HP 255 G7: Office laptop with poor display quality

With the 255 G7, Hewlett Packard delivers a simple 15.6-inch office laptop that is aimed at both professional and private users. The device is one of the increasingly rare laptops that offers an optical drive. More precisely, there is a DVD burner in the laptop. Furthermore, you'll look for high-quality case materials in vain, since HP has opted for a silver-gray plastic chassis. Alternatively, models made of black plastic are available. When it comes to connectivity, you'll find the standard range of ports.

A Ryzen 3 3200U APU, 8 GB of RAM (1x 8 GB, single-channel mode, expandable), and a 512 GB NVMe SSD (M.2-2280) equip the laptop for office and Internet use. It would be possible to squeeze a bit more performance out from the APU by installing a second memory module (= activating dual-channel mode). However, HP didn't make the process of accessing the case particularly user-friendly.

Hewlett Packard made an absolute mistake with the display. It's a viewing-angle unstable model (TN, LED) with poor color reproduction and unsatisfactory color-space coverage. The brightness (193.3 cd/m²) and contrast (398:1) remain far below the target: We consider values beyond 300 cd/m² and 1,000:1, respectively, to be good. Furthermore, the display exhibits flickering at a frequency of 2,500 Hz at brightness levels of 90% and below.

More information and many benchmark results are available in our review of the HP 255 G7 159P1EA.