Non-glossy Win laptop for PE?

[Lataxe]

Greetings to all you luminous ones from a new member of the forum albeit a longtime reader of this site's wisdom & knowledge. A good forum (good-mannered and peopled by considerative folk) is hard to come by; but this one seems to meet the spec.

My photographic profile: an amateur who has used an SLR for decades before turning to (non-DSLR) digital cameras in 2004.  Some experience of Photoshop and now using RAW via CS5  exclusively.  Some composition knowledge but of the pedestrian kind.  Photographic subjects are mostly land/seascapes, family portraits and images connected with my other hobbies - notably cabinet-making and archery.

I hope to glean all sorts of good advice here (I'm probably too inexperienced to offer much useful advice of my own) and I'd like to start with a fairly mundane question about laptops.........

A regularly-profiled NEX 3090  is my current desktop window onto photographic images so I am spoilt.  :-)  I did have an aged (2004) laptop with a half-decent screen but it has unfortunately turned up its electronic toes with a sad croak of farewell.  It struggled, anyway, to run Photoshop; and its wee disk was stuffed.  I want a laptop to act as storage/viewer/photo-weeder and even play-editor when away from home.

I have been unable to find a decent replacement laptop.  The cpu, disks, ram and other components are all very much up to the job but every current laptop screen seems to be a horrible glossy thing, more of a mirror than a screen; and (I read) not easily calibrated because of this gloss.

My question, then, is simply: can anyone point me at a laptop or laptop brand that has a non-glossy screen option but also comes with a decent photo-editing spec that woks without glitch, crash or an annoying whirry sound?  I would prefer a Windows 7 64bit OS machine simply because I can fly that and don't want to learn Macese. Price is not important, assuming it is not outrageously bad value for money.

Any pointers you can provide will be gratefully received.

[Pete_G]

I can only recommend 2 brands, Lenovo Thinkpads and HP Elitebooks.

They are both expensive options, up there with Mac prices. Both are rugged and reliable machines.

I have both Thinkpads and an Elitebook, of the two I would certainly prefer the Thinkpad.

Have a look at the W series Thinkpad and also the T series. The W series is a mobile workstation designed for
graphics, video and photo work. Beware that there is an enormous selection of Thinkpads available at any time, so you need to do your homework on the Lenovo site to make sure you get the CPU, GPU and display that you want, also you need to specify the OS, in your case W 7 Pro (64).

Note that Thinkpad options can be different depending on where you live.

A typical W series would be available with an i7 processor, an Nvidia Quadro 2000M graphics card, and whatever disk and RAM configurations you want. The best screen is the FHD.

Google for "Thinkpad forums" and lurk around to see what people think of the latest machines.

Bear in mind that you can remove the DVD drive and by buying a cheap caddy from Lenovo, you can self install a 2nd hard drive into the DVD drive bay, which can be used for a system image backup and storage of images.

It is often difficult to get to see Thinkpads in retail outlets, but the build quality is much the same between
the series, so if you can't get a hands-on experience with a W series, you can still judge the quality of the machines by playing with a different model.

I think the W series is still available with a built-in screen calibrator, but since this is based on the Huey, it may not be an option you would want, and you could save money here.

[Lataxe]

Peter,

Thanks for that rapid advice - I've been and had a gawp at the Thinkpads and played with Lenovo's "Spec your laptop" web page.  A Thinkpad W520 looks just the thing, with the basic spec except for a future-proofing 8Mb of RAM instead of 4.  A wallet burning £1300!  But hopefully a long term, er, "investment".

As you suggest, I can eschew the W520  "colour calibrator" option and use the Xrite i1 I already have.  The lesser processor will also be fast enough as there seems little need to emulate a Cray.

The facility to mount a second hard disk rather than an optical drive is interesting.  In the end, I feel the optical drive will remain useful whilst a USB key of sufficient capacity for a system backup (if not a data backup) will soon be an affordable option.  As the laptop data is unlikely to exceed one trip's worth of photos (they get stored and backed up on the desktop PC when I return home) data backup on the laptop will also get done via a USB key.

Incidentally, I did manage to find a Sony 16.3" laptop with a non-reflective matt screen but (perhaps like you) I feel wary about the bling finish and one or two other fixed aspects (eg a 1920 X 1080 resolution- on a 16" screen!) that seem to infest the Big Brands.  The Sony seems to a television in disguise.

Thanks once more for your advice, then.  One final thought - are these Thinkpads the old IBM laptops now reborn after IBM sold off some of their hardware division?  The Thinkpads of old were certainly utilitarian yet tough beasts - I had one for years as a business laptop.

Lataxe, scraping down to the bottom of his wallet.

[NigelC]

Peter,

Thanks for that rapid advice - I've been and had a gawp at the Thinkpads and played with Lenovo's "Spec your laptop" web page.  A Thinkpad W520 looks just the thing, with the basic spec except for a future-proofing 8Mb of RAM instead of 4.  A wallet burning £1300!  But hopefully a long term, er, "investment".

As you suggest, I can eschew the W520  "colour calibrator" option and use the Xrite i1 I already have.  The lesser processor will also be fast enough as there seems little need to emulate a Cray.

The facility to mount a second hard disk rather than an optical drive is interesting.  In the end, I feel the optical drive will remain useful whilst a USB key of sufficient capacity for a system backup (if not a data backup) will soon be an affordable option.  As the laptop data is unlikely to exceed one trip's worth of photos (they get stored and backed up on the desktop PC when I return home) data backup on the laptop will also get done via a USB key.

Incidentally, I did manage to find a Sony 16.3" laptop with a non-reflective matt screen but (perhaps like you) I feel wary about the bling finish and one or two other fixed aspects (eg a 1920 X 1080 resolution- on a 16" screen!) that seem to infest the Big Brands.  The Sony seems to a television in disguise.

Thanks once more for your advice, then.  One final thought - are these Thinkpads the old IBM laptops now reborn after IBM sold off some of their hardware division?  The Thinkpads of old were certainly utilitarian yet tough beasts - I had one for years as a business laptop.

Lataxe, scraping down to the bottom of his wallet.

£1300 -where did you see that? I've just seen that spec on special offer on Lenovo website at over £1600, prior to upping spect to 500GB 7200rpm HDD and 8GB RAM.

[B-Ark]

I'm currently specing a T520 for purchase in the next month or two. Just a few thoughts:

- get the minimum 2Gb memory from Lenovo, and then install additional RAM from your friendly neighbourhood computer store. Its much cheaper.

- get the smallest hard drive from Lenovo, and then get what your really want from your friendly neighbourhood computer store. Again, its much cheaper.

- both the T520 and W520 support a mSATA SSD. Install one of these, and you'll really fly. Not cheap.

[John.Murray]

I'd agree on Lenovo.  The Hp's are hopeless - the crapware installed make them nearly unusable - timewise you're better off buying a Window 7 license and doing a clean install and adding in drivers as opposed to cleaning up what you get as shipped.....

[Lataxe]

Nigel,

The Lenovo website build-page lets me specify a basic W520 but with 8Gb RAM, a 500Gb disk and a couple of other tweaks for £1666.80 inclusive of VAT.  However, it offers me a £358 discount to give a "web price" of £1308 inclusive of VAT.

http://shop.lenovo.com/SEUILibrary/controller/e/gbweb/LenovoPortal/en_GB/builder.workflow:Enter?sb=%3A000000F0%3A00000227%3A&smid=7169546BFB61412BA52F819D914F4A03

One may easily spend a lot more by speccing the fastest processor, an SSD and so forth.  Frankly £1300 is plenty to spend!  One hopes for a performant machine but also one that will last at least 5 years, both physically and in ability (even if upgraded a bit) to run future applications and handle future gigantic data files.

The machines do seem mercifully free of bloatware, apart from an MS Office prebuild (no license) which I will obliterate on receipt.  They offer also a security software option but my internet service provider already includes a full McAfee security set for "free".

Lataxe, wondering now how long the "web discount" will last.

[NigelC]

OK I understand, I was looking at the i7 2.2 version. However, since my desktop is well optimised for still image workflow, but not particularly video (in respect of processor and video card), I may use this W520 for video editing which I'm planning to get into, so i7 may be worth coughing up for (£35 a year extra over 5 years!)

[Pete_G]

Lataxe,

Your spec looks fine, if you can afford it I would go for a 7200 rpm system drive. Bear in mind that the FHD screen is 1900 x 1040 pixels, I think; when you first fire it up the Windows icons will look very small, all is not lost though, and you can re-configure icons, fonts and window sizes to suit your eyesight.

IBM sold off their hardware division some years ago including the Thinkpad line, luckily Lenovo have, more
or less, continued the tradition that IBM started and the current machines are, almost, as solid as their illustrious forebares. I heard that Lenovo took over the Thinkpad brand lock, stock and barrel, including all the US based engineers.

The W520 will make a very good photo laptop, I would get one myself, but my old T61p is still going strong. I had an A31p before that which lasted 5 years and was still working well before it was stolen!

Do as others have suggested and get your laptop with one 4GB memory stick, buy another 4GB from a good supplier such as Crucial or Kingston. If it's cheaper to get just 2GB with the machine and throw it out and buy
2 x 4GB sticks from a 3rd party, then do that.

You can always buy the hard drive caddy later, from Lenovo or 3rd party suppliers, if you wish. The hard drive
just snaps into the caddy. You can swap the caddy out and slide in the DVD drive as you wish.

Once you've decided on your spec, do google around to see if others are offering the machine cheaper than Lenovo direct, it does sometimes happen.

Some of the built in Thinkpad software can be useful, other modules can be un-installed. I have found that with Win 7, most of the Thinpad apps are now redundant, although you need some of them for the "hot keys" etc. The Lenovo support site for these machines is as good as it was under IBM, i.e. The best.


John,
I'm not sure I agree with you about HP, the Elitebook I've got ( 8730w with Dreamcolor display) is part of their workstation line and had very little crapware installed. It's a fine machine but I feel that the Thinkpads are tougher, especially the keyboard.

In fact, although the Thinkpad keyboard is extremely tough, it can be the first thing to fail, but you can pick up new Tpad keyboards on eBay for very little and fit it yourself. You can download a very well written Service Manual from the Lenovo site that tells you how to take the whole thing apart, and reassemble it!

[Lataxe]

Peter,

Perhaps I could ask you to elaborate about the FHD screen?  Apart from having a much higher ppi than the 1366 x 768 screen I am planning to order, all models of the W520 seem to have "LED Backlit Anti-Glare Display".  Is there some other advantage to the FHD screen over the HD, for photo-editing, other than lots more pixels per inch?

I work out that the W520's 1366 X 768 screen is likely to be around 100ppi which is the same as the NEC 3090 I use now and is just right for my eyesight - as long as all the "make text/icons bigger" switches are on for Windows and Photoshop.  (Age!  It rots one's functional bits).

Upgrading the basic machine to a 500Gb HD, by the way, seems also to get the faster spin-speed as well as the extra space.

Preservation of a good tradition is quite rare in the volatile electronics world so it's pleasing to see the virtues of the original Thinkpad build philosophy preserved by Lenovo.  Much else (including cameras) now seems to be built to satisfy only the ever-shortening product-refreshment cycle of a few months - although I do still have a Sony R1 as my main camera (near 7 years old now and still working well).

Lataxe

[Pete_G]

With the Thinkpad screens, I think it's not just about pixels, the 1920 x 1080 screen has a wider gamut, 95 per cent according to Lenovo, 95 per cent of what though, probably sRGB rather than Adobe RGB. It is in fact
95 per cent of NTSC, which I don't think is that special but better than nothing.

Follow this link to the Thinkpad Thinkwiki:

http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Hardware_Specifications

From here you can download the tabook.pdf which is a complete (and exhausting) breakdown of all the models and features, at http://www.lenovo.com/psref/pdf/tabook.pdf

These are the specs of the Thinkpad displays, from the tabook:

15.6" (396mm) HD+ (1600x900) color, anti-glare, LED backlight,
   220 nits, 16:9 aspect ratio, 500:1 contrast ratio, 60% Gamut
 15.6" (396mm) FHD (1920x1080) color, anti-glare, LED backlight,
   270 nits, 16:9 aspect ratio, 500:1 contrast ratio, 95% Gamut
 15.6" (396mm) FHD (1920x1080) color, anti-glare, LED backlight,
   242 nits, 16:9 aspect ratio, 500:1 contrast ratio, 95% Gamut,

Thinkpad displays are not the best, but I find them OK, obviously you will want to check all your corrections on your NEC anyway.

I too (and many millions of others) am dismayed by the constant upgrading/downgrading of electronics, especially when the marketing departments have their say. I'm totally happy with my old Hasselblad 203FE and it's old CFV 1 digital back!

[NigelC]

Just a few thoughts before I order W520. (I also considered Mac Book Pro 15" to run Windows but that works out more expensive for similiar spec)

1. Presume the HDD is unpartitioned out of the box - I would want to partition to keep system/programs on one partition, also as boot up disk and data on the other - can you specify an asymetric division, to keep the larger partition for data?

2. Where would you put the scratch disc on this set-up - boot partition or data partition? Is it possible to run a high capacity memory stick as scratch disc?Is it possible to partition a 500GB HDD into 3 partitions?

3. Is the RAM for the W520 a fairly standard spec? - however, it may be differen in the US, but for the price listed on the Lenovo UK website to upograde from 4GB to 8GB, I don't think I could get it cheaper from Offtek, Crucial etc.

[Lataxe]

Nigel,

I'm not knowledgeable enough to answer all your questions;  but I can comment on the disk organisation strategy, having read-up and played around with Win 7 disk management stuff when I rebuilt my desktop and installed the 64bit version of that O/S on it.

You can shrink existing disk volumes with Win 7 disk management toolset, then create a new volume in the now-unallocated space.  The volumes can be any size within the total capacity of the physical disk.  Windows won't allow you to "shrink away" any data already inhabiting the original volume. You also need to allow any re-organised volume to have "breathing space", as most processes will want to write new data to a volume, temporary data or otherwise.

There isn't that much advanatage, in terms of Photoshop performance, from mere virtual separation of a single physical disk into distinct partitions.  It is advantageous if the processes that access each volume do not run concurrently.  If they do run concurrently (as with Photoshopping, when program, data, scratch and cache volumes are all accessed during a Photoshop operation) a single physical disk will still be getting its head flogged, as it traverses the one platter with the one head to all those volumes.

In my desktop I ended up with three physical hard disks - one for OS & programs, one for permanent data and one for backup/cache.  The latter is normally "still" if only used as a backup disk once a day/week to copy the other two disks; but I established separate logical disks on it, one for the regular & automated backups, the others for temp, cache, scratch and other files created on-the-fly.  The Bridge/Photoshop/ACR cache files are all there, as is the Photoshop scratch disk.

This means that each of the physical disks only has its own particular task to deal with when Photoshopping: running the OS & programs; fetching/writing the image files; writing/reading cache & scratch files.  You could probably make a case for having four physical HDs, with cache and scratch volumes each having their own head/platter.  You might even add a 5th, seprating OS and programs. :->

My disk sizes, incidentally, are: 500Gb for the OS/program disk; 1Tb for the data disk; 1Tb for the backup disk.  The data disk is itself partioned and has several logical disks, for various semi-permanent files such as those written by the TV card when it records programs off-air or downloads from the BBC iPlayer.  The "true" permanent data disk is 500Gb. 

The strategy was: OS/program disk space + data disk space = backup disk space.  In practice the OS/program disk is only 25% full so the 1Tb backup disk can easily spare 125Gb for temp, scratch & cache files.

With the Thinkpad W520 you could probably load a 2nd hard disk (as Peter mentions) into the DVD bay, with a USB3 key acting as a 3rd HD (perhaps for the scratch file, as you mention, but maybe also for the cache files).  You would need to remember to take/plug-in the USB key again if it gets removed for laptop travel, otherwise Photoshop will moan and you will have to redirect/rebuild scratch/cache files somewhere else.

For myself, I wll only be using the W520 laptop as an away-from-home storage, viewing and fiddlin'-about Photoshop machine.  One HD will therefore do for me.  If you want to use the laptop to Photoshop (or do video) in anger, more HDs would seem the best strategy.  The W-series Thinkpads seem inherently capable of supporting them, especially with those USB3 and combined USB2/SATA ports.

[Pete_G]

Out of the box, the Thinkpad hard drive has TWO partitions, one is a small service partition that holds a
backup of the default system software including OS. This is used by the restore software in the case of serious system corruption, it allows you to restore the disk. I personally don't like the Thinkpad system restore software and always make a separate backup onto an external disk using Acronis. I don't bother to delete the original restore partition. I do, however use the TPad restore software to make DVD backups, just for extra safety. I do this as soon as I get the machine.

If you want to repartition the disk, you can do so, using tools such as Partition Magic (paid for) or FIPS or other free partitioning software. This allows non destructive repartitioning. You can specify the size(s) of the new partition(s). I used to do this but don't bother any more, I can't see any advantage.

I don't think you get much advantage by using a separate partition on your system disk as the scratch disk, to really take advantage of scratch disks they need to be on a separate, very fast drive. In fact, on a single drive system, the wisdom is to not create a separate partition for PS scratch, but allow the programme to use the system partition and choose the location itself. Under these circumstances, the system partition should be big enough for such a use and be defragged so there is contiguous space for PS to use.

The boot partition is considered to be better for PS scratch, since it is a portion of the disk where IO is faster.

The RAM is fairly standard and I know Crucial and Kingston stock it, others may do too. You just need to get the tech spec of the RAM from the machine specs, so that you are buying the right stuff. As you suggest, it's not ALWAYS the case that 3rd party vendors are much cheaper.

The quad core Thinkpads have 4 memory slots, max 16GB, the dual cores have 2, max 8GB.

Checkout your model on the tabook:  http://www.lenovo.com/psref/pdf/tabook.pdf

[NigelC]

Any views on Dell XPS 15 - I can spec this to similiar level to W520, including FHD 1920x1080 screen, for nearly £400 less. Any downside to Dell? Need to make quick decison as Lenover has 0% discount which ends at midnight!

[Pete_G]

Nigel,

If you're going to compare Dells to Thinkpads then you have to talk about the Dell M series workstation laptops.
I have no experience of these machine, although others have spoken well of them. With the M series, you will find the price difference is less. You can't compare an XPS to a Thinkpad.

[NigelC]

I've discovered it's got a glossy screen, therefore not worth considering

[Thomas Krüger]

The Clevo barebones (sold through resellers worldwirde) are not bad, have a look at the P150HM.
http://www.notebookcheck.net/Review-Schenker-XMG-P501-Gaming-Notebook-Clevo-P150HM.46526.0.html