We’ve usually held back in selecting a specific brand of laptop as a single pick as “the” laptop for photographers but this line of laptops from IBM (now owned by Lenovo) comes so close to perfect that it deserves some recognition.
We weren’t paid, bribed or even asked by Lenovo to give this line of laptops recognition, in fact we asked for the chance to try it hands on and we didn’t even get a response. It’s ok though because this line is just that good and will benefit photographers in ways they didn’t know a laptop could so we’ll still spread the word.
The W series from IBM has been on our radar for a few months now mostly because the line is well suited for photographers as these are workstation laptops rather than home, gaming or business class laptops. Coming equipped with NVIDIA® Quadro FX® MXM-based graphics cards means you’re system isn’t geared toward gaming, it’s geared towards getting things done. The new W510 system announced at CES 2010 sports:
- Quad Core Intel i7 processor
- 15.6″ – 95% NTSC gamut 16:9 Touchscreen Monitor
- Built-in X-Rite® PANTONE® Calibrator
- USB 3.0
- Solid State Hard Drives
- Up to 16GB of RAM
- RAID 0/1
- Blu-Ray Disc Drive
Basically it’s powerful, portable and feature rich. The other W series systems include the W700ds which includes a “palm size” Wacom tablet, built-in… yes built in. As well as an additional 10.6″ LCD display and yes it’s also built-in and folds out right next to the main 17″ display with the built-in calibrator.
The downside to the W700ds is that all those extras will hamper battery life and that currently they only offer it in the now outdated Core2 series processors. If you’re looking at the W700ds laptop we say give IBM some time to update the specs with an i7 processor for the added performance gains.
Are we saying this is the be all end all line of laptops for photographers? Not at all, in fact it would be better for the photography community if some of the other big guys would take note and compete, were looking at you DELL, HP, Toshiba, Samsung, Apple.
Currently IBM is only taking orders for the W510 via phone, we’re guessing they just haven’t had enough time to ramp up production to offer them on their site (or they’re just greedy and want to keep all that computing goodness to themselves).
Visit Lenovo’s website for more information.
