Laptop / desktop?

[laurasteph]

Hi there

My laptop has completely gone kaput.

I am looking to by a new one to do Photoshop ect.

Would you recommend a desktop over a laptop and which kind?

thanks Laura x

 

[TTMartin]

Keep in mind almost all laptops can be hooked up to an external monitor, keyboard, and mouse.

So the only question is cost vs convenience. Laptops tend to be more expensive compared to equally powered desktop devices.

I haven't used a Microsoft Surface Tablet, but, I suspect there is some advantage to a touchscreen while editing files.

 

[MrCPH]

Hi Laura,

Did you use photoshop on your old laptop? Did you spend a lot of time on it and did you find any disadvantages with it?

 

[laurasteph]

Hi Laura,

Did you use photoshop on your old laptop? Did you spend a lot of time on it and did you find any disadvantages with it?

Hi,

Yes I did use it on my old laptop but I'm not very good so I couldn't tell you the disadvantages. I am looking into starting a course after Easter tho so hopefully I can get use out of it.

 

[Bjorn_L]

Hi there

My laptop has completely gone kaput.

I am looking to by a new one to do Photoshop ect.

Would you recommend a desktop over a laptop and which kind?

thanks Laura x

A desktop is more reliable, cheaper to buy, cheaper to fix, easier to upgrade.

A Laptop is more portable.

 

[Leonard Migliore]

Hi there

My laptop has completely gone kaput.

I am looking to by a new one to do Photoshop ect.

Would you recommend a desktop over a laptop and which kind?

I use a laptop with an external monitor. There are a couple of reasons for this besides the obvious convenience of having a portable computer.

One big reason is that Photoshop puts up lots of palettes and other garbage that blocks the screen, especially on a laptop. With an external monitor, I can put the image on the monitor and all the palettes on the laptop screen. Makes it much easier to work.

The second reason is that for the most part, laptop screens have poor color that changes a lot with viewing angle. This makes it hard to get repeatable results. A good IPS monitor can be calibrated and will allow you to do more consistent work.

If portability is not important, then a desktop with a good monitor is much cheaper and perfectly satisfactory.

Monitor models change all the time; check recent reviews for what's currently good.

 

[MrCPH]

Well, it really depends on how long time you expect to spend on it. Is this for a full time job, or just as a small hobby? Would you want, or do you need the advantage of taking the laptop with you?

I use photoshop for editing.I do it on my laptop without any issues. It is however at hobby level and not my profession, so I don't need big graphic cards and processors.

Nowadays laptops are pretty powerful things, so you will be pretty safe on a laptop. They also take up less space and use less power - all in a good cause

 

[archmonk]

Hi there

My laptop has completely gone kaput.

I am looking to by a new one to do Photoshop ect.

Would you recommend a desktop over a laptop and which kind?

thanks Laura x

It really bogs down to whether you will be editing on the go or always at home in front of a big screen. Also depends on your budget for the pc/desktop/mac . Also depends on your profession (I am a developer / hobbyist Photographer) and recently moved to Mac and now can't see myself going back to PC.

 

[hotdog321]

If you don't need the portability, I'd go with the desktop. You can get a lot more bang for the buck and it is almost endlessly upgradable. I own both--laptop for field work, desktop for heavy lifting and day to day work.

 

[PhotoFactor]

Most laptops have hard drives that spin slower than desktops, hurting performance.

If the laptop has an SSD then it is way faster (same as if a desktop has an SSD), but SSDs are much more expensive for the capacity.

My desktop boots off an SSD but I have a large (2TB) desktop-class hard drive to house over 400GB of photos, plus 100's of GB of video. So a laptop would be limiting for me because I'm not going to have an SSD with the capacity I would need, and few laptops allow for two internal drives. External drives won't perform as well unless they have a fast connection (at least USB 3.0; many/most external HDs are slower USB 2.0 connection).

If you only do a bit of editing then none of those performance differences may be significant and the laptop could be fine.

> Laptop benefits are portability at the cost of screen size/quality, storage speed/capacity, and cost.

> Desktop benefits are lower cost, better expandability and storage capacity/performance.

You will need to decide which priorities are most important.

 

[PenPix]

There are some laptops with reasonably good IPS monitors if you are willing to pay the price for it. $1000 is the starting point.

Also try cross-posting the the PC Talk and Mac Talk forums for what people are actually using.

 

[Mystery member]

My laptop has completely gone kaput.

I am looking to by a new one to do Photoshop ect.

... Yes I did use it on my old laptop but I'm not very good so I couldn't tell you the disadvantages. I am looking into starting a course after Easter tho so hopefully I can get use out of it.

Would you recommend a desktop over a laptop and which kind?

Could be that you don't really need PS; something like LR might be better for you, or even one of the free ones.

Almost all new computers will have sufficient power/storage for photographic work; some of mine are quite old by modern standards (i.e. 3 to 6 years old, with minor upgrades).

I have a small NetBook (10" screen) for use on the road ($250), a more powerful Notebook ($600) for most of my work (sometimes with an external screen $400) and a desktop for long-term storage ($800).

Take your pick.

 

[davidedric]

Another factor, at least for me, is connectivity. I have a host of usb connected peripherals, and that is likely to be much easier to manage on a desktop.

Dave

 

[musicalhell]

Dear Laura,

Unless portability is something you need badly I would gow ith the desktop. Not only is it easier to repair/expand/upgrade as the others have said, it also should be better for running long hours (assuming that you spend a good deal of time running the computer) since you have better cooling options. Of course this may not be too relevent and if price is not an issue you should be able to find other solutions.

With the ever increasing MP count on cameras (canon's 50MP 5ds for example) I think it would be safer to go for a desktop which you can 'power up' to meet demanding hardware performance (HDD space/processing power/RAM etc) making it better for long term use. This is just my personal opinion though.

Regards,

Musicalhell

 

[Neez]

I have a Lenovo Y50 with a 4k IPS screen with a 256GB SSD, $1100. Pictures are gorgeous on it.

You can buy a macbook pro with a 4k retina display for a few hundred more.

You can also buy a desktop, but a 4k screen is around $500 by itself, you'll end up spending just as much as the laptop. The advantage of a laptop is portability, but a desktop does everything better. You can also add multiple hard drives for photo storage, but i use a NAS(network attached storage) to offload my photos from my laptop. 256GB fills up fast considering the camera memory card is 32gb.

 

[mreynolds767]

I have a relatively new Mac laptop and there are definitely times when the processing power is really SLOW ; which a desktop would in most cases handle much faster.

That said, I am talking about stitching multiple shots with CS photoshop. Last night I edited a photo of 8 shots each 24 MB into a pano, did some other edits with luminosity masks and other things that really increase file size and had an over 2 Gigabit file.

Exported that into CS lightroom at actual size and my laptop and lightroom became really buggy and super slow. Also was on battery power and it sucked the life out of the battery really quick.

These are uncommon uses of course, normally for 1 photo editing it is never a problem and very fast. Next time I will size the photo down to half the size or less as an early step in the process as the file was just too large for my laptop.

My point, if you plan on working with enormous files you will need a high amount of RAM which becomes extremely costly in a laptop compared to a desktop.

As a general rule you are likely to have a bigger screen, larger hard drive and more processing power with a desktop both of which are very helpful for using Photoshop

I am happy with my decision because portability is a huge factor to me and I usually edit photos on the couch or chair with family in the room and TV in the background ; so could not do that in a desktop environment.

 

[photosen]

Hi there

My laptop has completely gone kaput.

I am looking to by a new one to do Photoshop ect.

Would you recommend a desktop over a laptop and which kind?

thanks Laura x

Well laptops are more practical, I would make sure to get an SSD hard drive, a decent processor (At least AMD A10, and there are many that are more powerful but there's no need to go over the top), and enough RAM (at least 4GB).

You may want to get a decent external monitor to hook up to that laptop, that makes a big difference for photography, or hunt down a laptop with a decent screen. I ended up with a Macbook Pro Retina 13, the screen does make a big difference even for shots taken with my old 30D.

 

[chuxter]

Hi Laura,

Did you use photoshop on your old laptop? Did you spend a lot of time on it and did you find any disadvantages with it?

Hi,

Yes I did use it on my old laptop but I'm not very good so I couldn't tell you the disadvantages. I am looking into starting a course after Easter tho so hopefully I can get use out of it.

Laura, you started out well, but you seem to have deserted your thread. I normally avoid commenting to deserted threads, but I'm guessing that you may not have another computer? SO< here goes...

Leonard was right. If you need portability, look at a MacBook Pro w/ Retina display. One notch down is a fast laptop with an IPS display. These will be expensive! You may also need to get a second IPS monitor because PS works best w/ a large screen.

If you can do w/o portability, then a desktop will be much less expensive and often reach performance levels not available on a laptop.

 

[zukeeper]

skip the desktop and either go all in one or my preference , laptop HDMI to HD TV when you need a big screen, best of both worlds

 

[ARShutterbug]

What's better really depends on what you want, not what anybody else wants. If you like mobility, you may not want a desktop machine. If you like working on buses, trains, and other areas where you will be exposed to risky conditions, you probably don't want a fragile laptop machine. If you want lots of expansion room, you want to consider a desktop or laptop that offers it. Then there's the issue of cost, the sunk cost and depreciation over whatever time period you are using for your amortisation. Also consider using both a desktop and a laptop, and carefully consider issues related to laptop ergonomics and any required plug-in port placement around the exterior.