Laptops for photo editing and other use

[ctmike]

Rumors swirling that the refreshed Ivy Bridge MacBook Pros will be more Air-like in their design and potentially have high-res screens- Apple has at least shown an interest in heading that way with their other products, so it's a reasonable rumor. MacBook screens tend to be pretty color accurate if I recall as well.

Memory and batteries are all replaceable if you are comfortable opening it up.

Personally, I've had no problems whatsoever moving from Leopard to Snow Leopard to Lion.

Not trying to evangelize or anything. I've just had nothing but rock solid experiences with my MacBooks. I just hope they too move to higher-res screens.

[4jphotography]

We have multiple MBP's, a MB Air and two iMac's. With the exception of one Airport issue, have never had a problem, and our Mac relationship goes back 7 or 8 years.  They're expensive, but they're dependable, just work and lack the BS that seems to come with PCs (viruses, etc).  My brother is a software engineer for a major defense firm, has access to any machine, and choses to use an MBP for his photo editing.  Same with just about every pro I know, photo or video.  They're something of a creatives industry standard for a reason, I think.

[Jettatore]

I am getting a Lenovo X220 Tablet.  Has a built in Wacom + Multitouch.  I'll let you know how I like it after I test it out.  There is a review of it by a photographer here:

Lenovo X220 Tablet X220t Review for Photography Professionals - Night and Day Photography Shop Talk

Another interesting idea. I'd actually have to play with this. Not a big fan of touch screens and 1366x768 just doesn't seem to cut it.

I completely agree.  I'd much prefer larger resolution as well as a dedicated graphics card.  The machine that should be here today (possibly tomorrow) the aforementioned x220 doesn't have either.  And as a rule, I would agree that those are two things I would never, ever want to skimp on.  However the reason I chose this machine, and made those compromises, is battery life and portability while still being a very powerful machine.  This thing is said to get well over 10+ hours on a full load, I've heard reports with some power saving options of 18 hours with the added slice battery with is already here with me waiting for the machine.  The other major reason for why I am accepting the compromise is the small size and the built in wacom + multi-touch functionality.  This is as close as I could find to having a full toolkit, with a lot of power (I7 + 8Gigs), that can last a full work day on a single charge, away from a power supply and still be small enough to be near the portability of a netbook. 

I am a dual monitor fan (have 2x 22" widescreens @1650 x 1080), recently one of my monitors died and I've been on only one but made it through fine, clearly it feels cluttered vs. two monitors but I don't feel like it's slowing me down.  So now I am going to attempt to make this work with a reasonable hit to the resolution (about 300 pixels in both directions) and if it doesn't, I will let you know immediately.  If I can make it work and work well, I will let you know how it stacks up to a custom built dual monitor desktop with a fast Geforce GTX dedicated desktop gaming card and a wide-screen Intuos tablet.

[Jettatore]

MacBook screens tend to be pretty color accurate if I recall as well.

They aren't and have never been anything close to color accurate in comparison with industry standard color correct displays.  (I have not checked this in about 5 months)  In fact they usually have a hyper contrast and over driven vibrance that gives them an incredible 'pop' which throws off what your images will look like on other monitors and in print.  It's like putting some cool effects on your images that will not show the same on anything other than very similar equipment, that isn't good for consistency.

[Mt Spokane Photography]

I am getting a Lenovo X220 Tablet.  Has a built in Wacom + Multitouch.  I'll let you know how I like it after I test it out.  There is a review of it by a photographer here:

Lenovo X220 Tablet X220t Review for Photography Professionals - Night and Day Photography Shop Talk

 
I have a lenovo X200s, plenty of computing power to edit images.  It has the optional high resolution screen, which is very disappointing, colors are lousy, and even calibrating it does not make it into a good screen.  Supposedly the X220 has a better screen, I'd want a backlighted led screen or IPS if I upgrade.  Right now, I don't bother to even try editing with the X200s due to the poor screen.
 

[neuroanatomist]

Mac user for many, many years..  How many? - One RAW image from my 5DII exceeds the capacity of the HDD in my first Mac   

Like camera brand (and I won't open that can of worms here), it comes down to personal choice.  For me, Macs just work - better ergonomics, no hassles, etc. 

Are Macs more expensive?  That's a oft-beaten horse.  It's absolutely true that you can not get a 'cheap' Mac.  The bottom of the line is more expensive than a lot of PCs.  But on a spec for spec basis, they're not really different unless they aren't equally spec'd - RuneL's comparison is typical, and misleading - the Dell is almost 1" wider and taller, 0.5" thicker, over 1 lb heavier, has a tray loading optical drive like most PCs (ever snapped off a tray?), no backlit keyboard, etc., not to mention 24" vs 27" external display, no difference there, right?.  How about total cost of ownership?  My employer provides PC laptops - in a period of 5 years I went through 2 Compaqs, 3 HPs and a Lenovo (4 broke down, one was end-of-lifed), and for that whole 5 year period, I had one 17" MBP, and only the most recent Lenovo beat that on specification.  So, which was cheaper, in the long run?  That might be one reason why my company has recently given me a MacBook Air instead. 

As for things being locked down, in Mac OS X, yes - and that provides a good level of security as well, thanks to the Unix kernel.  But if you need to, you can run Windows natively, or as a virtual machine (on my 2011 MBP, a Windows VM outperforms current corporate PC laptops).

MacBook screens tend to be pretty color accurate if I recall as well.

They aren't and have never been anything close to color accurate in comparison with industry standard color correct displays.  (I have not checked this in about 5 months)  In fact they usually have a hyper contrast and over driven vibrance that gives them an incredible 'pop' which throws off what your images will look like on other monitors and in print.  It's like putting some cool effects on your images that will not show the same on anything other than very similar equipment, that isn't good for consistency.

So true.  The default Apple LCD color calibration is like the Landscape Picture Style, or perhaps even like using Super Vivid setting on a PowerShot - contrast and saturation are ramped way up.  But...my Macs play quite nicely with hardware calibrators (I use an xRite i1), and that results in an accurate display (so accurate it can almost cope with the blown out magentas in Canon images  ). 

[ctmike]

MacBook screens tend to be pretty color accurate if I recall as well.

They aren't and have never been anything close to color accurate in comparison with industry standard color correct displays.  (I have not checked this in about 5 months)  In fact they usually have a hyper contrast and over driven vibrance that gives them an incredible 'pop' which throws off what your images will look like on other monitors and in print.  It's like putting some cool effects on your images that will not show the same on anything other than very similar equipment, that isn't good for consistency.

My bad. I was mixing it up with the reviews of the new iPad screen, which apparently is very color accurate.

[AmbientLight]

As for PCs you can definitely not go by specs alone, because quality varies wildly. From my personal experience I can highly recommend both Lenovo and Sony laptops, with the latter being somewhat limited in battery live, but SONY VAIO F-Series actually being my favourites.

[Jamesy]

How about total cost of ownership?  My employer provides PC laptops - in a period of 5 years I went through 2 Compaqs, 3 HPs and a Lenovo (4 broke down, one was end-of-lifed), and for that whole 5 year period, I had one 17" MBP, and only the most recent Lenovo beat that on specification.  So, which was cheaper, in the long run?

I have been at the same company for twelve years and am on my 4th Lenovo, currently a T400, previously had a T60. They have all been decent and the only reason I have upgraded was opportunistic rather than catastrophic failure.
Six systems in five years is a bit of a stretch IMO, depending on the environment they run in. Most decent systems can run for years and years, it just comes down to whether or not you want to use an old video card, slow bus, slow drive, etc.
MBP's are great machines but in my case, it would require a retool of software, methodoligies, etc... Not something I am willing to do at this juncture in the road.

[Drizzt321]

I use a Lenovo W500 with the 1920x1200 screen upgrade and switchable graphics  It's a tough laptop too.

I've got the w520, great laptop, and you can even get it with a built-in colorimeter to calibrate the screen. Works like a charm, and I think it was only a $50 upgrade. Plus, you can go up to 16GB  of memory which is crazy in a laptop, and it has a slot for an mSATA SSD instead of a WWAN card. All in all, a great machine, and I love it.

[dafrank]

Just so happens that my old HP DV laptop, with its 3000 updates of WinXPPro, finally bit the dust a couple of weeks ago. It served its purpose well - being able to download files  by tether or card reader in order to store them and to just check out the files for basic fitness, and then, finally, to offload the files from the drive to my studio editing desktop. Never thought of editing them on a laptop, almost totally because of the greatest issue in laptop quality - the screens suck. Bad overall color, inconsistent color and brightness over the whole surface, and terrible viewing angles.

So, this time I decided to look for a laptop with some type of IPS screen to see if I could finally really judge my files for quality on the laptop screen and, in a pinch, edit with it as well. I tried to research the subject and had no real success - either the laptops were out of production, wildly expensive, not available in America, or had some other countervailing problems that made them bad choices.

Finally, I took a chance on a new HP again. This time, I got an new (2012 model) HP Envy 17. They never say if the screen (17.3", full HD resolution) is an IPS, but they do ballyhoo that the screen is superior with what I recall that they claim to be 72% Adobe RGB color space. Well, in practice I can only say one word - WOW. This screen kicks butt. It looks to my eyes to be capable, with calibration, of at least a 95% accurate portrayal of the SRGB colorspace, and would be perfectly suitable for very accurate file conversions and later retouching for any uses short of serious for-hire CMYK conversions. The laptop otherwise is also quite nice with beautiful and usefull industrial design, very high end specs overall and a great choice of memory, processors, and drive configurations. The price is surprisingly good (I got mine very nicely outfitted for about $1,400.00 with a good coupon), the support options look superior, it's not loaded with very much bloatware that you have to remove, and it comes with a couple of pieces of marginally useful (Adobe Elements Photo and Premiere 9, plus Office starter) software, plus 2 years of Norton AV, if you want it.

As far as I am concerned, this is the ideal laptop for me as a photographer - moderate price, excellent design and overall specs, very good connectivity with several USB3 and a myriad of other high-end ports, good to outstanding performance (depending on how you configure it) and the best screen I've personally ever seen on a laptop. If this machine lasts as long as my last one, I'll be one happy guy.

Highly recommended.

P.S. I do not work for HP or any company related to them, have no even remote association with them at all, except as a past paying customer.

[7enderbender]

I use a Lenovo W500 with the 1920x1200 screen upgrade and switchable graphics  It's a tough laptop too.

Hmm, didn't know this existed. Specs look like they fit the bill. How do you like the screen? 1920x1200 (WUXGA?) at 15" looks just like what I had in mind. How are brightness, color, sharpness on that one in your experience?

[Drizzt321]

I use a Lenovo W500 with the 1920x1200 screen upgrade and switchable graphics  It's a tough laptop too.

Hmm, didn't know this existed. Specs look like they fit the bill. How do you like the screen? 1920x1200 (WUXGA?) at 15" looks just like what I had in mind. How are brightness, color, sharpness on that one in your experience?

They have a newer version, the w520 which I have. Screen is 95% of NTSC color space, which I've found to be pretty good. Brightness is pretty good, although I wouldn't mind if it went up 1 or 2 notches, but I notice it most when I'm in a very bright room. It's matte (yay!), pretty good viewing angles, and has an optional built-in color calibration. Pretty darn nifty too, I open up the included software (reminds me weekly), close the screen, and a minute or two later it's all done.

The discrete graphics is a Quadro card, and frankly it's not much good in the way of games, I have to turn down pretty much everything on Civ5. Granted, that's running at the 1920x1080, but still. I kinda wish I had spend the $200 or so it'd have cost me to upgrade to the next one above it, but I didn't buy this primarily for games so I'm fine with it. You can use it for the Photoshop GPU acceleration fine, although I don't have much experience with that since I work almost completely in Lightroom. Does have USB3, which is amazing with my Transcend 400x cards. I can read from it at 80+ MB/sec, compared to pretty damn slow over USB2 from my camera.

You can put in an mSATA SSD card (I'm waiting for a 180+GB one to come out) in place of the WWAN card, although it's limited to SATA2 speeds. Overall, my first Thinkpad, and the build quality & keyboard is everything I've heard about, and I love it. Oh, and the bundled software? Awesome! I actually use the Lenovo branded tools & such, cause they actually are useful and work well. I think there was an Anti-virus limited time demo installed, but I just uninstalled it and put my own on.

[bbogetti]

Check out the Toshiba Qosmio series. I have an older model but works fine for the Adobe Suite of tools both for photography and movie editing.  Here's the specs on their current top model:

Qosmio X775-3DV80 $1899.99
Intel® Core™ i7-2670QM processor (quad core)
Genuine Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit)
17.3" widescreen, 8GB DDR3 1333MHz memory
1.25TB: 500GB (7200rpm, Hybrid 4GB Serial ATA) + 750GB (5400rpm, Serial ATA)
1.5GB GDDR5 NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 560M (3D Vision)
Additional features:
1GB Ethernet, 3D Technology, 7200 RPM Hard Drive, Advanced/Discrete Graphics, Blu-ray™, Bluetooth®, Eco Utility, Energy Star Compliant, EPEAT™ Gold Compliant, Face Recognition, Hard Drive Impact Sensor, harman/kardon® speakers, HDMI port, Hybrid Drive Technology, LED Backlit Display, LED Backlit Keyboard, Media Card Reader, Memory Card Reader, Numeric 10-key Pad, PC Health Monitor, Quad-core Processor, Resolution+®, Sleep-and-Music, Touch pad with Multi-touch, USB 3.0, USB Sleep-and-Charge, Webcam and Mic, Webcam with Face Recognition

Here's the link to the Toshiba website:
http://us.toshiba.com/computers/laptops/qosmio/X770/available-models#4294965746%204294965347%204294964287%204294964287%204294965697

[Jettatore]

If anyone is out there simply looking for a powerful machine at very competitive prices check these guys out,

http://www.ibuypower.com/IbpPages/Notebook.aspx

They are just standard laptops, but they kill everyone else in prices and though a small outfit, they are well known in the computer building and gaming communities and are well regarded.  If I don't have time to build a custom machine for a friend or family member, I send them there 9 times out of 10. 

Any machine they sell would be pretty powerful for 2D Graphics/Photo Retouching, some of their laptops in either size monitor go up to 16GB but if you are on a budget you can quite easily get away with 8GB, that's what I have on my desktop and I've been using it for nearly 6 years and it's still solid, 16GB would obviously be better.  Also, graphics cards for use in Photoshop are fairly new.  They just take advantage of openGL to draw the canvas and you don't need a super powerful card for this, when they switched to openGL it allowed them to start implementing features like being able to rotate the canvas, import 3D models for painting, etc..  Those Quadro's, they are CAD and 3D animation workstation cards and they are and always have been an utter rip-off.  A new Quadro is usually the last generation of gaming cards, no more no less, with custom drivers and a much higher level of customer service/tech support for if something goes wrong, they have a staff of programmers at the ready to help out any facility using those model cards.  The drivers are tweaked for CAD applications and often there are multiple driver options to choose from that may be more or less refined for any one specific application (3D Studio Max, Maya, Auto-Cad, etc.)  I have a lot of experience in 3D animation and I can tell you that a good gaming graphics card works just fine for even the most intensive 3D tasks (sculpting and painting high-poly models in Mudbux for example).  Also something to note, you can run Photoshop (dunno about the newest version) without OpenGL enabled and then not worry about having a decent graphics card at all, but you won't be able to do a few things like rotate canvas, import models and other features, however your base editing capabilities will be fully in tact.  Those iBuy power machines all come with really good gaming cards so you wouldn't have to worry about it, but if you find a deal on a good machine with integrated graphics, you should still be able to run Photoshop and Lightroom without a problem, the majority of the work on those is done in system RAM and processing for things like filters via CPU but keep in mind, Adobe is relying more on OpenGL with every new release of PS.