Video quality is something of a mixed bag. While color rendition appeared fairly accurate, the overall impression seemed slightly muted in tone. The display can be dialed up to eye-gouging brightness, should you need it. I saw visible shifting of color and contrast when viewing off-axis to one side, though the shifts were not too bad. Vertical viewing angles varylooking from the top down results in severe image degradation, but bottom-up viewing is less washed out. Normal office use and photographic editing worked well, and the 1600 by 900 pixel screen and its 14-inch (diagonal) size were welcome.

I took a little time to adapt to the keyboard. The depth of the key presses are very shallow, something I generally dont like, but the overall tactile feedback and sheer phyicsal size of the keys substantially made up for the shallow keystrokes. There is no visible PgDn / PgUp cluster, but the Fn + arrow keys handled this feature, as is the case with many ultraportables. The F1 key default state is to take you to Vizios support site. When I launched it, I was immediately notified that an update for the touchpad driver was available. That driver update improved touchpad usability a bit, enabling stronger palm detection and fewer wild cursor swings. Overall, typing and pointing were positive experiences, but a little more texture to the keys would have been welcome.

The touchpad also supports edge detection, making it ready for Windows 8. Sliding your finger off the edge will bring up the charms bar in the Windows 8 interface.

The C14 sports a 14-inch screen, and is exceptionally light for that class of display. The Vizio weighs a scant 3 pounds, 7 ounces without the power brick. With the PSU, it weighs in at 4 pounds, 4 ounces. Thats substantially lighter than a number of Ultrabooks with smaller screens. The power connector is an oblong shape, which connects at right angles to the system and lights up when charging.