UKH

I'm in the market for a new laptop, to use primarily for processing photos and video (4k possibly) and could do with some advice/suggestions... 

I had planned on buy a Dell XPS, but after some truly terrible customer service, I've decided to steer clear of Dell, so looking for alternatives...?

Macbook Pro's are far too over-priced, so they are ruled out as well.

I'm currently looking at the HP Spectre, which looks pretty good. The only real downside I can see, is that they can't be upgraded. Or not without voiding the warranty and risking a dead laptop.

Can anyone think of other brands I should be looking at?

Cheers

Scott

Depends on the Money but for photo/video processing I would have thought having a Solid GPU would be the most important factor, so I'd be looking at gaming orientated laptops. Razer, MSR and asus are all good brands. Stay away from Dell and HP, quality isn't great and they always install lots of bloatware.

Also most laptops cant be upgraded, you can typically really only upgrade the storage and ram, everything else tends to be soldered onto the motherboard. 

There's a lot of laptops out there so without a specific budget its impossible to recommend one. 

I went through the same thing a few years ago, and ended up going for a gaming laptop.  It has been great for Lightroom and gentle video editing, an equivalent model with current specs would probably handle 4k.  It was a Dell, customer service was good when the hard drive prematurely failed, but sure other manufacturers have similar options.

Laptops Direct sometimes have good deals on refurbished machines, have bought from them a couple of times and everything went smoothly

For serious 4k HVEC (H254) or h264** editing, you'll need a good GPU and a reasonable efficient CPU. And naturally you'll also need adequate amount of RAM and a fast hard drive (pretty much SSD is the only option). For photo editing, GPU is not important.

I think the best bang for bucks, is from a refurbished business laptop. They generally have enough GPU, memory and RAM for light 4K editing and all the photo-work. Plus unlike the cheapo-consumer laptops, they are actually made to be carried around. E.g. the Lenovo Txxx and I think the Axxx's tend to be quite solid options.

If the refurbished way is not something you prefer, then ASUS ROG or similar gaming laptop is the way to go. But they aren't really much cheaper than a MacBook Pro.

For the record, I do my 4K editing on a 12" Macbook and yes the crappy GPU does indeed suck for video work (I'm prolly getting a tabletop computer at home for proper work at some point... and use the laptop on the go). No problems running on LR (5, so old).

** so generally the video that comes out from most dSLRs, pocket cams or phones.

Loads of RAM, decent GPU, SSD.

Not sure on your budget, but you get a lot of laptop for your money with this :

https://www.scan.co.uk/3xs/configurator/3xs-lw15-evolve-rtx-2060

I have lower performance version (GTX1050Ti+i7+500gb M2 SSD+16gb RAM) that runs 3d CAD absolutely fine. Cost about 1k. 

Only complaint is that it has a plastic case, rather than aluminium like you would see on a mac or Levono x1 carbon. I have chipped a corner off it and one hinge is a bit wobbly. Performance wise, it's a different league to the run of the mill big brand stuff. 

I've been using https://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/  for years. Customise what you want, they will build and ship with warranty for however long you want. Decent prices and do 4 year finance - interest free if you pay it off in the first year...

The Spectre is about £1,800, so I was looking in that price range. I did look at Razor, but they seemed more expensive than the Macbooks!?!

Thanks everyone, lots to look through here..

The 3xs machines look pretty good value. My only concerns are the plastic cases (although they make them lighter), the fact that there's no info on ports etc. And the screens aren't 4k (this is probably the biggest issue for me).

Have you considered an external GPU? Since you need a strong video card, while it does sacrifice on portability (but most of the "gaming" laptops are not particularly portable, and you would need to run them off the mains anyway for intensive tasks), it offers much better performance, at a pretty good price point (desktop GPU usually costs less and runs much faster than an equivalent internal laptop GPU, even with the price of the enclosure). www.egpu.io has got some nice tips on that. Basically, with a fast enough connection like Thunderbolt 3, you can run a high-end desktop GPU in a powered external box with only negligible performance loss, for accelerating your video editing software, more monitor support etc. And it's natively supported on more recent Win and Mac versions and it really helps to bring out more performance from a smaller Macbook Pro or similar (unfortunately for HeMa, I am not their Macbook 12" has got the necessary TB3 port). Just make sure the notebook has got enough TB3 ports (internal - some might have several ports on the chassis but all connected to one port internally which limits speed), since you would be probably using TB3 for fast external storage and other stuff.

Why a laptop. I process my photos on a desktop - I want a good quality screen and the ability to upgrade the bits that matter as and when.

I have.

New MB Air would be a contender now, would I be looking for a laptop. But I ain’t and the 12” is working just fine, so I guess it’s 27” iMac in the future. 
 

if I’d start from scratch, I’d prolly go the PC way and a business laptop with indeed external GPU for video. But as I’n pretty set on Apple ecosys, getting the iMac isn’t all that bad. And I’ll still have a reasonably capable tiny laptop to take on holidays. 

That might be a future option, if whatever i buy this time starts to become sluggish. At the moment, I want to move away from having a desk at home, it all just takes up too much space and I live in a fairly small flat.

If I wanted to keep the desk, I'd just build myself another gaming rig for whatever i'm going to spend on a laptop.

This is a curveball, but do you by any change have a good telly?

Because If you do, MacMini might be and option (add eGPU later If video editing is sluggish). It has two TB3 controllers, so eGPU AND external storage are both available. 
 

Then, get a proper console for gaming. 

That is a curveball, , but no, my TV isn't all that. I have a console for gaming, so the laptop won't be used for that at all.

I like the mobile option, as it gives me the ability to process at work, when it's quiet.

Then a reasonable laptop & external storage plus eGPU in the future might be an option for ya. Just look for minimum 2 TB3 connections.

I use mine with an external 4k 60hhz monitor on one of the mini-display-ports (Acer thing - £250). The 3xs laptop itself has 2xmini-DP, 1xHDMI, 1xUSB-C 3.1. It will only drive 4k 30hz through the HDMI, so get a DP monitor if you are getting one. 

Thanks all!

I ended up going for the HP Spectre and just uninstalled most of the Bloatware. So far, I'm very happy with it, it's a beast!

It will be interesting to see how many years I can get out of it, before the 16gb Ram just doesn't cut it anymore...

In my experience it is way cheaper to get the laptop with the minimum amount of memory and buy ram separately.  When I got mine Lenovo were charging about twice as much per GB than Crucial.

Bought it with 8, upgraded to 32 and saved well over a hundred quid.

Unfortunately, a lot of Laptops now come with Soldered Ram, so they can't be upgraded. They've all seen Apple get away with it, so it's becoming more mainstream...

I sometimes struggle with my 192Gb RAM and outboard graphics cards (at my actual work). We supply 384Gb as standard now, and some systems have around 1.8Tb RAM....

If I don't take care, I can generate single files of 250Gb. 192Gb RAM can't manipulate that file in 3D in real time. 

And I still have customers asking to be sent the "raw data" instead of the carefully selected highlights, and I tell them they don't have the software or the hardware to run it, and they say "no we have a demo version", and I send them a big file, and they complain, and I don't respond to the complaint  

That sort of thing is a deal breaker for me.

What kind of 3D data is that?  Big point clouds & reconstructions?

Kind of doubt that. I think 3D VFX on top of ’Raw’ 4, 5.7 or 6K video. 

Ooh, he does the shiny stuff

There are a few fields with the capacity to produce insane datasets.  It's always interesting to see what people in other fields think of as "big".

Got a fair few multi gb models on my hard drive but nothing that massive.

X-ray computed tomography for industrial inspection. A 40cm * 40cm detector with 100um pixel pitch = a 16MP camera. Doesn't sound like much compared to a standard consumer digital camera, right? But each 2D image is a 14-bit image, so they are 32Mb in size and I'll take perhaps 3600 of them, and THEN it gets interesting when they have to be rearranged into a 3D volume. If I set a 16-bit output (don't ask! It gets complicated), and reconstruct the entire detector image (intelligent cropping is possible), that gives a single 128Gb file. If I output at 32-bit (don't ask!), it's 256Gb. 

That's for an object that fills the 40cm * 40cm detector. Different forms of horizontal and vertical stitching are possible too, if a user actually wants to burn out their motherboard  

Usually I keep things manageable and rarely create a >25Gb file. 

If something is going >60Gb either I have not thought it through, or a customer is being silly. 

And wrong I was. 
 

but point clouds, plus 3D model and even reg pics isn’t that big. As in an oil rig or plant. 
 

and for majority of time they are split into smaller chunks (section/unit) for engineering work purposes. 

There you go. From probably an 11Gb starting file at most. 

http://www.blue-straggler.net/35RC.mp4

I have been doing a bit of reading up on volumetric rendering lately so I enjoyed that.

Just been looking at upgrading my 2012 Samsung before moving to a Linux OS. It pretty cheap to boost RAM and add a SSD compared to buying a new laptop. I'm not video editing though!

As for soldering RAM it just goes to show the s##t money grabbing natue of these companies that monetise memory capacity when it is now so cheap.