Need help looking for good sRGB 95%+ gamut laptop

First, I don’t know where this post goes. If I post it in the wrong section, please move it to where it should be posted.

Now, here is my story…

For weeks now, I am trying my best to look for a decent laptop with sRGB gamut display between 95% - 100%. I will be using it for Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Affinity Photo, and Clip Studio.

Regarding price, it’s around £1200 - £1400. However, please don’t suggest DELL / HP / Apple. For example, I had problems with DELL before. Their laptop quality is absolutely bad! Lost my projects and progress to hardware failures! It was a DELL Precision, Intel i7 with a Firepro GPU. Support drives me insane! Never again!

So far, the only model I see is: Lenovo Legion 5 - 15ACH6H (82JU002WUK). It supports 100% sRGB.
https://psref.lenovo.com/Detail/Legion/Lenovo_Legion_5_15ACH6H?M=82JU002WUK

AMD Ryzen 7 5800H (8C / 16T, 3.2 / 4.4GHz, 4MB L2 / 16MB L3)
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 6GB GDDR6
Anti-Glare + 100% sRGB

I am planning to buy my laptop around May, next year. Memory and Capacity, I will plan that later once I have the laptop.

If you come across any models please let me know!

Many thanks!

8gb ram won’t be enough, at least 16gb or ideally 32gb.

If you don’t need it until May next year then wait until May.

There’ll be new ranges of laptops out then.

What’s wrong with HP and Apple?

The Envy X360 15,6" OLED (with a 4K AMOLED display) is the cheapest design-worthy laptop. The display has a 95-96% coverage of the Adobe RGB gamut (I measured it with an X-Rite i1 Display Pro Plus colorimeter and DisplayCAL).

It’s biggest downside it its very average battery life (5-6 hours at best).

It also has a gap in the brightenss settings: you can’t set it to any value between 90 and 140 cd/m2, or nits, so you can’t calibrate it to, say, 100 or 120 cd/m2, which might be a problem.

In my case it doesn’t matter, because I mine is calibrated to 80 cd/m2 (print design).

You might need 32 GB to work with several Adobe apps at once.

Some time ago Asus announced a new range of its ProArt Studiobooks with OLED displays, which means an Adobe RGB coverage of up to over 95%.

Or Dell… However the op has requested not these models. Although my current and last laptops were/are dell and they’re fantastic.

Anyway…

Still hung up on this misinformation.

By setting a basic colour management it won’t necessarily match print output.

Reportedly, some Dells tend to overheat.

I’m well very aware that getting a good print-to-screen match requires more than just a calibrated display:

In my opinion the sRGB gamut is insufficient for professional design work, since it’s narrower than even the CMYK color space, not to mention the Adobe RGB gamut.

I am trying to plan in advance and calculate my earnings and spending. Also as I’ve stated, I will upgrade the memory + capacity when I fully pay off the laptop.

Second, I prefer PC laptops as they provide better ventilation and easy maintenance (when I need to do it myself). With an Apple laptop… Uhm… it’s sealed and if you happen to have a faulty memory or need to upgrade/replace your storage, OMG… it’s a dilemma.

One step at a time. I can upgrade memories later… :slight_smile:

How about HP?

The RAM and SSD in the Envy are upgradable, though the latter has a capacity of 1TB, so you won’t have to upgrade it soon.

I’ve used HP before and their qualities are close to DELL. Had no failures but some keys on laptop went dead on me. Also the screen had 1-2 dead pixels forming like a year after usage… that was all I remembered. It has 16GB DDR3 and i7… forgot what the GPU was. Sorry.

That line of logic also requires that the display, the ambient lighting, and the various color/output settings be calibrated to the output device — such as the photographer in the video who apparently made his own prints using his own printer.

Unfortunately, for graphic design purposes, unless you’re working in prepress at a printing company, that across-all-devices calibration isn’t practical. What is practical is buying a good-quality display that can be relied upon and that you’re used to using. In addition, color accuracy requires working with a good printing company that cares about quality.

The old CRT days of computer monitors being wildly off in one direction or another are a thing of the past. The out-of-the-box color of good, higher-end digital displays falls well within the degree of variation between one printer and the next, which makes trying to calibrate one’s display to a point somewhere within those variations an exercise in futility.

Besides, viewing something on a display is never, ever the same as viewing printed materials. Even when viewing CMYK color on an electronic display, you only see a CMYK simulation shown to you in a reduced-gamut RGB. Good color matching between a display and print is doable. Fine-tuning beyond good isn’t practical (or even possible) — especially when you’re not calibrating it with the output device.

The only realistic way designers have for nearly spot-on color matching is to use the same color matching system as the printer — typically Pantone. That way, the color in your Pantone swatch book will match the formula the printer uses to mix the inks or the lookup tables in the digital printers.

Apple’s out because you don’t want a Mac, I assume. Eliminating Dell or HP from consideration is a mistake, though. A bad anecdotal experience with one computer doesn’t mean the entire brand is faulty. Different brands use customized cases, but they’re all mostly built from the same interchangeable parts inside.

Some brands specialize in using cheaper, off-the-shelf components, while others specialize in using higher-end, more expensive, off-the-shelf parts. Other brands, such as HP and Dell, sell models that span everything from the cheap stuff to the high-end with more customized features and hardware. More than anything, it boils down to how much you want to spend to get the good components as opposed to the less expensive, not-so-reliable ones.

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Well…

Have you seen what DELL did to their PC desktop lineup? For example, a lot of their pc case design is not that sturdy, the motherboard capacitor is actually low-grade quality and the PSU is a lot worse than what you think it seems to be. I am not going to even go there. In 2021, they are still trying to cut more corners and trying to upsell harder. Also, even trying to trick people into buying extra things/upgrades that they don’t even need! Seriously, they only know money and how to make more money!

I am sorry about this. But, I’ve seen plenty of videos and fixed computers in the past (freelance). I’ve seen more DELL coming in for repairs than any other brand.

That’s fair enough - I have had a positive experience with my Dells and delighted with the quality and build. The one I’m working on now has a ‘lambs ear’ feel to it - which is quite nice tactile that I wasn’t expecting, but I stupidly love this.

Anyway - that has nothing to do with build quality.

If I was in your shoes - and I don’t know where in the world you are - though you quoted in £’s - I guess you’re in the UK?

PC Specialist do quality builds and very high reputation.
Their customer service is excellent - and you can contact them about specific builds too.

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Oh - and you can finance from them - or with a finance partner like Humm (formerly flex-fi), which could give you 0% interest for up to a year or two years. Making it easier to pay off.

I will check out PC Specialist. Thanks!