Siggraph

Robert Baker product marketing manager commercial notebooks is here with HP’s new line of Elitebook mobile workstatsions–you might remember the splashy Elite brand launch in Berlin earlier this year. For me, the design does live up to the Elite marketing, but I have very pragmatic, mid-century-modern tastes. The brushed/anodized aluminum aircrafty-design feel that HP has pursued appeals to me, as do little touches like keypad coatings that prevent shiny spots. I like the two-pin locking system, because there’s something classy and solid about not having the cover wiggle around when you close your laptop.

Baker wants me to say that the design comes with “the tangible asset of durability” and supports that statement with a few additional features. So, I’m willing to share his assertion on the chance that my IT department is reading this post. They don’t decide based on my design tastes, but they understand durability, especially after years of watching how we beat the crap out of our laptops.

As for what these new workstations mean to content creation, the most relevent one is the top of the line 8730W. A 17″ screen (more on that in a minute) Core 2 Quad Core inside, Nvidia Quadro FX 3700M graphics controller with 1GB of video memory (or other configurations which start at $1699). There’s an optional second harddrive for RAID 1 or RAID 0.

Back to the optional ($450) DreamColor monitor panel, the unique element of the workstation–both in the range and in the industry. HP’s Larry Mahoney calls it the little brother to the DreamColor Display. The display is 8-bit which I’m reminded is a big exponetional jump. Those 24 bits per pixel translate to 16.7 million colors on screen, Mahoney calculates, as opposed to the 250K colors that come from the usual 6-bit display.

There are three profiles including sRGB (which Mahoney reminds me have the same primaries as rec 709 “so we expect it to be useful for HD, though not as dead on a the DreamColor Display”). There’s a highly saturated Native/Full, and Adobe RGB (”you can’t hit Adobe RGB with any other notebook on the planet,” Mahony claims).

In other echoes of the DreamColor Display the mobile display has a programmable white point (but you can’t manage the primaries).