The best 17-inch laptops give you a generous amount of screen space that photographers and videographers will truly appreciate. Yes, they won't be so easy to pop into a small back, but some of the thinnest and sleekest models today are surprisingly light and portable nonetheless.
This makes some 17-inch laptops among the best laptops for photo editing, especially for those who don't want to buy an external monitor. We've tested and reviewed many of the options on the market through a combination of benchmark tests and real-world use, including for photo and video editing. And based on our evaluations, we've picked the top options today, each striking an attractive balance between price and performance.
Note tat Apple doesn't make a 17-inch laptop, but it does make 16-inch MacBook Pros, so check out our guide to best MacBooks if you're interested in that.
The Quick List
This premium option can be configured with powerful components, it has plenty of ports, and it also looks impressively sleek for a large laptop. We think it's a superb if pricey laptop for photo editing, content creation and more.
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Designed specifically for gaming and content creation, this is a beast of laptop that can be configured with a powerful GPU for 4K gaming and seamless video editing.
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This is the thinnest, lightest 17-inch laptop we've tested. It doesn't have the sheer power of the laptops above, but we think it's a more practical option for editing on the go, and it's more affordable.
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The Blade 17 offers all the power for demanding video work and gaming, but for a more affordable option, we think this option from Acer is very well priced for its solid specs and an FHD display with a 144Hz refresh rate.
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This isn't the most powerful laptop on our list, but it's nice and affordable. We found that it does the job for Lightroom and Photoshop, but we recommend that video editors opt for one of our other picks.
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The best 17-inch laptops
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The best 17-inch laptop overall
The Dell XPS 17 may be a premium laptop, but we think every penny is well-spent thanks to the combination of performance, design and feature set. There are a lot of configuration options, so you can power up pretty much as far as your budget will allow, right up to Intel Core i9, Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 and 64GB of RAM. There's also the option of a 4K display, which provides excellent colour coverage and accuracy, covering 100% sRGB and 94% DCI-P3.
We found this laptop had us well covered for photo editing and video editing. We also appreciated the generous quantity of ports (4X Thunderbolt 4, plus an SD card reader for those who still prefer to transfer their material that way). On top of that, we thought it looked gorgeously sleek, which is not something we can say for many 17-inch laptops.
There are a ton of other features here, including a fingerprint reader and an infrared camera with face recognition. And battery life didn't fare badly in our testing, giving us nearly 12 hours of online streaming. Not as good as a MacBook Pro, but very acceptable.
The best 17-inch laptop for power
The Asus ROG Strix G17 may be focussed on gaming, but that also means its got the performance to handle intensive creative workloads too.
You can take the configuration up to a blazing-fast AMD Ryzen 9 7945HX processor packing 16 cores, while potent GeForce RTX 40-series graphics processors will make light work of video rendering. As for the display, the 2560 x 1440 IPS LCD screen boasts a higely impressive 100% DCI-P3 color space coverage, making it ideal for video editing, and it should be super-smooth thanks to a massive 240Hz refresh rate.
There's a wide variety of ports, particular attention paid to cooling and effective heat management, plus Dolby Atmos virtual surround speakers for immersive audio. All in all, we think this is the perfect 17-inch laptop for those who want a device for video editing, 3D rendering, or gaming.
The best 17-inch laptop for portability
The LG Gram 17 (2024), model number 17Z90S, offers premium productivity performance in an exceptionally lightweight 17-inch package. Weighing just 2.98 pounds makes it surprisingly portable for a large-screen laptop. It also excels in battery life of over 12 hours, making it a great choice if portability is your priority. If you're out and about, its 17-inch display with anti-glare coating is also surprisingly good at maintaining visibility in bright conditions.
Equipped with an Intel Core Ultra 7 processor, 32GB of RAM, and a 1TB SSD, the laptop performs well for basic tasks and content consumption, although the integrated Intel Arc GPU struggles with graphics-intensive applications, limiting its versatility, and we wouldn't recommend this for resource-intensive tasks such as video editing or 3D animation.
In short, this isn't as powerful as the top-placed devices in our pick of the best 17-inch laptops, but it slays the competition when it comes to portability. It's the lightest 17-inch laptop we've seen, and indeed thinner and lighter than many premium 15-inch laptops too, which is an impressive feat.
The best 17-inch laptop for affordable gaming
The Acer Helios line delivers gaming power at a relatively affordable price, and we found it to be a serious option for video editing too – although the more obviously 'gamer' styling may put some people off.
It's available with Intel Core i7, Nvidia RTX 3050 Ti and up to 32GB RAM in its top-of-the-line guise, and with up to 2TB SSD, or a SSD and hard drive double act, it can be configured enough storage space to satisfy 4K footage hoarders. As for the screen, our review unit had a 1080p 144Hz display (other options are available), and we found this to be bright and vivid.
In our benchmark tests, our unit achieved decent scores for photo and video editing. We also liked the keyboard and trackpad. Like the LG Gram 17, it includes a number pad, but it felt less squished in since the whole laptop is more bulky. Battery life is poor, giving us only four hours on our video streaming test, but that's not surprising for a gaming laptop. Overall, we think this is a versatile and well-priced option if you don't mind the gamer design touches like the Predator logo on the lid and the fonts used on the keys.
Read more: Acer Predator Helios 300 review
The best affordable 17-inch laptop
We've found it hard to pick out an affordable 17-inch laptop that performs well. The Acer Aspire 5 can only just about be described as such, coming in at the top end of the category, but it is cheaper than the other laptops on this list. It can be configured with up to an Intel Core i7 processor and 32GB RAM. You can even get it with a dedicated graphics card (the configuration we tested came with Nvidia GeForce RTX 2050).
Those are decent specs, but the laptop fell short of the kind of performance we hoped for in our testing. We found basic work in Lightroom and Photoshop to be no problem, but when we ran our Handbrake test, the machine took 15 minutes 15 seconds to transcode a 10-minute 34-second 4K video to 1080p. That's pretty slow. Photographers may find it suffices, but anyone working with 4K video would be best to look higher up in our list.
In short, if you're after a larger laptop for general work and productivity rather than more demanding creative work or gaming, this will do the job at a cheaper price than others in this guide.
See our full Acer Aspire 5 17-inch review for more details
How to choose the best 17-inch laptop
There’s no one best 17-inch laptop for everyone. So when choosing the right device for you, there are several things to consider. Most important of these is what you'll be using it for. Since you're reading Digital Camera World, we expect you're probably looking for a 17-inch laptop for photo or video editing, and we've ensured that all of the laptops in our list will have you covered there to an extent, providing at least FHD resolution and broad colour coverage.
For video editing in particular, you're going to want a reasonably powerful dedicated graphics card, and several of the laptops in our list meet that criterion. Other things to look for when it comes to photo editing are the inclusion of an SD card slot and several port options so that you can easily transfer material from your cameras to the computer or to external storage and hook up other peripherals or display options.
Another big consideration with 17-inch laptops is size and weight. By definition, a 17-inch laptop is going to be less ideal for travel and for using in places like cafes and bars than a smaller device. However, the weight and thickness of these larger laptops can vary greatly. Some options on our list, particularly the LG Gram 17 could
serve for commuting reasonably well, while others would almost need a briefcase of their own.
Finally, consider your budget. Larger laptops are almost always more expensive than their smaller siblings, and our top two choices are particularly costly. If you don't need that amount of power, a cheaper option could be a better buy.
How we test laptops
When we review laptops, we carry out a mix of standardised benchmark tests and real-world tasks to assess their internal hardware features, build quality, ergonomics and performance in a variety of usage scenarios. We also consider value for money and the overall suitability for different target buyers.
Although we'll evaluate a laptop with a typical user in mind, we will also pay particular attention to the perspective of photo and video enthusiasts. This means paying particular attention to screen quality and colour space coverage. We use a monitor calibrator to measure a laptop's display performance to assess whether it matches a manufacturer's claims, while software benchmarks like GeekBench are used to measure a laptop's processor and graphics card capabilities. We also put each device through several days of real-world use, living and working with the device and evaluating how it performs in a range of tasks, from photo and video editing to media consumption, browsing and general productivity.
FAQs
Is a 17-inch laptop good for photo editing?
Many of us prefer editing better on a large screen since it makes it possible to view images, or video at a larger size, reducing the need to zoom in. It can also make it easier to navigate the interface of our editing software or work across multiple panels. One option is to use an external monitor, but if that's not possible, a 17-inch laptop can be ideal.
That said, the downside of the extra size is the weight, and 17-inch laptops aren't great for working on the go. These larger laptops tend to weigh between 2kg and almost 4kg, which isn’t exactly conducive to lightweight commuting, and it's going to attract more attention if you work at cafe or bar. Even rare devices that seem to defy physics, like the LG Gram 17, are still too big for many people to want to travel with regularly, so the best 17-inch laptops are better left sitting comfortably on your desk at home or in the office, at least for most of the time.
What is the largest laptop?
For many brands, 17-inch is the largest laptop screen size that they make. However, if you want even more workspace, there are bigger laptops out there. Some gaming laptop brands, such as Razer, Dell's Alienware and Asus ROG Predator make 18-inch laptops. Asus even used to have a 21-inch gaming laptop, the ACER Predator 21 X, but it was absurdly expensive as well as being rather impractical to use as a laptop.
What are the benefits of a 17-inch laptop?
Many laptops today range from 13 to 15 inches, which makes them great for slipping into a bag and using on the go or for travel. But with that portability, you sacrifice on workspace.
A 17-inch laptop is great for many tasks since the larger screen can allow you to work more comfortably across more windows and to see what you're working on at a larger size. A larger chassis also often means that 17-inch laptops pack higher-performance components, better cooling solutions and larger batteries – all great for intensive tasks like gaming, programming, and content creation. The downside, of course, is that the device is larger and heavier, which many people will find less comfortable to carry around.
A 17-inch laptop can make sense if you rarely take your laptop long distances and tend to use it at a desk. If that's your situation, you might be tempted to go for a desktop computer and monitor instead, but crucially, a laptop, even such a large one, does provide at least some portability in cases where you sometimes need to move to another room or take your work to a client's office, for example.
