Originally posted by CWyatt I'm extremely wary of laptop screens. Have you callibrated it? They can be out in colour and contrast significantly. And then the ambient light and your angle to the screen can change it a lot even if you have it well set up.
It all depends on what you buy...buy consumer grade and get consumer grade components. As for calibration yup...and never had any probs about shots or prints I have made via BayPhoto. They look just like what is on the display and what I recall when I took the shot.
I know my previous post I was joking but I honestly can buy any system I wish and for the past 24+ years have never used anything but laptops/portables (my first 'portable' was a Compaq 22lb witha built-in 9" green display with CGA graphics...wooohoo!! Big time stuff back then!! hahahaha)...the biggest difference in them are the consumer grade product builds vs. the business builds. If ya research them a bit you will begin to basically all consumer grade laptops are beta products, cutting a lot of corners. They use poor display panels and marginal CCFL bulbs, though much has improved backlight wise with introduction of LED backlighting. The panels are usually lacking not only in terms of QC but are often culled as each panel is graded during QC testing. Lower grade panels go into the consumer product lines. Highest grade panels go into business builds.
Also consumer builds use extremely crappy/cheap cases and frames. That is because the mfg's consider, now sit down for this, but they consider consumer grade laptops as not really portable computers. That is based on a study done a few years back that like 90% of all consumer purchased laptops never left the desk at home. All of that goes into why you can buy an HP Pavilion 17" laptop for under $1k but a 17" from their current business lines (HP Compaq series systems) are $3k-$4k. But if you shop at the right time of year you can get in the door at around $1200-$1500 with a 3yr on-site accident covered system.
Those are but a couple reasons business builds are more pricey. The other major difference will be the case itself. Mg-Alloy has been the business build standard for a long time.
There are some lines that at one time are neither business grade or consumer grade, rather somewhere in between but with very solid graphics subsystems...Alienware was excellent in both build, and QC...but as I recall they were bought by Dell a couple years ago...
This is all a culmination of years of personal use and experience with various mfg's. Currently I would not touch a Dell system and find HP Compaq much better...my primary laptop is a couple years old now, an nw9440, and runs 24/7/365. I just upgraded to a 500GB drive and added another 500GB drive to the optical drive slot. The 2nd drive is SATA but the actual interface is only IDE so it's not super fast but it's good enough until my next laptop in a year or so...
BTW, the best time of year to find good deals from HP or even 3rd party sellers who sell the business systems, is from mid-January through mid-March as the new laptops are out about March/April as a rule. They are shown in November but like camera gear, as a rule, never seem to hit the market until Q1 the following year.
Even given all that if I was a measurebator or. more importantly, if my living depended on getting the images just right, I would have the best of the best monitors whether they be big CRT's or high-end LCD panels for those high end jobs...the graphics cards are no different from that found in a desktop system...and you never have the current best...
Plus remember, no matter how much you perfect the image colors on your system, when viewed online all your hard work will be undone by people using LCD panels that "...make your brown eyes look blue..."
Cripes!! sorry for the long arsed reply...kinda got carried away there...hehehe...oops!!