I have a shooting assignment away from home and I won't have access to my calibrated working environment. I have to buy a new laptop and I was wondering which one would be the most reliable as far as color management is concerned (color rendition on monitor, calibration, etc.). I'll have to do all the post processing on the laptop (I shoot raw and will use CS3).
Thanks for your help,
Marie

If you're on a PC, look at the new Lenovo IBM ThinkPad W700. But as gizmodo says here: http://tinyurl.com/5h2ovn "Except for the fact it runs Vista, it's like the perfect pro photographer's workstation."

Cheers,
Kumar

Get an EyeOne Display-2 or similar Colorimeter and profile it! While not the ideal display, it will be vastly better for image work after calibration and profiling. Just set everything to native white point and TRC (gamma), probably max luminance and that's it.

Eyeball calibration is totally useless.

Thank you for your answers. I'll let you know how it goes!
Marie

I find the new MacBook Pro LCD very good for calibration. I can go over 200 lumens very easily with the newer LED ones.

Luis

Digital Dog,
Since your advice always works out correctly, my question is how do you calibrate a laptop? On all of mine, I can just profile (Eye One Display 2).
I would love to be able to calibrate first, but my laptop does not have RGB conttrols.
Also, if the White Point is set to 6500K - is that better? The Native White Point on my XPS seems a bit yellow, maybe 5300K by the eyeball.

BTW, with a Vista Laptop and a connected LCD, I remove the Profile loader from the startup - and then maually load the ICC profiles about 5 minutes after the computer finishes booting. This gives fantastic results on my multiple monitor setup. Both profiles seem perfect.
I can have 2 instances of Bridge CS3, one on each screen and they both match visually perfect. This scenario only works by the delayed loader.

You're being too kind (or your really my mom logged into LL <g>).



Actually you can't. You can't really calibrate an LCD either but you have more options over luminance. The important thing is to profile the condition for the CMS. That provides at least some useful previews in an ICC aware application. At least in all the laptops I've used (and that's all Apple), pretty much max luminance is where you want to be (they don't get that bright anyway). Maybe the newer ones do. I haven't had good experience with the LED's, they might get brighter. But the point is, get a luminance that's appropriate for the environment, say 100/120cd/m2, set the software for native gamma and white point, build a profile that simply defines that condition.

Is your Macbook using LED backlighting?