Technology

Best Laptop for Creators

A guide to buying the best laptops for video editing, photo editing and other creative work with a focus on the Adobe Creative Suite.

Over the past year we’ve seen a pretty big spike in creator laptop. So devices that are geared towards creative work and we’ve seen stuff from like Intel, Nvidia and a whole bunch of laptop manufacturers that’s pushing that market to just you know selling products to people that are interested in devices for creative work.

So if you’re like an artist or a video editor or just anything that works with stuff, making stuff this post is for you.
It’s kind of a guide to figure out what you should look for, what you should avoid. So you don’t get bamboozled into the whole marketing thing because there is a lot of marketing fluff in this space right now.

Mac Books vs Windows Laptops

Over the past couple of years there’s been a very clear and obvious winner when it came to performance with Adobe products particularly Adobe Premiere, Windows laptops were just 2 or 3 times better than Mac books like forget about price and value and all that stuff like, just performance wise these things just crushed Apple’s Mac books.

But recently like the spring of 2019 Adobe updated the software to the point where Apple’s top-of-the-line Mac books are on par or just very equivalent in performance to the top-of-the-line Windows laptops forget about like the potential of keyboard errors and stuff like that. The Apple platform is a very viable platform for people that are interested in performance with Adobe’s products.

Screen Matters

When you talk about content creation a lot of people are interested in a screen that can display colors accurately to an industry standard and the truth is every single laptop here every single laptop that have ever had with has an imperfect color profile they’re never gonna be as good as like a professional calibrated screen.

The new OLED panels that are coming into the laptop space they’re all made by Samsung and a lot of manufacturers are marketing these panels, as like content creator screens for these devices and there is an issue with that the Samsung OLED panel is an amazing screen it’s bright, colorful, very vibrant but I do not consider them to be good for content creation.

There are couple reasons why they’re very difficult to calibrate, like super hard to do it right. One company does it properly like the arrow 15 from gigabyte their new one they run an OLED and it’s calibrated well they lower their brightness to do it properly but every other laptop manufacturer that I’ve seen with an OLED panel has worse color accuracy than I thought they would.

Considering how these screens are marketed towards creative workflows now another thing OLED panels use PWM to control the brightness levels. It’s not some of that’s going to affect everyone but if you’re sensitive to flickering and stuff like if you are bothered by fluorescent lights and how they flicker the PWM on these OLED panels can give you some kind of eye strain.

When it comes to content creation there are some really good IPS screens on the market right now the 15-inch MacBook Pro, great screen, bright color. The best screens from Windows laptops right now the Acer concept D uses the same panel as the older gigabyte arrow 15, they both use a 4k IPS panel, excellent color accuracy and brights.

But another thing to keep in mind is that alot of the gaming laptops right now have these 1080p high refresh screens and they’re surprisingly good for color accurate work like they’re not great, they’re good but you just want to expect a gaming screen to be good at all because often they haven’t been in the past the Razer Blade 15 like this is a 2018 model has a very usable screen for a color accurate work once you calibrate it.

But the takeaway here is that you don’t have to buy an OLED screen for sure and even some of the older devices like they’re great especially some of the 4k IPS panels they are very good for color accurate work.

Pricing and value

When you purchase a creator laptop or a laptop for creative work there’s kind of two main things you want to keep in mind the CPU and the GPU you want to pick up. If you can afford it a six core CPU that’s basically the number of cores that are in your processing unit of your laptop you don’t need the 2019 versions, the 2018 versions are already great.

The GPU let the graphical chip inside your laptop is a much more complicated decision it’s really dependent on what you do for your creative work? If you’re like a Photoshop user or an Adobe Premiere user you don’t need anything super powerful like the difference between the ten sixty and the top align our checks twenty eighty is very slights.

When it comes to a lot of photo and video work now MacBook users have a GPU option at the top end of a Vega GPU and that graphics card is quite a bit more capable than their five 60 or 560 X if you can afford it. And you’re one of the people that really want to use Mac for your creative stuff it is recommend if you can afford it to get that Vega option.

For the most part 16 gigs RAM is good enough but there are a lot of applications that can take advantage of 32 at this point so if you’re a Photoshop user and your projects are like six seven hundred Meg’s like once you get into bigger projects the extra RAM is nice and the same thing goes for video editing

The main Hardware decisions like you just gotta figure out what you’re doing? what you need? and go off of that.

Here are the list of devices you can consider.

• Double Screen ZenBook – https://amzn.to/2ofu4xV
• 4K XPS 15 – https://amzn.to/2W9Uxt0
• Razer Blade – https://amzn.to/2ofvusf
• MacBook 15 – https://amzn.to/2pM3Vao
• Aero 15 – https://amzn.to/2BGGOAJ
• Acer Concept D – https://www.acer.com/ac/en/US/content/conceptd-home