Finally there is a laptop that can do justice to my Canon 5D MkII and the pictures it takes. Since I travel around a lot and take a lof of pictures in RAW format with processing in DPP or Lightroom afterwards there has alwasy been a limitation in the quality of display when putting the pictures on a screen. The HD was simply enough never the quality needed and in between I used my IPAD 3 with its Retina screen to look at my pictures. I also have an ASUS PB278Q with 2560 x 1440 pixels which helped up the situation as most of my processing is done on the desktop with the ASUS.

Since I am going on a photo intensive trip shortly I was happy to see that the Yoga 2 laptop from Lenovo has an amazing 3200 x 1800 Pixels squeezed in to a 13.3″ screen. The touch and feel of the laptop is very much like using my Ipad3 in terms of razor sharp fonts and crispy clean pictures. The Ipad has a resolution of 2048 x 1536 pixels with a DPI of 264. The Yoga with the extra pixels and larger screen has a DPI of 276.

The effect on my high resolution pictures are amazing. It effectively means its possible to see the photos in a good enough resolution without being able to decern any pixels at all. It also means that when processing the pictures using a cheap an easy solution like Picasa is out. There is simply no way to even preview a RAW picture through Picasa with any concept of quality as everything will look like it came from a cheap camera with no clarity. Looking at the same picture in Lightroom or DPP or Lenovos own picture viewer will give the crisp results that should be there.

Ofcourse there is always a risk of not enjoying the best quality if there is scaling on the fly thus I normally process my pictures in DPP or Lightroom and then export them in several resolution sets. One in original resolution with 92% or above quality and then atleast one more set for the highest resolution my computer screens can do. With that default, looking at the photo in full scale 1:1 size should be guaranteed to give the best viewing experience of the photo on my screen. Just the last 24 hours I have started re-looking at some older pictures and it is simply amazing what detail there is in all of them that i would not have noticed before with all screens being of lower resolution. I rarely print my photos while often using them as slideshows instead.

Thus the process for me is now to export the pictures in 3200 x 1800 pixel as the limits with a DPI of 276 and 92% to 100% Quality in JPG.

It is also very interesting to see that now the fonts on Internet News paper sites are crsipy clean but the photos now seemingly lack in resolution 🙂

I am including one fully processed photo in the right resolution for the Yoga. make sure to load the full size picture to really see how it looks rather than the autosized one in the post itself 🙂

If you doubt the difference it makes just take a RAW file and export it with the 3200 x 1800 pixel as max limits and export 3 versions of the same file with DPI 276, 150 and 72 DPI while still keeping the jpg Quality to 100%.  The difference is directly visible if you can switch between the pictures without any zooming in between and it is quite significant!