The Next Time Someone Asks for a $1000 Laptop for Photoshop

[Trevor.Dennis]

This looks like a very nice spec for Photoshop for just over $1000.  I couldn't cope with the 15" screen, but young folk might be comfortable with it.

Acer Predator Helios 300 Review - TechSpot

[EDIT] Just read the entire review now, and it seems the screen can only manage 65% sRGB which leads to an overall under saturation, so Dag wouldn't approve.  It's going to be snappy for the price, but even I wouldn't want to put up with the poor colour rendition. 

[Trevor.Dennis · Accepted solution]

Toms Hardware has a more in depth review.  They echo TechSpots view about less than stellar colour accuracy, but say it has excellent contrast. I guess you have to decide what's most important to you.  With a 7700HQ CPU, GTX1060 GPU and 16Gb of reasonably fast RAM (2133GHz) it's going to do Photoshop as well or better than some desktops costing twice as much, but can you put up with the poor colour accuracy?  (blues drop off at higher brightness levels, so I'm guess your images are going to look a bit warmer than they really are.

Acer Predator Helios 300 Review - Tom's Hardware

[Terri_Stevens]

I wouldn't touch another Acer with a barge pole Trevor. I bought a laptop from them about 7 years ago with great specs. It turned out they fitted a 'desktop' 3GHz processor on a laptop motherboard. Yes it flew when running Photoshop, but the processor ran far hotter than a true laptop processor and this caused the inverter in the screen to keep burning out. The thing went back to Acer 4 times for repair. Eventually they admitted the processor was just too much for the cooling system and offered a replacement laptop, but not a 3GHz , something a lot more basic. I'd never trust them again as they cut corners.

[D Fosse]

Trevor.Dennis  wrote

the screen can only manage 65% sRGB

I've seen some of those screens and it looks really weird. It actually gets worse if you try to calibrate/profile it, because the red and green primaries are shifted sideways in relation to the sRGB primaries. So the useful, corrected gamut you end up with is considerably less than even those 65%.

In short, office work only. Maybe some gaming if you're not too picky.

High contrast is no advantage if you print, on the contrary. You'll just be disappointed. I run my Eizos at anywhere between 300:1 and 150:1, which is what you get on a good inkjet printer with glossy to matte paper. Offset print is 100:1 on a good day.