Recommend me a Windows laptop for photo editing.
July 25, 2017 6:09 AM   Subscribe

I'm thinking that my next major purchase is going to be a photo-editing laptop and I'd like it to be an awesome one that will continue to get the job done for years to come. It's got to be fast, with lots of memory and storage, and of course a superb display. Not a Mac. What should I get?

Right now I'm thinking the Dell XPS 15 may be the way to go, with its full-gamut 15" 4k display, 1TB SSD, 32 gigs of RAM, and Core i7 processor. It seems to top the rankings at a number of review sites, albeit not ones that I am familiar enough with to really trust. Does anybody have experience with this machine, or similar recent Dells?

It's been years since I've bought a laptop (my current one is a rather elderly and slowly disintegrating Thinkpad) and I don't really know where the various brands stand in terms of things like build quality and overall thoughtfulness of design. Last I recall, none of them are better than mediocre in those areas. I'm the kind of user who cares about stuff like keyboard quality, reliability, and ease of maintenance in a laptop, and information about that kind of thing can be a bit hard to come by. Personal anecdotes here would be really welcome.

I'm impressed by the specs on the XPS 15, but I'm not married to it. What do folks around here think is the top of the line at the moment as far as photo-editing machines go? I'm definitely looking for something in the 15" category. Thanks very much!
posted by Anticipation Of A New Lover's Arrival, The to Technology (2 answers total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
My general impression is that the XPS 15 is a very good choice, but I haven't looked at various laptops enough to say 100% for sure. One thing to keep in mind is that if you're using Adobe Lightroom, it's not likely to speed up much with a faster machine. Even spinning hard drives vs SSDs don't make much difference with Lightroom. Adobe knows they have serious performance issues, but they've yet to meaningfully address them.

One would hope that they address these issues and you actually get more performance out of bigger hardware, but this has been ongoing for several years. Photoshop and non-Adobe photo editing software aren't affected.

Getting back to the question, I don't think you'd go wrong with the XPS 15.
posted by cnc at 10:13 AM on July 25, 2017 [1 favorite]


I bought this three months ago. I use Lightroom 6.0 and OnOne editing program, and I am delighted with it. Quiet and fast.

MSI VR Ready GT62VR Dominator-012 15.6" G-SYNC Hardcore Gaming Laptop GTX 1060 i7-6700HQ 32GB 256GB M.2 SATA + 1TB Windows 10
posted by mcbeth at 7:57 PM on July 25, 2017 [1 favorite]


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