Lenovo Intros the Monstrous ThinkPad W700 275
Engadget recently got their hands on an early delivery of Lenovo's new powerhouse of a laptop, the W700. Aimed at graphic artists and photographers, this beast is designed to really pack a punch. No word on how much for the extra fusion generator to power it for longer than 20 minutes. "Containing enough computational artillery to level a small village, this for-creatives-only behemoth is designed for sheer pixel pushing ... and little else. The system packs in two features aimed at graphic artists and photographers which are fairly unique to a laptop: a built in Wacom digitizer just to the right of the trackpad, and an on-board color calibrator. But what's happening under the hood you ask? Well, for starters the 17-incher sports the first-ever Intel Quad Core Extreme CPU in a laptop (no word on speeds at this point) as well as the first showing of NVIDIA's Quadro FX 3700 graphics chipset (with a hefty 1GB of memory on-board). The workstation also serves up dual hard drive bays configurable as RAID 0 or 1 (SSD or traditional disk, naturally), up to 8GB of DDR3 RAM, and an optional Blu-ray burner. Of course, that's fully kitted out -- the W700 starts at $2,978 and moves skyward from there."
My wife's reaction... (Score:5, Interesting)
... (she's a graphic designer):
"Ooooooh!" (based on in-built Wacom thingie). - Interest level: High
Seconds later, "But it's not a Mac!" - Interest level: None
Re:Creatives Use Macs (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Apple needs to step up and try to match this. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Creatives Use Macs (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Apple needs to step up and try to match this. (Score:4, Interesting)
Perhaps the cup holder can be positioned over the CPU heat sink? That way it can double as a warmer or to brew tea.
Re:Very small niche - maybe? (Score:4, Interesting)
The Lenovo monster is just barely transporable, but so is a desktop.
It blows my mind how WHINEY techy people are today. Just barely transportable? what are you incredibly weak and cant carry that much weight?
Cripes I carry around over 45 pounds in my backpack daily. on my back on the bike, in my hand up the stairs. and this laptop would make no difference in my day. Take out all my test gear that makes up the most of my weight problems. Plus the Toughbook I carry weighs twice what this could soaking wet.
It's VERY transportable. If I can lift it and carry it without hurting my back or getting winded walking up 3 flights of stairs, it's incredibly transportable.
lefties (Score:2, Interesting)
It might be an urban legend, but I thought lefties were disproportionally represented in the heavily artistic fields. If that is true, it indicates they should offer left handed models if they are targeting that market niche.
Color Calibration (Score:5, Interesting)
I deal with pictures occasionally in my job, and I've had to manually/ocularly calibrate my monitors more than once. Big pain, especially when you don't have adequate lighting in the room.
The automatic calibration video really struck me as innovative, though nowhere close to game-changing, at least for a portable monitor. However, I don't understand where the system gets color information from.
The laptop has a camera on top of the LCD, so if there were, say, a tiny mirror near the trackpad it could see the monitor when the lid's down; but I see no reflective surface in the keyboard area--how does it see the monitor ouput?
Anyone care to share their take (or knowledge) on this? Just curious...
Re:Discrimination (Score:3, Interesting)
I kinda think touch-sensitive displays are not an option for serious drawing... They'd start to wear out really really fast. And even a little visible wear on the display would be a show-stopper annoying for anybody doing serious graphics stuff... Not to mention all the fingerprints etc.
Now if anybody here does serious visual work on a touch-sensitive display and knows fingerprints and wear are not a problem, feel free to correct me...
This is just about worthless. (Score:2, Interesting)
Well I was mildly intrigued about this when I read the headline and assumed they had integrated a WACOM screen into the display but that would have been just another tablet laptop with a CINTIQUE built in! Instead they give you the crappiest of WACOM tablets hammered into the right of the trackpad. I don't know anyone that uses a WACOM for anything professional that can stand anything less than the 6x8 size. Having thrown together a 12" WACOM display from an old 14x9 USB Tablet and a 12" HD LCD Display I can say that the closer the size and ratio is to what you're drawing the better it is. For a laptop screen the 6x8 is about a 2:1 for distance which makes drawing a circle only mildly a pain in the ass. On the 4x3" it's #&@!%# impossible thus drawing most organic shapes becomes a lesson in interpretive art.
Re:Apple needs to step up and try to match this. (Score:2, Interesting)
"Chinese crap" by another name... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Apple needs to step up and try to match this. (Score:3, Interesting)
I've been through three PowerBook/MBP 15" now. I know people with 17s and they look great... on a desk. I'd go for a MB or even an Air except, as a photographer and a medical imaging researcher I occasionally find a use for Firewire ports and decent graphics.
The desktop replacements just don't offer enough features to me to overcome the difficulty of carrying them around (often with twenty or thirty pounds of camera gear, for the suck-it-up-you-wimp types).
This seems even worse than the desktop replacement crowd though. This thing is big, but it's also got a bunch of extra crap tied onto it. That little tablet is too small to be useful, and everybody I know (including me) who uses a tablet likes to perch it at a weird angle. It's unlikely the screen calibrator does as well as a dedicated one in a controlled environment, and you don't need to calibrate even every day anyway.
Good on Lenovo for trying to innovate, but I think they've fallen into the all too common trap of throwing a bunch of gadgets at a notebook and thinking it's going to be the next big thing. They should have stopped with a light, well made, reasonably powered notebook with that nice screen (the screen has an extra wide colour gamut). Then they'd have tempted the creatives.