Affordable 13" laptop for travel

Got myself a refurbished 14" Lenovo Thinkpad T440 (8GB RAM 2Gzh 500GB HDD) for $460 a month ago from Canada Computers, including a 2 year in store warranty. Not sure where you find those in other countries but if you can find a refurbished Lenovo I’d say it’s usually safe to go for it :smiley:

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Don’t confuse gamut coverage with a calibrated screen. Even though the screen doesn’t cover the sRGB gamut, calibrating it means the colors it can show are accurate.

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Good find. Electronics can be much more expensive here.

PS Looks like a processor from 2013. How much have things changed since then?

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but there are colours in the image, which the monitor cannot display …

Hermann-Josef

Actually there is quite the story behind all of this. And I’ll actually check out the specs of the T440 once home.

I’ll try and summarise. Back in 2015 I purchased a Lenovo Carbon X 2nd generation (probably 2014) with an i5 processor I believe, 8GB ram, 250GB solid state HDD and touch screen. It was thin and light and just about awesome; a 14" lovely little thing just powerful enough to do what I need to do, slightly slower than on my desktop, when on the road. I began to experience issues with the screen though. Colours would revert to a mix of green/magenta at times, which I could fix when moving the screen a bit. It got worse as time went by and about 2 months ago I decided to finally get it fixed.

Try 1: I took it to this old fella’ who fixes electronics and seems pretty knowledgeable, but he admitted he doesn’t dare open up the all-in-one Lenovo Carbon laptops - he did however say he believes it is either the screen itself that is at fault, or the cable that links it to the mother board.

Try 2: I called this other fella’ who was advertising laptop repairs in my town …but he didn’t even need to take a look at the laptop and emailed right back saying he doesn’t touch Lenovos.

Try 3: I went to STAPLES, an office supplies store around here (come to think of it I should have probably gone to Canada Computers :frowning: ), which repairs computers as well. I told them about the issue, and they sent it out to their repair place in Toronto. Each week that passed I had to call there and inquire about the status of the repair, because apparently just when I was calling the technician was just about to call me and update me …every single time I called.

First they ordered a new display cable; which took a week to arrive, and proved to not fix the issue. Secondly they ordered a new screen, which also took a week or so to arrive, and another few days to install, which also I was told did not fix the issue.
As a solution to the problem, I was offered to have the motherboard exchanged - which has an all-in-one design which doesn’t allow you to replace parts one by one (figures). I of course said no, and told them to just the laptop back, thinking I can deal with the colours being off sometimes…
Once returned, the laptop’s screen was no longer working at all. When they said that no amount of replacing things fixed the issue, they meant the screen no longer functioning, but they did not mention that. I was upset and requested the matter to be looked into …which it was, and I was informed that the management’s verdict is that there was an pre-existing issue with the mother board which eventually caused the screen to no longer respond at all, and that it was only a matter of time until this would happen, and that it is a coincidence that it happened while the laptop was with them. All they offered was a $100 in-store gift card. :frowning:

I went and vented to a whole bunch of people, and eventually my one friend recommended I go to Canada Computers and look at their refurbished laptops, which are generally both good in quality and rather appealing in price. He is a lawyer and definitely not short on cash, but also one who won’t spend money if not necessary. I trusted him and got the T440 and I am happy with it. The processor is slightly slower than what I had in the old laptop, and the thickness is greater, though not by much, but otherwise I am very happy with it, and with a calibrated screen, it works like a charm.

If you’ve read this far, I wasn’t to thank you for letting me vent haha :slight_smile:
Also I totally agree with the premise of this post; travel computing is a must for people who like to tinker (and I mean photographers who want to post photos from on the go and can not go without their RawTherapee edits), and in this case, the 13/14 inch models tend to be a good compromise between power and size/weight. Not to mention they can be plugged into an external screen if the need for more desktop real estate arises.

Hey, at least you got an $100 gift card. I dealt with a company that charged me $120 for no repairs when I already bought a warranty of $400. It was long ago; I never bought warranty on or serviced any of my electronics again. I get burnt every time.

Tangentially, regarding the car rental story I told in My father got me into photography - #15 by afre, they unfairly charged me $300 for damages that I didn’t make. I just get bad luck with dishonest people and am too exhausted with the hard life to fight it all of the way. Need to stay sane.

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Better to have a small gamut with accurate colors than a small gamut with inaccurate colors.

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A couple of years ago, I got my son a laptop from Staples as he was entering university. It malfunctioned before too long, and I took it back to Staples on warranty. Like you, I had to hound them for an unreasonable amount of time to get it back. When I got it back, there were about 20 wireless networks added to the machine, plus some nice malware. As you can imagine, I have not bought a computer from Staples since.

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As a rule of thumb; I always back up my hard drive, delete any sensitive info off of it before giving it to someone for repair, and once I get it back I swiftly wipe it clean and reinstall (Linux :stuck_out_tongue: ) on it.

I’m sorry to hear about your experience with them. Seems like they are quite the scum of the earth of a company. I’ll use them for photocopies and buying printer paper, but just about that. Too bad.

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My travel “laptop” is a sluggard Surface 3, a castoff from my wife’s journey finding just the right computer. Particular to the current discussion, it has a rather decent display, right at sRGB gamut.

Emphatically.

Same here, other than I couldn’t use Linux for my son. :zipper_mouth_face:

The question is, what you mean with “accurate” colours.

As far as I understand colour management, depending on the selected rendering intent, colours are changed with respect to the “original” colours, thus I would call them inaccurate on the display. E.g. for the perceptual intent all colours are changed so they fit inside the destination space (in our case the monitor’s space), preserving the overall colour relationships.

Hermann-Josef

Calibrating your monitor is the act of measuring the different between a know, measured color and the color your monitor displays it. The resulting color profile that you load as your display profile is a list of those differences. Your Operating System’s color managent system then uses that color profile to correct the monitors color to that of the known, measured color.

By “accurate” I mean that the color that is supposed to be displayed on your monitor actually is. So if I show a square of color that we know is R66 G32 B89, that you can measure that color on the monitor and the RGB reading is the same.

This is different than your monitors’ display gamut, which is the number of different colors that your monitor can display.

You can get a wide gamut monitor that covers Adobe RGB, but if you never calibrate the monitor, you’ll see lots of different colors, but those colors probably aren’t accurate.

@paperdigits
I use 2 calibrated monitors, an EIZO with AdobeRGB gamut and an ASUS with sRGB. Colours appear different if I shift an image from one monitor to the other, due to the different colour spaces. Measuring the colour with colour picker on both monitors gives different values for RGB, So I would assume this is the value actually sent to the monitor after correction using the monitor’s ICC-profile. In RawTherapee I see the same reading on both monitors, although the colours appear different! So here I conclude that this is the value actually stored in the TIF file, i.e. the colour one is aiming at. But this means that if you adjust the colours to your taste, the exact result will depend on the monitor you are working on. This is what I wanted to point out.

So what is the “correct” colour? I would define it as the value stored in the TIF-file, but this may be outside the gamut of monitor or printer. Then the colours are subject to changes by the colour management in order to give a colour on the monitor or the printer as close as possible to the “correct” colour – depending on the settings of the rendering intents.

Hermann-Josef

I checked the 2-in-1 laptop I have, it’s a Lenovo Yoga L380 (20M70001). It comes with a 13.3" IPS touch-enabled display, Intel core i5 CPU, 8 GB DDR4, 256 GB PCIe SSD, and an active pen. It’s small but feels quite sturdy
Not the most affordable when new but check on second hand market.

You also might be able to find one of the macbook air’s on the secondhand market. They’re usually pretty light/portable and not awful for light computing. Double check the ability to install linux on it, though (I think the most modern ones have some issues?).

If you really want to be portable I suppose you could even find one of those odd 11" models too. They’re super-petite.

(You may want to also pickup an external drive with more space - the Airs usually show up around 128GB or 256GB SSD).

I think some Surface tables are cost effective and support Linux. One needs to double check though. Also you will need an external keyboard for it which can be pricey (Microsoft accessories are not cheap)

I forgot to say, last time I took my Yoga on vacations, I fit easily in the room’s safe, so 13/14" should be small enough

Really? :smile:

He stays in the treasury.

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