Choosing a laptop with photography in mind

Hardware
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I’m thinking of picking up a new laptop, and one of the key considerations is that it be good for processing photos. My key concern is the screen, in terms of quality and calibration. I haven’t been able to find much information that helps me choose a suitable laptop. Oh, and it needs to be Linux compatible. Any suggestions as to how to identify whether the screen is going to prove to be appropriate?

Thanks!

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This will have a lot to do with the size of screen you want, whether you need a GPU for image processing, and what distro you want to run. If you can fill in some details, that’d be great.

But until then: Thinkpad, lightly used, X or T series. Avoid Intel skylake, as it requires a very new kernel.

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I’m thinking 15" screen (anything larger won’t fit in the typical hotel safe, which could be a consideration down the road). I’m not particularly worried about GPU, since I don’t typically have the volume of photos where speed is a burning issue. I’ve been using Ubuntu on my last couple of laptops, and am fine with it, but if a different distro opened the door to a more suitable machine that’s cool…I’m not married to any particular distro.

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Wow, I typed a pretty long reply and then my phone ate it.

Short version for now:

In no particlaur order:

  • Dell XPS 15 (Ubuntu out of the box)
  • Asus UX305A
  • Thinkpad T540

Linux only hardware vendors:

  • system 76
  • zareason
  • think penguin
  • purism
  • entroware
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I have a Dell Precision 2800 and the Display is good. Of cause it is not as good as a professional external Display.

The good things are:

  • It has a i7-4??? CPU that is really fast
  • It has a numpad, and that is important if you plan to use Blender on the machine
  • Linux runs out of the box.
  • 15" is OK for Gimp and darktable
  • it has a nonreflecting display

Con:

  • it is big and heavy
  • it has no SSD
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Thanks for the suggestions…I’ll check them out. Sorry for the slow response…I was away for the last week.

Meanwhile, I came across this interesting machine, but probably won’t get it for wallet shrinkage reasons. However, someone else might like what they see.
http://www.eurocom.com/ec/configure(1,260,0)ec

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Certainly interesting that they’ll calibrate the display for you, though for 89 euro, you can probably grab a meter from eBay.

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That’s CAD $89 or 64 Euro, but your point probably remains true.

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I’ll mention my experience with a similar choice, maybe it helps you.

I purchased a very powerful workstation laptop in 2011 or so. One of those powerhouse workstation laptops where you can choose the components to beef it up. It’s still powerful by today’s standards. And I regret it.

  • I paid half the price because I ordered it from an original equipment manufacturer (Clevo) and not from a distributor (like Dell). But.
  • I paid double for the components just because its a laptop, relative to desktop PC costs.
  • It’s noisy.
  • It’s heavy, not portable.
  • Battery life is bad when it’s new, and gets worse as it ages. It killed two batteries so far, and I’ve been running it without a battery for the last three years. If the power goes out, the laptop instantly goes out, but I don’t want to invest 100 euro in a battery again just to see it die soon.
  • Its upgradeable, but there are very few compatible upgrade options.
  • The GPU is buggy, and I can only fit one of two GPU models in this case, both of which are old by today’s standards but almost as expensive as recent GPUs. That means to replace the GPU I’d pay a lot of money for the same old thing (GTX 285M).

I thought it would be good to have a powerful laptop because it’s more portable than a desktop PC and if I move it would be easier to take with (I lived in London at the time with no car), but when you include all the peripherals and thermonuclear power supply, that benefit shrinks. I can’t take it with me on holiday or to a client - too heavy, too expensive.

If you want a laptop, consider getting a light, portable one, so that you can take it around when you photograph, so that you don’t feel like its too expensive to take out of the house. I was laptop shopping over the last week for work, and decided on the ASUS Zenbook UX305CA. It’s very light, has a long battery life, the screen is a kind of clear matte which makes photos look great, with a resolution of either 1920x1080 or 3200x1800.
If the hardware specs of a light laptop are not enough, consider getting a desktop PC instead. It will be just as not-portable as a workstation laptop, but you will pay half the price or less and be able to replace and upgrade components cheaply with a large choice of compatible parts.

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Very interesting thoughts @morgan_hardwood. At the moment, I can get the ASUS ZenBook UX305CA for CAD $869, and I don’t see anything else in that price range with anything near that quality of display. Did you encounter any driver problems when putting Linux on it? My only concerns with this machine would be the screen size and the small disk space (512 GB) since I would have both Linux and Windoze installed (my bad…didn’t mention that).

I went the small and portable route with my most recent laptop. I picked up an 11" and found that it was simply too small for RT or DT. The tools eat the majority of the screen real estate. My previous laptop was 14" and I felt that I could manage adequately on it with DT, but wouldn’t want to go much smaller.

While looking at the ASUS ZenBook line, I also saw the 15.6" ASUS ZenBook Pro UX501VW. Very tempting but CAD $1999!

I had a look at the other machines mentioned on this thread as well. Some good machines at some fairly healthy prices. I’m starting to think that the most effective solution might be to get something like the UX305CA plus a good external monitor.

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A nice, external monitor is a great idea!

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IMHO if you’re away from your primary external monitor for some time, then having a laptop with a great LCD panel is tremendously helpful. Some are much better than others.

However it’s not easy to find a laptop with really good LCD panel. Few reviews online reviews do a thorough job of reviewing the screens. Sometimes the only way to learn about the actual performance is to read the reports of very high end professional users in laptop discussion forums.

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It’s on its way, should be here tomorrow, so if I’m at the office tomorrow I can let you know next week. I did check for Linux compatibility issues and the only thing was something to do with power management in kernels older than 4.6, that it wasn’t as effective as it could be. I’ll be using kernel 4.7.

Screen size in inches doesn’t concern me, I need resolution, and this laptop has it. 1920x1080 is perfect for RT. You could get the 3200x1800 version too. Keep in mind that the larger the preview area is (in pixels), the more processing power is needed to update the preview (e.g. when you move a slider of a CPU-intensive tool like noise reduction). I’ve been using RT for years on 1920x1080 and it’s fine for me. If you want even higher resolution (which requires even higher processing power) then consider getting a desktop PC instead. I don’t think you will need an external monitor with that laptop using the 1920x1080 screen, the resolution is enough and the colors on the monitor are great.

I did find three other options from that line, but they weren’t real options as they aren’t available where I live yet.
These are the other options:

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Thanks…I appreciate that!

I use a 24" 1920x1080 for RT on my existing desktop, and I totally agree that resolution works well. That machine unfortunately needs to remain full-time Windows for business reasons, so all my Linux activity takes place on my laptop, which means various other tools like DT live on my laptop only. Hence the hunt for a suitable laptop to replace my little 11" 1366x768 machine!

Maybe I’ll stealth-install RT on a UX305CA in a Best Buy and see how I like it. :laughing:

The other machines you mentioned aren’t available here in Canada either.

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Been using the ASUS ZenBook UX305 for a few days now. The 1920x1080, 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD version. I installed Linux Sabayon with KDE on it alongside the Windows 10 it came with. Both operating systems fly! Both boot in seconds. It’s completely silent, programs in both OSes run smoothly, KDE feels faster and is far more responsive than on my more powerful personal laptop. I’m typing this from Chrome with a bunch of tabs open, and VirtualBox with Windows XP and VB6 running in it on the other virtual desktop - no problems. There were no driver issues, after installing Sabayon it just worked. The power supply is tiny, it’s about the size of a tablet charger, so my laptop bag now weighs next to nothing. I haven’t calibrated the screen yet, but out-of-the-box the screen colors look far more similar to those of my personal laptop when I load the calibration curves into it than when I don’t load them.
I’m most certainly happy with it.

1920×1080 668 KB

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I finally found a store with a UX305 on display, and this machine’s display is beautiful! The construction of the machine seems pretty solid. There was a UX303 next to it (8GB, 1TB HDD, 1920x1080), but the display was glossy, could not achieve the same brightness, and was in general simply inferior.

How much of the SSD was left after installing Sabayon KDE? And after adding the rest of the above?

If you’ve tried any photo processing on it yet, how did it perform for that?

Thanks!

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My past self would have gone for the 1TB HDD, my current self would definitely go for the smaller SSD ;]

I shrunk down the Windows partition to half the disk, used the other half for Sabayon.

I haven’t and don’t know whether I will, since it’s a work laptop.

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Did you end up with the UX305CA? Is it fast enough that you can, say, run a darktable export and do stuff in GIMP or Firefox while you wait?

Also, how is the touchpad? That’s the main negative thing reviews mention …

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I got the UX305CA (1920x1080 version, 8GB RAM) and I love it! Small, light, completely silent, and the screen colors are great out of the box! I calibrated both my once-top-of-the-line home laptop (Clevo W870CU from 2009, i7, 8GB RAM) and this one side by side one evening, both to D65. The UX305CA’s screen covers 98% of the sRGB gamut, is capable of a very high luminance (I capped it at 120cd/m2 but it could do more), does not change much after calibration and profiling (meaning it looks great and the colors are close to what they should be even if you don’t have a colorimeter), and the colors look good from a wide range of angles. In comparison, my home laptop’s screen covers about 70% sRGB, fails to reach 120cd/m2 after calibration and profiling (reaches just 80cd/m3 - if I reset the video card gamma table to linear it gets significantly brighter but that’s because it gets significantly bluer), changes very much after calibration and profiling, and the colors change dramatically with a small change in viewing angle.

Haven’t processed raw photos with it yet. Your question is not really a question of speed, it’s a question of RAM. This one has 8GB, so you can process raw photos and run Firefox and do whatever and it will be snappy as long as you don’t run out of RAM. Further, GIMP (2.9) is extremely slow and non-optimized regardless of hardware - getting it to run faster is a question of optimizing code, not of throwing more CPUs and matches and gasoline at it. I hope this gets addressed once the tremendous task of porting everything to GEGL/BABL is done.

My OS with KDE Plasma loads in seconds from a cold boot and feels very snappy. Can’t say the same for my i7 home laptop.

The touchpad works great, for a touchpad. It has no faults or jumps or anything like that. There is one thing I wasn’t expecting, and it’s a touchpad-shortcut that lets you scroll without having to move the cursor over to the scrollbar. Odd things can seem to happen before you discover and identify it. Once you get used to it, after an hour, it not only stops annoying you, but becomes handy. There might even be a way of controlling it through touchpad settings in your OS. Still, I don’t like touchpads in any shape or form and mostly use a mouse.

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Wow, thanks for that detailed answer :slight_smile:

Well, could also be disk I suppose – my desktop has 8GB and an i7-4558U, but the drive is a “hybrid spindle/SSD” (just 8GB is SSD) instead of real SSD, and there web browsing while exporting is really awful compared to my Thinkpad with 4GB and an i7 2640M but a real SSD.