Yuku free message boards

My opinion? Don't buy one.

I was actually considering getting a laptop (non-tablet) myself (for school, and as a mobile art workstation) but then I remembered that laptops suck. No, they really do. No laptop is ever going to outweigh a pc in terms of pure processing power. And if it does, it's going to be around 6 grand. Have you ever used an animation program, or done any animation in 3d or otherwise? Ever edited video? It's INCREDIBLY resource-intensive. You may be able to find a laptop that can keep up with high-end games, but it's a different ball game when you start rendering out 30 fps animations in 3ds max or toon-boom. If you're JUST using photoshop or illustrator or manga-studio, then you might be able to get by. But animation is out of the question. ANY of the tablet laptops I looked at had a pitiful 2.0 processor or below. You'd need at least 2.4 to 2.5 ghz to work at a professional rate (I.E. quickly) As a comparison, my desktop I'm using right now is a 1.7 ghz, and even though it's a desktop, it chugs in Adobe Premiere, 3ds Max, and Toon Boom.

Plus, no tablet pc or laptop is ever going to be as accurate as a tablet. Why? Because a tablet pc works on the premise of per-pixel touch sensitivity. A tablet works on static (well, Wacom does anyway) and billions of points of contact, not to mention pressure sensitivity (which you'll never find on any tablet pc or laptop, and if you do, in no time you'll wear out your screen / break it) Plus, for around 250 bucks, you can get the Wacom Intous 3, which I use and have never had a problem / reason to look to a better model or tablet pc. I'm going to use it until the darn thing breaks.

Anyways, that's just my opinion. I second what Lam said, get yourself a decent wacom tablet, if you must, then get the cintiq (haven't tried or heard anything about it so I can't say anything) where you can actually draw on an lcd screen. But it'll set you back about 1 grand. Why are you looking at new machines? Is your old one getting slow? Why not just add some more RAM or a new processor to it and save a couple hundred bucks? It used to be really hard to mod your machine, but it's gotten ridiculously easy the past couple years.

Hope that helps, and again, just my opinion.

@Shodan: True, but the fact of the matter is, if he wants to go into animation, he's going to have to learn 3d anyway. A lot of animation currently either utilizes or is completely 3d. And just like how the seperate jobs of typesetter and page layout artist eventually merged into one, I guarantee in the next 5 or 10 years the average animator will have to know both 2d and 3d animation. There's nothing hard about 3d, it's just very memory intensive (well, the rendering anyway, depending on things like poly-count, # of objects in scene, frames, etc.)

Modern animes use lots of 3d as well. Most "professional" animation packages these days combine 2d and 3d elements into their suites, therefore making them bigger programs. No, for the love of god please don't use Flash to animate. It looks very cheap, and you can tell when someone has used flash. Even the best flash animators. That, and it's really wonky and hard to use as a dedicated animation studio, since it's also geared towards making interactive applications (lots of different menus to go through to do one animation-related thing, dependance on "object" based animation) That, and see how long it takes you to make a two-hour feature length flash movie.

Sound? There's some Ram-hogs. I can't even use Adobe Soundbooth (admittedly not a very good program anyway) on my machine right now, other than to edit little 2 minute songs or snippets. Sound has to be rendered out just like video or 3d imagery, and THAT's where your processing power comes into play. Don't have the right stuff, and you end up waiting two hours for a 10-minute music clip to render out (I spent 30 minutes waiting for a 2-minute songclip I messed around with to render out so I could save it)

Of course, this is all assuming Shaney wants to go pro (I would assume he would with a 900$ to 1000$ laptop), if not then I guess it's all fine and good really.

@Lam: There is, but it's used primarily for other things, like handwriting recognition....or....I'm not really sure what the heck you would do with a tablet laptop, actually. basic graphic design, I guess.

@Shaney: A lot of colleges nowadays (especially in the US) are equipped to handle students with disabilities, learning or physical. Hey, my computer I have now was 550 dollars and was purchased almost 3 years ago, and it's an Acer, which is pretty much hit or miss. It all depends on how you take care of your machine. I'd recommend browsing through Newegg , they have a LOT of good pcs, laptops, and tablet laptops at some really good prices and they ship usually within two to three days. I'd recommend looking for a "gaming" computer, since those usually have better processors and RAM, stay away from "Multimedia" or "Family" machines. You can find some pretty decent machines for around the 600 to 800 dollar range, at least in desktop computers. Look for brands like Asus, Sony Vaio, or Toshiba, those manufacturers seem to make the best quality systems. Acers are usually cheaper too, but like I said are a hit-or miss.

Anyways, I wish you luck! Make sure you get the machine that's right for you, don't compromise!