Hands-on with Lenovo's Monstrous W700 17" ThinkPad -- Photos and Impressions

Nathan Edwards — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 17:20:39 -0500

When we first walked into our meeting with Lenovo last week, we thought it was an oversized mockup. Sure, it looked like a ThinkPad. But it was huge! We're used to small, slim, no-nonsense ThinkPads; we were unprepared for this. Who would want a 17" ThinkPad?

Once we took a closer look at the just-announced W700, though, we got our answer: We want one. Maybe it's the integrated Wacom digitizer. Or the onboard HueyPro color calibrator. Or maybe we like the idea of a 640GB RAID array in a laptop. Or the 1GB of dedicated graphics memory. This is a big, powerful system, aimed at digital content professionals: photographers, videographers, animators, CAD/CAM engineers, and the like.

Looking closely at the specs, we can see that Lenovo’s not pulling any punches. The W700 will be the first notebook to ship with Intel’s not-so-secret Core 2 Extreme mobile quad-core CPU (officially launching at next week’s Intel Developer’s Conference), and the first with Nvidia’s just-announced Quadro FX3700M GPU, which has 1GB of video memory (Lenovo claims internal testing yielded over 10,000 in 3DMark06). Oh, and they’ll also put in up to 8GB of DDR3 memory.

The onboard HueyPro color calibrator will be especially handy with the professional-quality 1920x1200 WUXGA screen (a 72% Gamut 400 NIT display). To calibrate, you simple activate the program and clamp down the laptop lid – the software does the rest. With such a high end display, Lenovo recommends that users calibrate once a week.

And that integrated Wacom tablet? It’s a sizeable 12cm by 8cm digitizer that’s activated with a magnetic pen that hides in the side of the notebook. You can use it with digital content applications like Photoshop or Illustrator or configure it to map to the entire screen to manipulate your cursor.

The W700 also boasts a 7-in-1 media card reader, integrated camera, 5 USB ports, and plenty of display outputs – Dual Link DVI, VGA, even DisplayPort. Unfortunately, you’ll have to look to the optional port replicator dock for eSATA support (priced at $279).

The whole thing weighs about 8.3lbs, and Lenovo says it’ll get between 2.5 and 3 hours of battery life, which is hardly earth-shattering but a lot better than we’d expect from such a big machine. Placed next to a slim Thinkpad X300, the W700 dwarfs the ultraportable in comparison. We can’t imagine lugging it on business trips across the country, but we could see professionals using it as a desktop replacement at the office and bringing it home to work at night.

Prices will start at about $3K, and the machine will be pretty customizable – you can leave out the Wacom, calibrator, or both, and choose between normal hard drives (up to 320GB each at 5400RPM in RAID, or 200GB each at 7200 RPM) and SSDs (up to 128GB). Expect to pay upwards of five grand for a fully kitted-out notebook.

Pantone HueyPro

Katherine Stevenson — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 12:37:17 -0600

You don’t need to be a graphics professional to care about the color of your prints—even casual digital photographers take pride in their work. But what’s a user to do when the image he sees on the screen bears little resemblance to the printer’s output? Many screens provide manual control over individual color channels, but tweaking them to match your printer’s color can be a tedious and time-consuming affair. An alternative is to color calibrate your monitor with a hardware/software package made for the task.

Pantone’s Huey line of consumer calibrators promises professional-grade results with a price and user-friendliness that will appeal to even hobbyists. Both the standard Huey and the HueyPro function similarly: You load the calibration software, connect the cigarillo-size calibrator to your USB port, and then follow the software’s simple steps, which take little more than a minute to complete.

For this review, we focused on the HueyPro because unlike the standard version, the Pro will calibrate more than one monitor on a single workstation. Per the software’s instructions, we stuck the suction-cupped calibrator to our screen and watched as the device measured the screen’s color temps with a show of LEDs. In the end, our screen took on a dramatically different appearance that was warmer and redder than its previous state—it’s fun to toggle between the before and after results. The newly calibrated screen looked very unnatural to our unaccustomed eyes, so we compared it with a multicolored print that we ran off on our company’s production-grade printer, which gets regularly serviced and calibrated. And sure enough, the calibrated screen was a much closer match to the print—nearly identical, in fact.

The HueyPro lets you select from a few different white-point and gamma settings to suit your personal preference without disrupting the color balance. And you can opt for the device to measure the room’s ambient light at all times (from its wee cradle) and make appropriate adjustments to your screen on the fly.

For folks who do a lot of color printing, this product is a real boon; the trade-offs are a screen that likely looks very different from what you’re used to and a lag time whenever you boot and the color profile is reloaded.

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Hands-on with Lenovo's Monstrous W700 17" ThinkPad -- Photos and Impressions

Pantone HueyPro