HP Pavilion Laptop 16 review

The Pavilion Laptop 16 starts at $1,100 for a Core Ultra 7 155U, 16GB of RAM, a 512GB SSD, and a 16.0-inch FHD+ IPS display (with or without touch). Upgrading to 32GB costs $150 while storage can be upgraded to 1TB ($70) and 2TB ($210). That makes the most expensive configuration with a touch display come in at $1,509.

Most often, laptops like this one are heavily discounted, but HP currently offers this one at list prices only. And frankly, that’s just too expensive. You can get laptops for under $1,000 with better displays, performance, and battery life. If the Pavilion Laptop 16 cost $800, I’d look at it very differently.

The Pavilion Laptop 16 is constructed of all aluminum, and it’s reasonably solid. There’s a little bit of bendiness in the lid and the keyboard deck depresses a little under pressure. But overall, the build quality is fine. HP’s OmniBook lineup is a lot more solid, though, and they’re not that much more expensive (or around the same price).

HP makes some great keyboards, most notably the excellent version they used on their older Spectre lineup and most recently on the new OmniBook machines. This one isn’t quite the same. Its keycaps are a little small, and while there’s a lot of key spacing, the switches are too loose. It’s not a bad keyboard, exactly, it’s just that HP has done a lot better.

The touchpad is smaller than it could be given the available space on the palm rest, and it works well enough as a mechanical version with reasonably quiet button clicks. It’s not bad, either, but not as good as the excellent haptic touchpad HP uses on some of its machines.

The Intel Core Ultra 7 155U is a 15-watt chipset that’s Intel’s previous generation chipset. It has 12 cores (two Performance, eight efficient, and two Low-Power Efficient) and 14 threads, running at up t0 4.8GHz. It’s been superseded by Intel’s Core Ultra Series 2 (Lunar Lake) and Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X chipsets that are aimed at much better efficiency. The very first problem is that you can get the newer chipsets in laptops costing the same as or less than the Pavilion Laptop 16.

The second problem is that the Pavilion Laptop 16’s performance doesn’t stand out. It’s considerably slower than Lunar Lake and even more so than Qualcomm’s latest chipsets. It’s okay for basic productivity tasks, but it’s not going to keep up with other contemporary laptops. As we’ll see, it also doesn’t have the efficiency benefits of Lunar Lake, so there’s no good reason for the compromise. And, its Intel Iris Xe integrated graphics aren’t very fast, meaning it’s not a great choice for gamers or creators.

The Intel Core Ultra 7 155U chipset is a member of the previous generation that wasn’t as focused on efficiency as newer chipsets like Intel’s Lunar Lake and Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X. But, it’s the lower-power version of its generation, so when combine with a low-resolution IPS display but only 59 watt-hours of battery capacity, I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect.

I’ve provided more than a few comparison laptops to give an idea of what to expect from the Pavilion Laptop 16. It didn’t do badly, exactly, compared to earlier laptops, but it’s nowhere near the current crop of machines. You won’t get nearly a day’s worth of battery life, even running basic tasks, compared to many other laptops that will get a full day and then some.

The Pavilion Laptop 16 has just one display option, a 16.0-inch 16:10 FHD+ (1920 x 1200) IPS panel running at 60Hz, which is available with and without touch. That’s not high enough resolution for me at this screen size, with text that comes across as quite pixellated. The display seems plenty bright and blacks aren’t too gray, so those are plusses. But, colors did seem muted to me.

My colorimeter confirmed those impressions. Brightness is definitely great at 404 nits, and contrast exceeds our 1,000:1 threshold at 1,210:1. That’s not OLED-level of inky blacks, but it’s good for IPS technology. Colors, though, weren’t very wide, at just 69% of sRGB, 49% of AdobeRGB, and 49% of DCI-P3, where average IPS displays today come in at 100%, 75%, and 75%, respectively. And color accuracy wasn’t very good at a DeltaE of 2.70, where productivity users want 2.0 or better.

If this were bona fide budget laptop, I would be more forgiving. But starting at $1,100, this display just isn’t good enough.

It might very well be that I caught the Pavilion Laptop 16 in between a sale price that would make it a lot more attractive. It’s fast enough for most productivity users, and it’s built well enough. But its battery life isn’t great and its display just isn’t colorful enough.

That makes the Pavilion Laptop 16 hard to recommend. You can get some much better laptops for the same or less money, and they’ll have better displays, better performance, and better battery life. If HP drops the price a bit, I’ll be happy to revisit the machine.