Best Laptop for Photography?

[DakotaDidYou]

I have been looking for about a year but I am having trouble finding a laptop that really fits my needs. 

 

Needs

• A built in card reader.
• i7 or AMD equivalent
• At least 2 USB ports. 3 would be ideal
• Sometype of on-board GPU

I don't want a Chrome Book or Mac book. This is only going to be for editing photos and some light video editing. Almost all the laptops I look at with a good CPU also have high end graphics to go with and are expensive. Any help is greatly appreciated! 

[another random person]

Personally, I used a Asus Zenbook Duo (Non-pro) for mobile editing in my professional workflow. I found that photo and video editing did not use the GPU as much as I would have expected so I'd recommend going the Thin and light direction unless if you are also planning on gaming. 

 

Some good baseline laptops to look into are the Dell XPS range or LG Gram range or the HP Spectres

 

By USB ports do you mean USB C or A

What's your budget and country?

[DakotaDidYou]

6 minutes ago, another random person said:

Personally, I used a Asus Zenbook Duo (Non-pro) for mobile editing in my professional workflow. I found that photo and video editing did not use the GPU as much as I would have expected so I'd recommend going the Thin and light direction unless if you are also planning on gaming. 

 

Some good baseline laptops to look into are the Dell XPS range or LG Gram range or the HP Spectres

 

By USB ports do you mean USB C or A

What's your budget and country?

Type A. I live in America. I don't want to spend over $2,000. My ideal price is between $1k-$1.5k 

[svmlegacy]

19 minutes ago, DakotaDidYou said:

I have been looking for about a year but I am having trouble finding a laptop that really fits my needs. 

 

Needs

• A built in card reader.
• i7 or AMD equivalent
• At least 2 USB ports. 3 would be ideal
• Sometype of on-board GPU

I don't want a Chrome Book or Mac book. This is only going to be for editing photos and some light video editing. Almost all the laptops I look at with a good CPU also have high end graphics to go with and are expensive. Any help is greatly appreciated! 

Honestly there's not a huge difference between i5's and i7's in the laptop market, they're all power limited anyways. So if you're finding i5 powered laptops that meet your needs otherwise, I would definitely consider it an option.

[another random person]

6 minutes ago, DakotaDidYou said:

Type A. I live in America. I don't want to spend over $2,000. My ideal price is between $1k-$1.5k 

Not many modern thin and light laptops have USB A ports let alone 2-3 of them. You may have to start looking into devices for enterprise.
One example is the Lenovo Thinkpad T14, another would be the "New" Inspiron 14 as inbetweens.

 

The only laptop I can find which would fit your requirements is the Dell Latitude 3520, though it is a fully enterprise level device so it does not look as nice as the consumer models and is a little thicker. 

[svmlegacy]

2 minutes ago, another random person said:

Not many modern thin and light laptops have USB A ports let alone 2-3 of them. You may have to start looking into devices for enterprise.
One example is the Lenovo Thinkpad T14, another would be the "New" Inspiron 14 as inbetweens.

 

The only laptop I can find which would fit your requirements is the Dell Latitude 3520, though it is a fully enterprise level device so it does not look as nice as the consumer models and is a little thicker. 

The USB ports are easily dealt with by a USB-C dongle/dock. There's affordable ones on the market that will provide 3 type-A's, along with other connections.

[shoutingsteve]

Not that it answers your question, but it is worth mentioning;  the speed of your file transfers is far more limited by the speed of you camera's storage media.  No matter how fast the port on the laptop, a crappy budget SD card is going to crawl along.  I have the Lexar Professional 633x.  It is really great.

[BlueChinchillaEatingDorito]

Just putting this out there since you said you're using it for photo editing... make sure the display is up to snuff and not garbage tier like in most entry level gaming machines (since it seems like you're wanting some sort of dedicated GPU). 

[DrMacintosh]

For editing photos, what you need is good display. I don't see a photographer purchasing anything other than the 14" or 16" M1 MacBook Pros. If those aren't in your budget, the 13" has a good display, but it lacks ports. 

 

Is there any particular reason you don't want a Mac? The new models were almost made specifically for your use cases.

https://www.apple.com/macbook-pro-14-and-16/

[SupaKomputa]

 

pros : slim huge (16inch) OLED screen, tall (16:10) more space to edit.

[DakotaDidYou]

2 hours ago, BlueChinchillaEatingDorito said:

Just putting this out there since you said you're using it for photo editing... make sure the display is up to snuff and not garbage tier like in most entry level gaming machines (since it seems like you're wanting some sort of dedicated GPU). 

What types of displays are good?

[SupaKomputa]

19 hours ago, SupaKomputa said:

OLED

 

17 hours ago, DakotaDidYou said:

What types of displays are good?

 

[Roswell]

19 hours ago, SupaKomputa said:

 

 

Unless something has changed recently with Samsung panels, I would really steer clear of OLED for color accuracy. They look great on paper but perform terribly in practice.

 

Uniformity, especially at lower levels of gray/black, is really really bad and you can’t keep them calibrated for more than a week due to the nature of OLED’s uneven RGB degradation.