UKC

My desktop is fine for editing in Lightroom but I'd really like a nice laptop for editing in the field....so to speak.

I most definitely do not want a MacBook. I know that they get great reviews for editing but won't go down that road. Lenovo seem to get reasonable reviews but ideally I'd prefer some information from a user.

The other problem is, of course, COST! Max would have to be £500.

Any suggestions/ideas?

In reply to Alan Breck:

http://bestlaptopforphotography.net/

In reply to ChrisJD:

Thanks. One of the many articles I've had a look at but I'd really like to hear from anyone actually using the "machinery"

In reply to Alan Breck:

it will just be a case of buying a laptop with the most RAM and best graphics card you can for £500, hardware wise there really isn't much between the major players.

In reply to Dark-Cloud:
needs to have a good matt (not glossy) screen

the most RAM and best graphics card you can for £500.......and which one to that spec are you actually using?

needs to have a good matt (not glossy) screen.......and which one of those are you actually using?

Any actual users of laptops for photo editing out there??

In reply to Alan Breck:


What exactly are you hoping for here, there isn't one better laptop for editing photos than another, it's not a specialised task, apart from the few things that have been pointed out to you you would struggle to buy a dud from Dell, HP, Lenovo etc

If you were asking for a laptop to run Autocad, SCADA or other specialised stuff then the answer would be different.

Just go into PC world, look at the £500 laptops, choose one you like with as much and buy one, load Lightroom and edit away, simples.....

In reply to Alan Breck:


Care to explain why ?

In reply to Alan Breck:



Loads - but they all use Macs,


Chris

In reply to Chris Craggs:

Only the ones with more money than sense.

In reply to Chris Craggs:


That's for historical reasons - in the old days Photoshop and Quark ran best on macs with their RISC chips. The machines also looked cool. Ergo the graphic design & art community fell in love with them and things grew from there. However, macs now have CISC chips and there are no performance advantages to using one over a PC.

To answer the OP, I have a 8Gb RAM quad core AMD wiondows 8.1 machine from Acer and it works well. I use the olympus editor rather than adobe products though.

In reply to Dark-Cloud:


My last (and only) Lenovo machine failed from rotted capacitors after less than two years, which was a major contributing factor to my switch back to Apple hardware. Quality on cheap Windows machines is not guaranteed.

In reply to Alan Breck:
Buy the most powerful laptop you can for that price ( which pretty much straightaway eliminates most Mac hardware ).

Invest in a high quality monitor with accurate colour reproduction. Look for something that can replicate the AdobeRGB colorspace, such as the ViewSonic VP2772 or similar.

In reply to Alan Breck:

I got a dell xps 13 for under 500 from the dell outlet, you have to keep checking on there, some bargains to be had.

In reply to peewee2008:


Ahhhh, but have you used it for photo editing, it will de discarded as an option unless this is the case

In reply to Alan Breck:

I'm using an HP 450 with 8GB of RAM. Lightroom is quick, always working with RAW files. Has enough oomph to run an external monitor as well which is my preferred setup when at home.

In reply to Alan Breck:


The thing about this is that you will always get someone saying oh I had a brand X that broke once, they are terrible. This information isn't that useful since you need many data points rather than just anecdotal evidence to comment on issues like reliability.

They are all much of a muchness in performance at a certain price point and for this reason I would say a lot of it comes down to individual preference of aesthetics and build and for this you can't do better than going and seeing them in person.

In reply to Alan Breck:


I wouldn't ever use a laptop for photo-editing..

In reply to Dark-Cloud:

Yes, that was the main reason i went for it, with the SSD it runs Lightroom very well, and the latest version with GPU processing seems to work even faster.

Thanks guys. Some handy information there once I sort out the useful from the usual UKC drivel.

In reply to Alan Breck:

Blimey, you ask the UKC photographic collective for some free help and then you are nasty to us !

In reply to Alan Breck:

I've got a Sony Vaio (model SVF1521Q1EB according to system info) with an Intel Core i5 chip and 4Gb of RAM. It cost somewhere between £500 and £600. It runs Lightroom without any problem. I would, however, be careful about the monitor you use and I might be suspicious of the built-in screen of a sub-£500 laptop. The one on my Sony is particularly poor (see the other thread on monitor choice) so I have a second good quality monitor. This sort of defeats the purpose when you say you want to use it in the field. So I think my main concern in buying a laptop would be the screen quality and I'd want IPS technology instead of TFT (which I think my Sony uses). I think one of the big pluses of apple laptops would be the quality of the screens but you'd probably pay for it.
Anthony

In reply to JDal:


I'm sat here with two machines running, a MacBook Pro that I bought with my own money and a work Lenovo ThinkPad, the Apple is the older of the two machines. They cost about the same, the Lenovo is an absolute dog.

Not that this really helps the OP as both are over his budget.