Best Laptop for Photographer — a Call for Nominations

We all know who a photographer’s best friend is: Their camera of course. That, and slightly overcast weather, great natural landscapes, and beautiful women. Well, each to their own, as they say. In terms of technology and photography tools, until the advent of digital photography all a photographer ever needed was a half-decent camera. Of course, you could still spend unlimited amounts of money on this one, fundamental tool, but once you had that sorted out, you had a best friend almost for life, accompanied by little helpers like a tripod, a flash etc., and that was all you had to worry about without venturing too much into the world of technology.

At the advent of digital photography now more than a decade ago, most pro photographers’ reaction was similar to when CDs replaced vinyl and audiophiles just didn’t trust it. It didn’t sound the same, they said. Of course it didn’t, and still doesn’t, and CDs are about to be extinct, being replaced in turn by MP3s and, hopefully, much better music formats in the future. But this trend has long since become accepted as an inevitability. When photographers finally and reluctantly realized that digital photography had reached the same level as conventional photography, they found themselves in a tricky position: Every digital image needed to be processed on a PC. You couldn’t just take your digital camera into a developing room and take it from there. Now, the problem was, photographers were no IT experts. Suddenly, every photographer, no matter how professional or amateurish, had to own and use a computer as it was the only tool that permitted seeing and developing their precious shots.

So what is the best daily companion for a busy photographer? Let’s take a quick look at some contenders for best laptop for photographers.

What do photographers look for in a laptop?

• All you are ever going to do is process images, so a decent graphics card is a must. Opening and displaying images will be much faster if a top-notch graphics chip is on board. More and more photo processing apps tap into the graphics chip, which can lead to performance boosts of up to 4 times. Online photo editing tools like Pics.io also leverage the power of your graphics card when processing image adjustments.
• You will want decent amount of storage. While it is not recommended to use a laptop to store your WHOLE photo library, and it is much preferable to use some kind of network storage (see our NAS vs. cloud comparison here), you will want to intermittently store photos on your laptop while travelling. For example, it is common for photographers to take snapshots while on the road, then edit them on the train or plane on the way home. This all but excludes laptops with faster solid state drives (like the MacBook Air) which are often limited in their capacity.
• The processor needs to be up to scratch. No matter which photo editing software you prefer, it will take some amount of horsepower if you don’t want to stare at green bars filling up all the time, especially when working with RAW images.
• A top-class display without too much glare and a nice amount of pixel display is a bonus when it comes to viewing photos. Apple has raised the bar in this category with the Retina display first found on the iPad and now incorporated into its MacBook Pro line. Other manufacturers have followed suit, and high resolution IPS displays are popping up everywhere, so be sure to get one of them!

Looking at the prerequisites above, one could say there is not a big mystery here: You pay more, you get a better machine. Processors, graphics cards, and storage are common denominators which people look for when getting a laptop. But they are especially important for the professional photographer.

The switch from specs to form factor

Arguably, more than 20 years after the personal computer became commonplace in every household, technical specifications (clock speed, RAM, hard drive capacity etc.) have seized to play the dominant role they once did. Most modern laptops, if you spend a reasonable amount of money, should be good enough to get the job done. Instead, it has come down to a battle of form factors: The tablet, the gamer laptop, the super-thin ultrabook, they all vie for your attention. Let’s compare three of the candidates.

• The super-thin ultrabook

The perfect example in this category is the MacBook Air. It is thin and light, and combines great style and battery life with a mature operating system. Unfortunately for photography fans, the Air loses out in our comparison, as do other, comparable ultrabooks. Its SSD drive is just a bit on the small side, and while it is by no means a slouch, it just doesn’t have enough power to deal with ALL image editing software comfortably.

• The gamer laptop

If weight is not an issue, an alternative is to go for the opposite of the sleek ultrabook that the girls in Sex and the City love so much: the full-on gamer’s laptop. This type of portable computer, while dismissed by many for years as far too heavy and bulky to carry around, has come on leaps and bounds in recent years, and you don’t have to be a gamer to benefit from the unlimited graphics firepower that these machines provide. An example that we highly recommend it the slimmed down Razer Blade (2013) which comes with an Nvidia 765M graphics chipset and an Intel Core i7 processor.

• The tablet/hybrid

A new category of hybrid tablets is proving to be increasingly popular with photographers due to their portability and pen input, which some prefer over the mouse when it comes to retouching pixels on a screen. The best example in this new category it the Microsoft Surface Pro, which on the face of it, has it all: a fast i5 processor, a great HD display, and precise pen input. Plus, it is unique for a tablet in that it runs all imaging software ever written. Lightroom on a tablet? Your wildest dreams are just about to come true. Unfortunately, this and similar devices are brought down by mediocre battery life — not great when a road trip into the wilderness!

Save money by using online services

As you can see, getting a laptop which is perfect for image processing while still offering great mobility is most likely to be an expensive affair, no matter which way you look at it. But don’t forget that online services are improving every day and can be a more than viable alternative to expensive and power-hungry processing software like Photoshop. TopTechPhoto’s Pics.io is under development to make RAW processing less overwhelming. Having your entire image library in the cloud makes losing up an image or running out of space things of the past.

If you are a hobby or professional photographer, chances are you have been playing around with different software and hardware combinations for a few years. What’s your recipe for magical digital photos? Do you use online tools or more conservative desktop solutions? Let us know in the comments!