mjmjam Loc: Michigan

What is a good laptop for photography. I shoot raw images. I don't do an over amount of image processing. Price around $600.00
Thanks in advance

Just Fred Loc: Darwin's Waiting Room

A Google search for $600 laptop will yield results that include HP, Toshiba, Acer and Asus.

At that price point, pretty much all laptops are the same.

Rongnongno Loc: FL

At that price spare your $$$ and go out to party.

Bobbee

Most laptops that come with cameras are not of a high quality. I would consider another device for taking pictures.

Oknoder Loc: Western North Dakota

Personally I do not understand most people's love affair with laptops, especially for demanding tasks like Photoshop and the like. Laptops have their place but they are so disposable and their upgrade options leave a lot to be desired.

ygelman Loc: new -- North of Poughkeepsie!

Someone who's never been in love certainly can't see what love is all about.


This sound like a statement from someone with very limited experience. My laptop contains Photoshop, and my desktop (which I obtained when my wife upgraded hers) does also. I would not want to be without either one.

Oknoder Loc: Western North Dakota

Both of my current rigs have the exact same operating systems, but I can definitively notice the difference between an Intel i5 4200u that is a 1.6Ghz dual core with 8gigs of ram, if memory serves me, and an AMD FX8350 octocore overclocked to 5.2ghz with 32g of ram, and this does not take into account the dedicated graphics cards available cheaply for desktops. Yet the laptop was almost twice the cost for less than an eighth of productivity. It is absolutely painful to try and PP on it yet if I didn't notice the difference everything would be bliss. Both have their places to be sure, out in the field or on vacation the laptop wins hands down,but when speed and power are needed laptops just cannot compete, especially when considering their initial cost and the inability to upgrade them very far.


As far as my experience goes I'll simply state, I have 80% confidence I can get my old Commodore 64 to pass post and boot, and it has been in the closet for years.
Mobility has a price but that just seems like raping the customer. Just my opinion.

nicksr1125 Loc: Mesa, AZ

I would stay away from ASUS. Most other mainstream brands should be okay as long as they have at least 4gb RAM & a 500gb hard drive. I wouldn't buy 1 that has a 14" screen. I would invest in an external drive for backing up your photos & other files. Check out as many as you can at Staples, Office Depot, Costco, Sam's Club, Best Buy, etc. and get a sense of how you like the keyboard and how smoothly the system operates. You shouldn't have any problem finding 1 within your budget.

Bobbee

Humm. Try putting your desktop in a backpack and get past TSA with it. Also. My laptop is pretty fast. Chips and memory considered. I edit pictures on planes. If you have seen the new Delta videos (very funny) where they go through safety procedures, there is one where the person is sitting there with a desktop and a full monitor on their drop down. I guess that is you.

PS. On the videos, seems the Red Head is gone with the wagging finger. I was in love with her!! (LOL) <sigh>

Bobbee

On another note. For a couple of years I have heard people raving about SSD. I just figured this was good for NORMAL laptops. I have so much software running at start up my laptop took about 6-8 minutes before it would respond to a mouse click. I m a software Eng. So I just figured I would not get the same results.

My harddrive started to go belly-up at a client in South Africa a few weeks back. Got a sale ad from Newegg and got a 500 gig SDD for $200.

20 seconds boot up from the time I enter the password......Holy Pooh Pooh!!! Get one.

dsmeltz Loc: Philadelphia

If you are not doing a lot of layering, and just want to review photos, adjust color and crop etc..., you should be OK with a laptop in that range. I would suggest you shoot in both RAW and JPEG so you can do little things to the JPEGs on your laptop and save editing the RAW files for when you go home and use a more robust computer.

mjmjam Loc: Michigan

Thanks for the info everyone.

Gene51 Loc: Yonkers, NY, now in LSD (LowerSlowerDelaware)

I would suggest that you increase your budget - LR can be slow on an underpowered computer. For $600, you typically get a i5 quad core which does not offer hyperthreading. LR uses multicore hyperthreading- so an i7 quad core should be your minimum consideration.

Most laptops in this class used shared ram for graphics and program execution, and generally only offer 8 gb ram. So the operating system, your application, your images while being processed, and the display of those images are all competing for the 8 gb ram. Not a great situation. Currently, running Win7 or 8 the minimum for photo editing is around 16gb, with a discreet graphics adapter and its own video memory.

lastly, these machines often use cheap system drives, running at 5400 rpm. These are extremely slow.

The worse part, is that you cannot upgrade memory or hard drive without tossing the memory the machine comes with, if you can upgrade it at all.

Trying to edit photos on such a machine might be frustrating at best. Such a machine is great for students, light home use, home office applications. But graphics editing requires quite a bit more horsepower.

jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

You forgot to add the smiley face. :D

jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

I always get Core i7, and 16GB of memory. Look for sales.