The HP Dragonfly G4 is a premium C-suite business laptop that is lightweight, has a long battery life, and offers dual-webcam support. It is based on 13th-gen Intel Core U-series processors and features a 13.5-inch display with a 1,920x1,280-pixel resolution. The Dragonfly G4 is available in the UK for £1,673.99 and in Australia for AU$3,299.
I like the crisp, squared-off edges of the Dragonfly Pro better than the rounded edges of the Dragonfly G4, but the G4 is still a good-looking laptop. The matte-black chassis is elegant, and it's made from a 90% recycled magnesium alloy. It weighs just 2.5 pounds, which is the same as the 14-inch Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon Gen 11 and lighter than the 13.6-inch M2 MacBook Air (2.7 pounds) and 13.4-inch Dell XPS 13 (2.6 pounds). It's also considerably lighter than the 14-inch Dragonfly Pro, which weighs 3.4 pounds.
The Dragonfly G4 is light without feeling cheap or flimsy. It's solid, with hardly any flex in the keyboard deck or lid. And the matte finish not only looks sharp, but it's also pleasing to the touch. There's a very fine grit to the laptop's matte-black surfaces that I really like. The matte surfaces are also excellent at repelling fingerprints and smudges.
The Dragonfly G4 is narrower and a bit deeper than most laptops we review. The majority feature a display with a 16:10 aspect ratio, but the Dragonfly G4 offers up a taller and boxier 3:2 ratio. It's the spiritual opposite of a widescreen 16:9 laptop.
On a business laptop, it's a good fit because the extra vertical space means you can read more and scroll less. There's a reason you won't find a 3:2 display on a laptop meant for home use: it's less than ideal for watching shows and movies because they appear smaller than they would on a similarly sized 16:10 or especially a 16:9 screen. The taller display results in large black bars on the top and bottom of whichever video player you use.
Our test system features an IPS panel with a 1,920x1,280-pixel resolution. It suffices for the display size, but the text could be sharper. If your job requires you to read through documents for long stretches, then the upgrade to the OLED panel makes sense just for the bump in resolution alone. As it is, the baseline IPS display is very average. With mediocre color coverage, our test system's display is better for scanning emails and working on spreadsheets than any creative endeavor. In testing with a Spyder X Elite colorimeter, the display covered 99% of the sRGB space but only 75% of AdobeRGB and 76% of P3.
The display did, however, match its brightness rating. Rated for 400 nits, it hit a peak brightness of 405 nits in testing. It also exhibited wide viewing angles. Still, when HP offers a higher-resolution OLED display option for hundreds less, it's a no-brainer to punt on the baseline display of our test system in favor of the superior contrast and finer resolution that the OLED option affords.
The built-in webcam has a 1440p resolution and produces crisp, grain-free images with accurate skin tones. It also has an IR sensor for easy, secure logins via facial recognition. It's great all by itself, but the Dragonfly G4 lets you double down. HP claims the Dragonfly G4 is the first business laptop to offer simultaneous support of dual webcams. It's the first laptop -- consumer or business -- that I've used that lets you set up a two-camera shoot.
Given the thin enclosure, I expected less of the keyboard, but the keys offer surprisingly deep travel and snappy feedback. The keys are also very quiet when
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