Laptop for professional photographer

galwayfox

Evening all.

Is there a particular laptop that professional photographers would favour i.e screen types etc? I will not be making the leap over to Mac and my budget is around 500-600.

Many thanks.

Borderfox

I use a Sony Vaio, 2gb of ram and big hard drive. Screen is very nice

melekalikimaka

as above, sonys are noice

Ballyman

I use a Dell inspiron with 4gb RAM which cost me about €600 a few years ago. The HD is only 200GB which fills up pretty quickly and I have to use external HD's to supplement it.

However the 4gb RAM is more than enough to run Photoshop and Lightroom very quickly. Only time you will see it slow down is when stitching or something like that in PS and even then it's not too shabby. I would recommed also getting as big a HD as you can afford but remember that you can always buy more down the line. You can get an external 1TB HD for less than €100.

I'm not a professional photographer though!!

galwayfox

Thanks!

This looks nice - http://www.amazon.co.uk/Sony-VAIO-NS30E-Laptop-Pentium/dp/B0029U2HBE/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1263241570&sr=8-1 works out about 500 Euros.

red_ice

All laptops have the same internal workings, even macs have the same workings as a pc/windows based notebook. The question you should be asking is not what laptop should i get, instead what laptop will get me the best results for a budget.

throwing out, i have a sony Vaio, i have a dell or i have a mac is like saying i can drive, give me something that has an engine. If thats your attitude, your simply buying into a name and not really caring about how the performance of the laptop. Which means your going to pay too much for something thats useless to your needs.

Idealy in todays working world you need to have at least 4 gigs of ram (8 idealy) and a duelcore/core2duo that would clock in over the 2.4gig mark(3 gig idealy). An alright graphics card and for comfort and convienience a harddrive near the 500gb mark (1tb idealy). And the obvious SD Card slot. And basing a computers speed on how much ram it has is so very wrong. Ram is like a bottle neck to how much data gets processed. With 4 you should be fine, its the processor you have to worry about.

Last year, i got my 3rd acer. My laptop runs every day from 10am to 3/4am and i use a variety of different software. Its an acer aspire 5739g. Im due an upgrade now, but it still runs most stuff at a reasonable standard. All my software is 64bit software. So lightroom for example should by rights run better. Although laptops get faster and faster, software gets more and more demanding.

The only difference between mylaptop, and a version of my one with a dell/HP/sony tag on it is the price. They will all run the exact same.

Borderfox

I have a toshiba and a sony and the sony screen is far superior, in fact its better than most any desktop I have had.

melekalikimaka

i chose my sony also based on their superior screens from reviews online. true they all are the same on the inside, the screen how ever is an exception

.Longshanks.

My only comment is that i've yet to see a better laptop screen than my macbook....

DotOrg

as a photographer the most important things when i bought my laptop were:

size: 13" is enough when you have to carry it around any distance
battery: long enough to last a few hours out on a shoot
power: at least 4GB of ram and dual core processor
firewire: for fast performance using video cameras and external hard drives
screen: properly bright and consistant colours in the screen
reliable: some company who i've heard of and uses quality components

in the end i got a macbook pro, expensive yes, but if you are buying it to make money with and see it as a cost spread over the two or three year lifespan you expect to use it, it doesn't work out as a major expense.

galwayfox

Thanks everyone for all your replies.

I just bought a Sony VAIO NS30E/S Laptop and cant wait to get going on it.

Cheers!

PCPhoto

reading the thread I thought I had responded to this earlier ......

and I was right !

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=2055795701

red_ice

if its this one, you've made a mistake imo.

That laptop is running Vista for a start, which is by far the worst microsoft operating system ever - undisputed. Hence the rush to get windows 7 out. Its also a 32bit operating system, which means you are now restricted to 3 megs memory. Thats the most memory you can put in it. Adding more later (it will take 4 max i assume) wont make a difference. If you do upgrade to a 64bit OS, such as something from the windows 7 line, you will not be able to get more than 4gigs, because the motherboard is obsolete(assumption).

Its also running an intel graphics card. Intel make terrible graphics cards. nVidia and ATi are the industry leaders. These days i always buy nVidia, the two ATi cards i had a few years ago both failed on me.

i would highly recomend you cancel that order and look at something like this. Its more or less the same laptop, but you have a choise of 32/64 bit vista and it has an nVidia Gefore 9300M, which is a grand little Graphics card. Perfect for photography and image processing.

However, if your not really that fussed on upgrading your laptop or squeezing as much bang for your buck as possbile, keep the sony order.

Just keep in mind, buying a laptop is like buying a car, you always buy them to sell on (or upgrade!).