Let's Note: Panasonic's Japanese Business Laptops! 

It's strange how the stars aligned and LTT did the same brand of computer within a few weeks of this.

When I worked at a PC repair shop, we had a tourist come by and she had a modern let's note. It had a small but 1920x1200 screen so it was super crisp and clear, and sported an NVME SSD. It was incredibly light, it almost felt like a toy but it didn't feel cheap either. It was an absolute delight for everyone at the shop to work on.

Panasonic laptops are quite visible on Japanese TV even till this day (shows, news programs, etc), the iconic trackpad is hard to miss.

I don't think these trackpads supported two finger scrolling, but it's because their scroll method is to run your finger around the circumference of the trackpad. But like you mentioned, there might be a driver limitation too

Greeting from Japan! I have seen people using this PC in McDonald's (Japanese people love to study or work in McDonald's) a lot like 5 years ago, but nowadays not that common. But somehow I recently feel this kind of design is actually interesting to me, I hope to get a second-hand one someday and install Linux for programming probably.

That under the palm rest DVD drive was definitely something you don't see very often. It was a good space saver. I still use optical media, but I know most people don't, so I like features like that.

The DVD tray is 90% of the value here, it’s the party piece

When I was in Japan last (2016) I was astonished to see most folks using Macs. In offices it was a different story, mostly Fujitsus with a dash of Dells. Fax machines were everywhere, every home I visited had a fax machine. Even my grandparents had one. Mostly Panasonics.

Two finger scrolling is usually achieved by running a finger round the circumference of the trackpad.

I think Japanese like to use fax for written communication because kanji is easier to handwrite than type. When I was at Berklee in the '90s a lot of Asian students would have fax machines because it was cheaper to send a fax than make a voice call to Asia. Email was becoming a thing but they still preferred to handwrite notes rather than type them.

As for the optical drive, physical media is still popular in Japan even today. CD music album stores are everywhere, and I even saw some DVD rental shops. Japan was one of the last developed countries to widely adopt streaming music.

I was an Emergency Department scribe in 2013ish and all of us used these laptops to write our notes. They were durable as hell, super light, and served their intended purpose perfectly well

I love how they integrated the optical drive. Really creative. Shame about everything else.

WiMAX is still used to provide rural internet. My parents in Illinois have it and works well enough. They have a pizza box shaped antenna on the outside of their house that is pointed to an antenna mounted on a grain silo a few miles away.

The iconic laptop for Japanese salaryman, one of my senpai in my first job always carring one with a portable A4-size printer.

Michael MJD made a video awhile back about the CF-M33, which is simply an American import of the original Let’sNote (mini) CF-M32 but remade for the ToughBook line such as having a rugged magnesium lid and shock absorbent caddy. Though it was originally made to compete with the Toshiba Libretto’s of the time (hence why they too became a success in Japan), they ended up being mostly used within industrial or embedded environments typically to control specialized machinery due to their enhanced durability.

My daily driver PC laptop is a Japanese CF-SX2 I bought a few years ago, only one generation newer than that CF-S10. After an SSD and RAM upgrade upon arrival, it still runs as good as it looks - beautifully. The light ruggedization of the Let's Note line helps a treat too!

Here you can find many like this ,one thing you forgot to mention,this laptop it has an special Sd driver that is possible to tranfer music to SD cards in copyright protected mode we used to listening in SD Music Players that was released in earlier 2000's !

LTT just did a video on these, and it's honestly got some really neat features, like the optical drive.

Neat video! I just happen to recently get ahold of a similar older model of that laptop, a CF-W7 that runs Windows XP and found it amusing that this video just happens to pop up on my recommended.

Would be a great contender for Win7 or Linux install. Changing the thermal paste would be a good idea at this stage. The screen looks like it would be decent for its age and I like it's industrial design.

thanks colin love your content!!

Panasonic kept adding optical drives to the CF-S series of laptops until late 2022. The last model to still carry an optical drive is CF-SV2, which has that optical drive, a VGA port, a SD reader and a Thunderbolt 4 port at the same time.

I was precisely refurbishing one last week. The University I work for had it as the “recommended option” for portables, so you could see hundreds of them years go, after they were replaced I got a whole bunch of them, 10. I use them for spare parts and as distro hopping test-bed… btw, yes, I’m in Japan.

Cool review! Thank you! 👍

Nice preview!😊

Love the surprising disc drive placement! I guess it might be annoying to have the drive spinning right there, but it’s a neat one.

The usability of these devices was relatively good. Over time, i got used to the CF-F5 i got as a gift from someone, working in a japanese company. With its great battery life for the time and its mild rugged design, it was the perfect choice for car diganostic operations. I still use it with Windows 7 and it's full of software for vehicle diagnostics: Manuals, part lists and OBD software. Though, i never managed to find a bluetooth adapter to fit inside the laptop itself. There seemes to be no option for the CF series.

I wonder if the hardware would be well-supported in Linux out of the box. There are a lot of older niche devices that no longer have maintained drivers on Windows, but that still have drivers in the Linux kernel. Could be worth a shot!

Pretty much everyone in civil service industry in Canada uses Panasonic Toughbooks the police use them and well as the RCMP and almost all of the provincial and federal government infrastructure workers

I use to have it way back. Perfect machine, its so fast! Cant wait to own it again.

i have a toughbook cfy4 that was a store demo unit. paid around $2000 canadian at the time. Its semi rugged yet lightweight even with the charger, making it ideal to take with me everywhere around campus - you dont want to leave a laptop in the locker even for 30 min. it had enough performance, the screen was large and high res (14 inch 1400x1050) full size keyboard and optical drive. decent battery life. i did all my school work with it. some light gaming and dvd watching after school and before work. i still have it and altho it cant keep up with todays requirements for any online activity, its still a good xp machine for retro windows and dos games. the market has changed and this product line no longer has its advanatges over the competition, but i will forever remember this letsnote or "business" toughbook product as an invaluable tool during a certain stage of my life.

it was a great time to see these awesome machines. Only problem was the price point back then

I have a (U.S. market) Panasonic ToughBook laptop with the same round touchpad.

Love this laptop ❤ nice review

Love it, particularly that palm rest DVD drive.

I got this same model locally recently and its been one of the most useful laptops with its insane extendo batt and lots of io! Wish we still had laptops like this on the shelf in NA

I'm so enamoured with these laptops. I ended up ordering a 2016 10" Lets note RZ6 with 8GB of ram and a more contemporary i5. Hoping to use it for general web browsing and writing.

Anyone knows how to enable the multi finger gesture? Or does the touchpad support it? Because I checked the synaptics settings and it's grayed out with no option to check it

The toughbooks from Panasonic are very well known in the Netherlands in the petrochemical industry. Because they are really fall proof. Those things are built like a tank. With also a very high price, but worth it for the build quality.

I think you should check out the CF31 model, it was a weird combo of i5 3rd gen laptop with 4:3 XGA display.

Gotta love how the optical drive is hidden

thx for the video, pal

9:59 I could have sworn that the introduction of WiMAX was after 3G was (relatively speaking) widely available. I used it briefly on Sprint; it was competing with Verizon’s LTE at the time for 4G dominance (despite the fact that neither was true 4G)

Ive been eyeing one of these for quite some time. But i have a dozen or so other laptop projects that I need to get to first.

great video

i bought this for college and it has been the best purchase of a modern eletronic device i have ever made

Your videos are so damn comfy

Actually, Panasonic laptops did spread outside of Japan. Panasonic also made the Toughbook series of laptops, which you'll find commonly in American police departments.

I wonder if Panasonic ever made a Let’s Note with a socketed CPU and an expresscard slot, those two things could extend the life of a machine by quite a bit. I know most Fujitsu LifeBook models from this time period have both.

What's the plastic knockout on the right next to the USB port for? Seems to be about the same size/shape as a 4-pin FireWire (which many business laptops still had in 2011), but it might be for something else.

I used a Fujitsu laptop from Japan around 2008 which was kinda similar in appearance. Lots of ports, good build quality. It was clunky but got a lot of compliments.

Bought a black S9 in Japan in 2010 and used it until 2014 in Europe and the US.. was running Linux Fedora; people in airplanes sometimes asked me about it.. still have it, the 2nd ram slot is same as S10 and kind of accesible from the trap but it's tricky

I want to get one of the newer ones that was in the LTT video. A modern laptop with a disc drive is something that appeals to me.

have you tried windows update to check for drivers?

Lol, I love how they implemented the Disc drive!

The toughbook cf-ax3 is the laptop I got for my daughter, relatively low power, but tough enough to survive kids and with a fairly nice touchscreen

I had a Panasonic CF-T2 which had a resistive touchscreen and pen. i fondly remember it as probably my favourite laptop ever. it was so small, light and neat. it was almost indestructible too. the HDD died and it was a strange proprietary connection so i couldn't get a replacement easily.

I bought one of these while I was in Japan. It did not include the original power adapter, which the machine detects on startup and presents a message on boot (in just English!) stating that it will only charge the battery to 80% capacity. Anyway, it's a fun machine and very Linux friendly; I run Fedora Workstation on mine.

@ThisDoesNotCompute The low power on count likely means that the mainboard for this laptop was replaced or repaired by Panasonic at some point. Not 100% sure about the processes they used in Japan, but when I worked for Panasonic's US service center our standard operating procedure was to reset the board in either situation -- zeroing the counter. As for not supporting two finger scrolling, that's by design. All of Panasonic's laptops with circular trackpads let you scroll infinitely by moving your finger around the circumference in either direction. Some even had a neat feature where your starting position determined whether it would scroll vertically or horizontally. And good call not trying to open it up to replace the original stick of RAM -- I never personally saw this exact model, but if it's any thing like the Toughbook CF-C1 series that it shares major design elements with then disassembly will require physically destroying the keyboard. Yes really.

Thanks!

You don't do linear scrolling in round trackpads! They are actually really cool for circular motion around perimeter for scrolling! Can't exclude the drivers not compatible with win11. But it's a shame the signature feature is missing from the video. I remember experimenting with some custom/other device firmware on my old laptop that offered this feature on a regular rectangle trackpad - it was really cool way to scroll. Albeit iirc, I couldn't keep using it for some other reason. Old Panasonic laptops almost reach the coolness factor of Sony devices, with unique recognizable hardware features like round trackpad and palmrest CD drive.

Nerd Sniped pretty hard on this one. Can't wait to get your perspective!

I used a similar specification machine (t420 thinkpad) daily up until a few months ago. With xubuntu it was pretty usable as long as i didnt want to both watch 1080p youtube and talk on discord at the same time.

It's beautiful!

It's 2023 now, and I bought a refurbished CF-SV7 on Idle Fish (a Chinese second-hand web market) which costs 2500 CNY and came with a new battery. I think that's good for college use.

That optical drive is a trip.

Great video, thanks! I was wondering what page you bought it from?

I *love* that disk drive.

I like the integrated disc drive - I'm tempted to just buy one to use as my dedicated burning station.

Sprint tried to make their 4G network based on WiMax, but eventually got on the LTE train with everyone else

Many modern projectors still connect via VGA, I have been praised for enlightening people that VGA to HDMI adapters exist since newer corporate machines only have HDMI.

I have Windows 11 on an HP ProBook from more than 10 years ago also with a second generation i5 and 8Gb of DDR3 RAM and it works perfectly.

I bought a used Panasonic SV-1 from a seller who had imported it from Japan to the UK, i got it for £600 which is alright once you know how much they ship when new. It has a 11th gen intel it-1155G7 wth Iris Xe graphics, it runs Windows 11 from new and shipped with a thunderbolt 3 port, 3 usb As 3.1 or 3.2 gen dont quote me there, 1200p 16:10 display, HDMI and VGA and an SD card reader. My model is missing the DVD ODD but it still ships with them. The system is amazing and i bought it to get me through the rest of my school and college years and further on. I got the ide of getting the product because LTT highlighted it antirust happened to stumble across it. Its amazing, runs a little louder than most laptops today but still quiet and the battery literally makes up 90% of the weight, without it it feels too light haha. they're a great brand of laptops!

That's the coolest CD drive I've seen in a laptop

Panasonic has been making Personal Computers since the 80s. They were pretty big on the MSX standard, and the only manufacturer to support all generations (MSX, MSX 2, MSX 2+ and MSX Turbo-R). One of my most prized possessions is a MSX 2 made by them, the FS-A1.

For scrolling you run a finger around the circle like an old iPod. You gotta try it; really nice!!

i like the hinges look very substantial

Had noticed this or similar laptop before I invested in some Toshiba nb205s. Just wanted to learn what the windows side was, being mainly a Mac user who only used windows virtualization. Added ssd and only helped a little with speed.

In Anime, when there are computers in the scene, characters always use that laptop, the design is unmistakable.

I have a 2011 Dell Vostro that originally started out as an i3 machine with 4GB RAM. Over the years I swapped out part of the mainboard for one that supports an i5 along with a dedicated graphics card, upgraded the wifi to 802.11ax, swapped out the HDD for SSD and it sings with Windows 10. The only upgrades left are swapping out the old CD-ROM for a slot-loading BD/DVDRW and a backlit keyboard. I may actually do that some day.

i was expecting the non-toughbook type Lets Notes. those are more fascinating than the one here.

I like that you installed FireFox as the better browser, nice.

I recommend rufus to build installation media such as for Windows 11 and Driver Booster to find and install the latest divers

Most if not all computers I've ran windows 11 on had no driver issues, because windows 11 is basically just a reskin of 10, but with artificial hardware limits

Panasonic makes really nice Notebooks. A shame that they more or less only sell the toughbook line (I have some toughbook myself) outside of japan. And its nice to hear that japan also uses faxes a lot like we do here in germany. Here in germany for a lot of stuff you need a fax machine because the only other option is a classic letter.

That no-so-obvious DVD drive compartment is so genius. lol

I just got a Let's Note CF-SZ6 with i5-7200U, 8GB, 512GB SSD...refurbished with Win11. Battery life still holds for more than 6hours! Very light (feels like a toy), still very responsive its my mobile warrior now!!

my 2016 Lenovo L series Thinkpad has a VGA port, its just a staple that wont go away as you can have flat panel monitors (up to 1920x1200px, so plenty for 1080 even) via VGA

i actually remember those as a kid i haven't used it in yrs doe im interested in these.

LTT video show you can scroll by running your finger around the edge of the touchpad. But that may not be support in win11

The design of this machine has sort of a Serial Experiments Lain quality to it I somewhat like. The circular trackpad is very eye-catching.

It finally happened: The computer featured in the old tech videos I watch has the same specs as the one I´m using :S

i have one cf-ax3 ... its amazing ..

Can't believe the 3do guys made a laptop!

I had a Japanese Fuljitsu for my first laptop. Thing was stacked in 1998.

To scroll on Panasonic laptops you need to circle around the touchpads

Damn that cd drive door is so smart

Great video as always.. I think you meant LTE instead of 3G at 10:01 in the video, you said "3G", WiMax was technically a 4G technology

Love it