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hi, i am loking to upgrade my laptop for photo editing, any suggestions what are the current best photo editing laptops around the £1000 mark?
A lot of people on here will disagree with me Dewey (nothing new in that) but I honestly can't image doing any serious photo-editing on a laptop. I find that a pair of 27" monitors is the minimum I can comfortably work with.
It may be, of course, that you intend to attach external monitors to your laptop but need the portability of a laptop for other purposes. In that case I am sure that someone will come up with some recommendations.
Good luck either way.
.
My advice on the laptop is to get the best display you can, not a glossy one, and factor in the cost of a decent calibration device. Then spec up lots of RAM, as much as you can and make certain it has a fast hard disk and again factor in the cost for a decent external drive to back it up to. As for brand, I am not certain I could recommend a brand these days.
As left forum states, a decent desk machine is best, but you may need portability.
Desktop+excellent screen - provided your laptop is powerful enough for the program you are using. I would suggest a laptop using the laptop screen for the palettes and a Dell Ultrasharp 2312 or 2412 for the actual photo.
There are loads of laptop companies out there but I am a Dell groupie (Dell XPS desktop + Dell 15" Studio laptop).
I use a laptop for editing- Win7 64bit + 8G ram, seems great for speed despite its slowish 5400 RPM disk.
BUT the 15.4 inch monitor often used in front of the TV with evening room lights on does give me quite variable colour results and detail, the editing area is quite small. To be serious about this I would need at least a 24 in monitor and consistent room lighting. I'd also strongly consider a tablet for editing.
Your 1000 budget is great and should be fine, heck for a grand you might even get some fast SSD disk in there to speed it up further.
But you are still stuck with a laptop screen
Note - Windows 8 is due out at the end of the month and has touch screen features built in - this may make for interesting editing option with a tablet. (Of course Apple make great laptops too).
Btw, The laptop brand I like most is Lenovo.
I use a 15 inch macbook pro and find that,
a. the screen is fairly accurate compared with my 27 inch mac desk top, both are calibrated using a sypder device, just watch the angle and note laptop screens area brighter when plugged into mains.
b. The trackpad on the apple MacBooks is very useful for editing, in my view much better than a mouse.
although i have a tablet for the desktop I bought an trackpad to use in preference to the mouse.
I reckon any problems I have with the laptop are more to do with brightness or contrast rather than colour tones balance. Before making important prints try some small ones. Photobox are very good for price and will supply a calibration image.
Ian
Don't buy a new laptop just yet. Windows 8 is out in a couple of weeks and at the very least will mean price cuts on some Win 7 laptops.
Hi, for photo editing I use a high end laptop:
I looked for a gaming spec machine, because they have similar requirements
Spec is:
I7 2670 with turbo boost
win 7 Ultimate 64 bit
2 x 500GB hard drives - look for ones with the faster speed or 1 SSD for the boot drive and have your editing software use this as a scratch disk the other a standard drive for storage
2 x usb 3 - 2TB backup drives - so much faster than usb2 drives
8 GB Ram - The more you have the more the editing software will use - my software is using 6GB
2GB Video Ram Photoshop & other editing software loves dedicated video memory - redraws so fast you will think it hasn't.
My screen size is only 15.6 - but that is because I live on a boat, no room for massive monitors.
As for make, well they are all pretty reliable these days.
You might consider having one built to your own spec. The company on the link have a very good reputation.
PC Specialist
happy hunting
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