The Creator Z17HX Studio is MSI’s attempt to give photographers and video editors the fit and finish of an Apple laptop, the color accuracy of a studio-grade computer display, and the performance that comes with the newest Intel and NVIDIA hardware. The good news is that MSI delivers surprisingly well on all of these promises; the bad news is that it had to make one huge compromise along the way.

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When NVIDIA reached out to ask if we wanted to try the new RTX 4090 GPU, we almost said "no." Most of our readers are photographers, and most photo editing simply doesn't require a top-tier GPU. But we did say "yes" because we wanted to answer a different, more relevant question: do photo editors need a GPU at all? And if so, how much do you need to spend to get top-notch photo editing performance?

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The Kamvas Pro 24 (4K) is Huion's flagship pen display: a high-resolution graphics display that delivers most of the benefits of a Wacom Cintiq Pro 24 at about half the price. In the two months I've spent using it on-and-off in preparation for this review, I've come to three important conclusions: (1) this is an excellent product, (2) a large 4K pen display is the best way to edit your photos, and (3) I can't realistically use this display as my daily driver.

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As displays have become better and cheaper to manufacture over the past several years, high-quality pen displays have slowly been edging out pen tablets as the best way to edit your photos. One of the companies making a major push in this space is Huion, and over the past couple of months we've had the chance to go hands-on with the company's brand new, color-accurate Kamvas Pro 16 (2.5K) -- one of the most compelling options for any photographer looking for a high-quality pen display at a reasonable price.

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XP-Pen's new Artist Pro 16 is one of the most compelling entry-level graphics displays on the market. It's lightweight, well-built, highly customizable, color-accurate, and all for a price that will make Wacom owners blush. It's not a perfect product, but no other Full HD pen display on the market offers this kind of experience and build quality for just $450.

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If you've been using an Apple Silicon Mac with an external display for photo and video editing, you may have noticed a few issues. Whether it's ultra-wide monitors not displaying correctly, calibration software not working right, or high-end monitors displaying in YCrCb mode instead of RGB, Apple Silicon still has a bunch of issues with color-accurate monitors.

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There's one piece of equipment that the working photographer uses more than any other. No, it's not their camera. Not their favorite lens either. I'm talking about their photo editing monitor.

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HP's ZBook lineup -- which encompasses the lightweight ZBook Firefly, the affordable ZBook Power, the powerful ZBook Fury, and the best-of-all-worlds ZBook Studio brands -- doesn't attract a lot of attention. As a mobile workstation-class device, the ZBook Studio is not as flashy as most gaming laptops or as affordable as most "creator" laptops, but in many ways, it's better than both.

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ASUS announced plans for the ProArt PA32UCG way back in September of 2019. Based on specs alone, this exciting monitor would improve on the already-impressive ProArt PA32UCX and take on the Apple Pro Display XDR by offering the same 1600 nits peak brightness out of a 4K panel, with a faster refresh rate and wider color gamut. Nearly two years later, the monitor is finally available, and we're here to see if it can live up to the sky-high expectations we've built up over the past two years.

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When Razer announced the "mid-2021" Blade 15 Advanced back in May, it seemed like a standard refresh. The company swapped out the 10th-Gen Intel CPUs in the "early-2021" model for 11th-Gen processors and added a new anti-fingerprint coating to the chassis. No big deal, right? Wrong -- that 11th-Gen processor has allowed Razer to upgrade just about everything under the hood of the latest Advanced model, leading to a huge performance uplift.

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The Dell U4021QW is, quite literally, one of a kind. It's the world's first 40-inch curved ultra-wide WUHD 5K2K monitor -- a 21:9 aspect ratio monster that boasts a color-accurate 10-bit panel. In our testing, it has performed beautifully. But while it's definitely the premiere ultra-wide monitor for photo editing, it's not the best photo editing monitor overall.

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The Sharp/NEC MultiSync PA311D is NEC's flagship photo editing monitor, with more colors, more accurate colors, and more control over your colors than any other monitor we've tested to date. It's not a perfect display -- HDR editing is out of the question, and hardware calibration is impossible unless you pay extra for an NEC-branded colorimeter -- but everything about this monitor was designed with professionals in mind, and we absolutely love that.

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The Razer Blade 14 released just a few short weeks ago is aimed squarely at gamers. The headline on the Razer website is "the world's most powerful 14-inch gaming laptop." But don't be fooled by the glowing green logo and the RGB-backlit keyboard: with its AMD CPU, NVIDIA GPU, and color-accurate QHD display, the Blade 14 is an ideal choice for photo and video editors who are looking for a PC that's portable and powerful.

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The last few generations of iPad Pro were already powerful enough for serious photo editing, but the benefits of such a small and versatile device have never quite outweighed the cons of a tablet-based workflow. The 2021 iPad Pro -- with its M1 SOC, up to 16GB of RAM, Thunderbolt support, and mind-blowing miniLED display -- makes the best case yet for ditching your laptop. But even with all this power under the hood, it’s clear the iPad is still an accessory, not a laptop replacement.

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This morning, Adobe unveiled the long-awaited version of Lightroom Classic that is fully optimized for Apple Silicon devices, and we had a chance to test it out before release. Our hopes were high for a program so famously sluggish. Could Apple’s M1 processor deliver a hefty performance boost for photographers? In short: yes. The latest version of Lightroom Classic was up to 25 percent faster on the M1 than on our more expensive Intel-based Mac.

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If you own an iPad and an Apple Pencil, there are several ways to pair them with your computer and transform them into a high-quality drawing tablet for photo editing. There's Apple's own Sidecar feature, the popular app Astropad, the hardware-assisted option Luna Display, and the "made by ex-Apple engineers" Duet Pro. I wanted to see which of these options offers the most features and the best experience for the photographer on the go.

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What do you get when you take a bunch of former Wacom employees, start a new company, and give them carte blanche to develop a brand new pen tablet? What you get is Xencelabs, a new player in graphics that is bringing some much-needed innovation to a stale market. This is no cheap knock-off we're talking about, Xencelabs' new Pen Tablet Medium just put Wacom on notice.

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As display technology has improved in leaps and bounds over the past few years, the market has forked into two distinct camps: gamers who prioritize speed, and creators who prioritize color. The 32-inch 2K MSI Creator PS321QR tries to strike the perfect balance between these two needs, offering a compelling combination of refresh rate, response time, and color accuracy for just $700.

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With the release of the Wacom One in 2020, Wacom lowered the barrier to entry into the world of pen displays and inadvertently created an ideal product for photographers. Where other pen displays in the Wacom lineup are either too big or too expensive, the Wacom One makes a great case for trading in your Intuos Pro for a more intimate photo editing experience.

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With the release of the new-and-improved PhotoVue SW271C, BenQ is once again hoping to win over photographers with impressive color accuracy and targeted photo editing features at a reasonable price. But unlike the original SW271, the SW271C is entering a much more competitive marketplace, at a price that isn't quite so "reasonable" anymore.

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