E6520 use with Photoshop???

I purchased the E6520 through my business. As of today it shows “in Production” with a ship date of 4/15. I will do a lot of spreadsheet and contact work on it when away from the office. I have no doubt it will work fine for that.
My other needs are for Photoshop. I work on thousands of pictures that I will keep on an external 2T drive interfaced through the eSATA port. My OS is on the internal drive. I’m not real knowledgeable about the inner workings of the HD, Processor and graphics card but have read up a little on the supplied card and am not that impressed. Other than that this system seems capable of handling the requirements of Photoshop.
Any help on configuration here is appreciated…..
Thanks
Mark

1 225-0376 Dell Latitude E6520 $2575.00
1 317-5997 Intel Core i7-2720QM, 2.20GHz, 6MB Cache, Dell Latitude E6X20
1 317-3592 8.0GB, DDR3-1333MHz SDRAM, 2 DIMM, Dell Latitude
1 331-1238 Internal Backlit English Keyboard, Dell Latitude E
1 320-2081 nVidia NVS 4200M 512MB DDR3 Discrete Graphics, Dell Latitude E6520
1 342-2166 256GB Dell Mobility Solid State Hard Drive, 2.5MM, Dell Latitude
1 318-0341 LCD HD+/FHD Cover, Dell Latitude E6520
1 320-2361 15.6in FHD+(1920x1080) Anti-Glare LED-backlit with Premium Panel Guarantee, Dell Latitude E6520
1 469-0059 Genuine Windows 7 Professional, 64-bit, no media, Latitude, English
1 430-3973 Dell WLAN 1501 (802.11b/g/n) 1/2 MiniCard, Dell Latitude E
1 331-1543 No Intel vPro Technology Advanced Management Features, Dell Latitude E6520
1 312-1151 6-Cell (60WH) Primary Lithium Ion Battery for Latitude
1 331-1245 Energy Star Enabled/E-PEAT/Gold, Latitude E6520
1 421-3954 Microsoft Office Home and Business 2010,English,OptiPlex,Precision and Latitude
1 331-1720 E-Modular Bay, USB 3.0, Dell Latitude $50.00
1 331-1640 Intel Core i7 Processor $0.00

 

Quad core CPU + 8GB RAM should run Photoshop without any issues. eSATA will run the external storage as fast as if it is internal, but having the files on an SSD would be faster. It would be worthwhile testing whether temporarily moving files from the external HDD to the SSD (and afterwards copying them back to the external storage)would boost throughput.

John

 

As John has stated above, that system should have no issues with Photoshop, and he has a 256GB SSD in the build.

 

My problem with that is I have over 10,000 RAW exposures I work with. Also the way Lightroom and CS5 works is EVERY time you make ANY correction on a photo it writes it onto the database so write time or me is important. I have read time with the SSD is superfast but not so with write time…..
Does this make sence?
Does the graphics card handle the power of PS?
Mark

 

The 4200M isn't the best card but it will handle PS.

Unless you are doing PS 24/7, the read/write speeds will be sufficient for your needs.

 

I suspect that the <1ms access times for SSDs will give you no performance bottleneck - the amount of data to be written is probably small.

John

 

Are there ANY specific configurations I should set this thing at?????
Just saw it was shipped yesterday!!!!!
Thanks in advance&#8230;..
Mark

 

The LG panel in the E6520 is higher quality than I was expecting. My measurements showed it to be very neutral for a business laptop.

Most screen calibrations are set to a white point of 6500 Kelvin (the color of midday sun) with a Gamma curve of 2.2. Most photographers will set their brightness between 125 – 175 nits of brightness when they edit to make sure that prints are not darker/lighter than what they see on their screen.

Here is what I measured for the 16 brightness levels on the LG LP156WF1 1920x1080 panel in this machine:

Brightness level 15 - 6538k @ 386 nits– 2.19 gamma
Brightness level 14 - 6520k @ 365 nits
Brightness level 13 - 6520k @ 339 nits
Brightness level 12 - 6517k @ 319 nits
Brightness level 11 - 6513k @ 295 nits
Brightness level 10 - 6508k @ 275 nits
Brightness level 09 - 6503k @ 250 nits
Brightness level 08 - 6497k @ 226 nits
Brightness level 07 - 6491k @ 204 nits
Brightness level 06 - 6485k @ 180 nits
Brightness level 05 - 6481k @ 156 nits– 2.03 gamma
Brightness level 04 - 6472k @ 132 nits
Brightness level 03 - 6465k @ 108 nits
Brightness level 02 - 6458k @ 86.5 nits
Brightness level 01 - 6452k @ 62 nits
Brightness level 00 - 6445k @ 40.8 nits

The color temperature stays consistent across the range of brightness settings. The native gamma and white point are close to ideal. You have added 85 nits of brightness to the “300 typical” of the E6510.

The display is fairly well balanced “out of the box” before. There is just a hint of a blueish hue to the screen, but it is very subtle. The colors hold up well to high brightness levels. The screen can get very dark as well. This is a great panel for the money. Probably the best business class panel I have seen in a Dell outside of the Precision line.

The panel calibrates very well. Delta values are all below 2 which puts the panel in the “Quite Good” to “Excellent” range.

Looking at the calibration curves, you can see that the red was slightly increased, the green was fairly stable, and the blues were slightly decreased.

The color gamut is not as wide as the RGBLED displays, but the colors look great. I can see some color limiting in the reds - Coca-Cola is notoriously tough to see correctly and the E6520 renders the site slightly orange as it runs out of gamut.

Looking at dithering test images that will show the flaws of the 6bit panel showing 8bit color spaces showed very little banding. There was some pixel walk in specific test images, but nothing in the real world. The built in dithering that the panel uses to simulate 8bit color is very good.

The matte finish on the screen is nice to see. No glare from a glossy screen.

Tethered to a Canon 5Dmk2 camera, the screen did a very good job at spot proofing images as they were taken in a studio setting.

Editing images in Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom went well. While I would not use the built in panel for extremely precise color correction on a photo, it was very good for “normal” image editing. Very good for a non-professional level monitor.

Summing up. Good out of the box. Calibrates well. May be limited in overall gamut and only be a 6bit TN panel, but it does better than many other more expensive machines. You would have to find an RGBLED backlit TN or IPS panel to do better.

 

What a great detailed answer....
Thank You!
I receive my 6520 on Wednesday and will use my Datacolor Spyder to calibrate and looking forward to seeing the result.
I use mostly Lightroom 3.3 and it is a POWER HOG!!!
Thanks Again
Mark

 

You are very welcomed. I used a Spyder 3 Elite for my main calibration and measurements.

You are going to LOVE the 2720QM when you are doing exports. Lightroom is not always great about fully loading multicore processors. The 2720QM is very aggressive with overclocking 1,2,3 and sometimes all 4 cores.

The hard drive will be the slowest part of this machine - even as a solid state drive - and it will be what slows down large imports and exports. The video card is fine for Photoshop's GPU acceleration.