HP decided its connection to creatives needed nurturing, and in new ways the company hasn’t tried before. Last week at annual Adobe Max, the company revealed just that, new plans and initiatives to better deliver their hardware to the world’s creative professionals.
At the conference, HP announced Z Club, a program to offer creative professionals better options to upgrade their studios. An initial group of 100 creatives will be selected. What do they get? Custom-built hardware and software bundles for photographers, video editors, graphic designers and other artists.
The bundle will be free of charge for three months. HP will then offer the hardware and services as a monthly subscription, the popular – and lucrative – approach that Adobe pioneered. For that monthly fee, the Z Club will provide the latest computer internals, pro-grade displays, printers and accessories with HP experts available to help members along the way.
Subscriptions for workstations – that sounds like a potential stress-free approach to putting your studio together. Those interested in more info about the Z Club can go here.
What about the gear?
So what has HP been up to with their re-badged Z by HP line of products? We’re talking about the ZBook mobiles, Z desktops and the award-winning HP DreamColor displays. As you might guess, updates are in store, with better processors and displays including the latest six-core Intel i9 processors which help to better handle heavy workloads such as video editing and 3D rendering.
More memory is also available, up to a massive 128 GB on some models. Meanwhile both the HP ZBook Studio (the thin and light workstation ultrabook), and the convertible HP ZBook Studio x360 (a great machine for digital inking and painting) have gained a boost in graphics performance with a speedy NVIDIA P2000 series card.
The HP ZBook Studio x360 is one of the most exciting and powerful convertible PCs available. If you are an artist who relies on digital painting and sculpting, you should definitely take a look at it. The Studio x360 features an optional anti-glare touchscreen which helps tone down glare in bright lighting conditions including sunshine outdoors. The display supports 100 percent of the Adobe RGB spectrum with 600 nits of brightness, 20 percent brighter than the Apple MacBook Pro 15-inch Retina display and 50 percent brighter than the Dell XPS UltraSharp 4K display.
Granted, a bright screen isn’t always the best when color grading, so you can pull that down. But the boost in brightness is what you want if, for example, you like to do a little editing when on a lit set or in the great outdoors.
HP ZBook Studio x360
