Lenovo Unleashes Monster Notebook for Photographers

Delivers Industry’s First Built-in Digitizer and Color Calibrator Along with Ultimate Power, Multimedia and Display Technologies Lenovo today introduced a monster notebook aimed at photographers. This 17-inch beast includes an Intel Core2 Extreme processor, up to 8GB DDR3 RAM, a 400 nit WUXGA (1920x1200) monitor that displays 72% color gamut, has a built-in color calibrator by X-rite (embedded Huey Pro), Nvidia Quadro graphics (up to 1GB), RAID 0/1, Blu-Ray burner, and built-in Wacom tablet. A 7-in-1 card reader is included and you can add a CF card reader as well. The notebook supports 802.11 BANG, Bluetooth, ultra wideband, and will add Wi-Max support later this year. Pricing starts at $2,978 USD. With everything mentioned above, the price is over $5,000 USD. At first glance the W700 certainly contains all of the desired buzzwords: high res/high gamut monitor, color calibration, Wacom tablet, card readers, Quadro graphics, oodles of RAM, built-in RAID, Blu-ray burner, all of the 802.11's, WiMax, Ultra-wideband (does anyone use this yet?)... The list goes on and on. All this in an 8.3 pound package. Ouch. Be ready to hire an additional sherpa for lugging this baby. Still, photographers have been longing for a mobile workstation that meets their needs and this one appears to fit the bill. I am currently trying to get one in for review and I will let you know how usable this beast is. You can read the full press release here.

Mac Pro SATA Blu-Ray HOWTO

Apple's decision to not offer a Blu-Ray drive as an option on the Mac Pro has been frustrating many users for quite some time. PC users have long enjoyed the expanded storage and high-definition content available on the new format.

This has not stopped enterprising third parties from adding Blu-Ray drives to their systems. The good news is that Apple decided to make the Mac Pro easy to upgrade in the field. The bad news is that Apple chose to use the more traditional (and less expensive) IDE (PATA) interface for it's optical drives. PC motherboard OEMs are cramming more and more SATA ports on their boards, so optical drive makers are switching to SATA as well. This makes it hard to find IDE based Blu-Ray drives.

Enter the gang at Cooldrives.com with their SATA-PATA adaptor board. This little gem plugs into the back of the SATA Blu-Ray drive and allows you to easily install it in the Mac Pro. Apple provides a complete and thorough set of instructions on how to swap out optical drives on the Mac Pro, so I won't cover those here.

SATA and PATA sides of the Cooldrives adaptor board

Here are the steps to prepare any SATA optical drive for installation in the Mac Pro using Apple's instructions.

Tools needed:

• Large paperclip
• Small Phillips screwdriver (or large jeweler's screwdriver)
• Tweezers (optional)

Instructions

1. Take the large paperclip and unfold one side of it.
2. Insert the unfolded end of the paperclip in the front of the optical drive to manually pop out the drive tray. (Please refer to the drive manual to see the exact location of the ejection port.)
3. Turn the drive over and (using your fingers only) pry the front plate off of the drive tray. The plate is usually snapped on the front of the tray, so carefully pry the tabs away from the tray and push down. The front plate should slide off intact.
4. Take the Cooldrives adaptor and peel the cover off of the double-sided tape.
5. Line up the SATA connector with the SATA port on the optical drive.
6. Press the Cooldrives adaptor gently but firmly onto the optical drive.
7. If you are installing the drive as the Mac Pro's primary optical drive (as I did), you have to pull the jumper off of the back of the adaptor board. Use your fingers or the tweezers to pull the jumper. If the drive is going into the secondary slot, you won't have to mess with the jumper. (Apple usually expects optical drives to be set to "Cable Select" but that is not an option on the Cooldrives adaptor.)

Your drive should now look like this:

Front and back views of prepared optical drive

Follow the Apple installation guide and you will be able to mount the drive easily in your Mac Pro. I used an LG GGW-H20L which supports BD writing, HD-DVD reading, multi-layer discs, DVD's, CD's and includes BURN-Proof and Lightscribe. You can purchase this drive from Performance PC's. Tell Hank that I sent you.

Please keep in mind that Blu-Ray/HD-DVD playback is not supported in any Mac OS yet (the jury is still out on Snow Leopard) so you won't be able to play commercial discs. You will be able to burn BD discs for playback on set top players and for data storage. Roxio Toast Titanium 9 offers BD support via an optional plugin.

Apple Blu-Ray Support: What's taking so long?

I have been thinking about this topic for quite some time now. What is preventing Apple from officially supporting BD drives and HD content from them? Steve Jobs is on the Blu-Ray Steering Committee for Pete's sake!

Not technology. With the latest refresh of the Mac Pro, even the base model has hardware support for decoding the HD content with ease. MacBooks and iMacs have been that way for a while as well.

Not encryption. The HDCP stack is now supported fully by all of the components.

Not licensing. iTunes/AppleTV already has access to a ton of HD content.

The only answer (that I can think of) is money. Playing HD content over DVI or HDMI requires royalty payments to the patent owners. My guess is that Steve is waiting for DisplayPort (the royalty-free VESA standard for HD connectivity) to become prevalent. He will then announce new video card options for the upgradeable Macs and new version of the MacBook to support this technology. At this point the drives will become suddenly available and viewing BD content on the Mac will only require a quick software update (which removes the blocks in place).

Oddly enough the catalyst for this will be Windows Vista. With the release of Service Pack 1, Microsoft will add support for UEFI (making more video cards compatible with Mac) and DisplayPort as well. This will drive changes in the video industry with new graphics cards and displays coming out in force later this year. Add HP throwing their weight in the UEFI arena and we can see a lot more options for the Mac in the near future.