The Lenovo W Series is a range of laptops aimed at the workstation market, with the Lenovo ThinkPad W700 (£3053 inc. VAT) being the Lenovo ThinkPad W700 battery second model in the range. This machine is a hulking 4.3kg desktop replacement that has been designed with the professional photographer in mind.

Lenovo is offering hardware options which Apple isn't close to touching with their new W700. With the Lenovo W700, you can configure systems with quad-core processors, up to 8GB of memory, multiple hard drives in RAID, and Nvidia's latest lineup of mobile QuadroFX graphics processors, none of which are available on the PowerMac lineup today. Not only does the W700 offer what Apple can't, it also offers configuration options which are unique to the rest of the Lenovo ThinkPad W520i AC adapter PC space as well.

Lenovo Thinkpad W700 is a 17-inch laptop designed for photographers. It’s a big monster due to the large display. The unit's 17in screen has a Full HD native resolution of 1920x1200 and is one of the W700's highlights. Not only are images displayed clearly and with great contrast, it has an effective colour calibration system that uses a series of small sensors above the digitiser and HueyPro software. The performance is perfect when running large graphic softwares like PhotoShop, Auto CAD, etc. So it could be the best laptop for photographer. With a workstation’s power (and price) in an understated package, this laptop is built for road-ready digital graphics artists.

The first of these is an embedded version of Pantone's Huey, which Lenovo says adjusts the color quality settings up to 60 percent more accurately than doing the job without it. It works with an on-screen utility and a tiny hardware Lenovo ThinkPad T410i battery calibrator built into an area beside the trackpad buttons; you click a button and close the lid, and the calibrator does all the work. When finished, you can view the before-and-after settings. The changes produced by the calibrator were noticeable and, to my eye, correct.

Even an R50p keyboard still found in editorial use, which is already now an over 4 year old pro-device, but as the "low-priced" plastic edition, shows itself even after years of intensive use considerably more user-friendly and with a more pleasant type feel than the current keyboard of the W700 test sample at hand. Fortunately, they stayed loyal to the accustomed quality of trackpoint and touchpad. Both let themselves be employed perfectly and make even an unproblematic use of the notebook without an external mouse possible.

This machine manages to fit in an Intel 2.53GHz Core 2 Quad processor without signs of growing hot to the touch. Overall, we found the performance of the ThinkPad W700 to be excellent. The Windows Experience Index (WEI) gives the user an Lenovo ThinkPad W520 charger indication of how well his machine will run under Windows Vista. A typical machine will score 3.0, while the W700 ranks in at 5.9 – the highest score we've ever seen using WEI.

Although it is convenient to have a built-in digitiser with you when travelling, its very small size of 128(L)x80(W)mm greatly reduces its usefulness and makes it difficult to draw with; this isn't helped by the pen being too small. In spite of this, we found that our pen strokes were recognised with relatively good accuracy once we customised the settings and became used to it.

The Quado FX 3700M’s large 1GB frame buffer may make you think that it’s made for gaming, but many content creation apps actually need the large frame buffer more than games. While it’s not intended as a gaming part, it does OK but it won’t outpace the Gateway P-7811 FX gaming notebook and its GeForce 9800N GTS part. We also fired up Crysis and tried to push it at very high at 1920x1200 and the results weren’t pretty. It ran but we wouldn’t play the game that way. It’s better suited for playing Crysis at 1024x768 or 1280x1024 instead. The W700 is more than enough to play Lenovo ThinkPad W701 charger Unreal Tournament 3 and is capable of 48 fps at 1920x1200 resolution. So while it’s capable of gaming, it probably doesn’t make sense to buy the W700 if that’s your only purpose. The Gateway P-7811 FX is a better fit and far cheaper.

A prominent role is assigned to the graphic card in the package of the Thinkpad W700. Lenovo offers two variations for the notebook. Either the Nvidia Quadro FX 2700M or the, in our test sample integrated, Quadro FX 3700M. This, optimized and certified for CAD applications, graphic card, in regards to its architecture is equivalent to the Geforce 9800M GTX but offers 128 Shader units

The architecture is also closely related to the current Geforce GTX 280M, which is also based on the G92 core but is manufactured in the 55 nanometer process (FX 3700 – 65 nm).

Finally, a mobile workstation made for professional photographers! The Lenovo ThinkPad W700 is unlike any other workstation—or laptop, for that matter—breaking ground in areas that once seemed out of reach. It's the first and only laptop with an internal color calibrator. Placing a Lenovo ThinkPad W530 charger digitizer on the palm rest is also ingenious, and a secondary display is something that all laptops could use but only Lenovo has accomplished so far. Obviously, at this price, the W700 isn't for everyone. But if time is money in your field, the W700 will save you tons of it.

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