Please recommend a laptop for me. Photo processing only

I don't do gaming, never make videos, and am looking for the most basic (i.e. cheap) laptop that will allow me to process my 6D raw files using Canon DPP and Photoshop Elements.

I don't use Lightroom or the other suite of Adobe products. Just Photoshop Elements and the Raw processor converter from Canon.

There are only two things I'm concerned about:

1. Enough processing power to handle those two jobs reasonably fast (doesn't need to be lightning fast, just not painfully slow).

2. True, honest colors and sharpness on the monitor (I know very little about monitor specifications...that'​s my main concern. I don't want to process photos and have them look dramatically different when printed).


Thank you for any advice.

My budget: Under $500.

Thank you

Thirty dudes read the post and nobody comments? Oh well.

You're budget is too low.

Check woot.com. They have daily specials, and often have really good deals.

A while back, they had a refurbished Toshiba P75-A7200 at $600. Haswell i7, 8Gb (expandable to 32Gb), 750Gb 5400RPM drive, with a second free drive bay, 17.3" Full HD 1920*1080 display, four USB3.0 ports, etc.

They do usually have units in your price range also- but they won't be top spec like the unit above.

You could get a used 2-3 year old MacBook Pro for that price. That's what I did. 8 gb of ram and a 500 gb hard drive runs Aperture 3 super smooth and runs the free trial of lightroom I downloaded beautifully as well.

Universities sell off their laptops at the end of the 2-3 year lease to students and faculty. If you know anyone who is a student or faculty at a university, that could be an option for you. The university I've gotten mine from over the years (a family member is a professor there) makes sure each individual machine works pretty much flawlessly and I've heard most universities check over laptops before selling them so you can rest assured you're not buying a brick. There are often minor dings and scratches on the outside but the screens are generally fine.

From what I understand, Mac Book Pro's have monitors which are the best at color reproduction on Laptop screens. I've tried to calibrate my Dell Precision M4700 (way outside your budget, I know) but cannot get it to look like my Dell 24" Ultrasharp. Laptop displays are usually very bad at re-producing color. In my experience they are usually missing color saturation and the gamma curves are off.