Lenovo is a computer company founded back in 1985. It purchased IBM’s PC business in 2005, and now produces laptops using the ThinkPad name - with the distinctive red pointing stick still in place - but there's a lot more to the company’s products than that, especially for photographers and other content creators.
The company is a major player in the world of business laptops, the slim and sleek ones you can easily slip into your hand luggage to work on spreadsheets or a presentation while flying to New York,
However, if your tastes run to applications that need a little more processing power, such as Lightroom or Affinity Photo, then Lenovo has got you covered too. Its Yoga series provides 2-in-1 flexibility, the ThinkPads offer executive levels of cool, and the Legion and LOQ laptops are fully-loaded gaming machines that will provide all the power you need for throwing large raw files around.
Here are some of the best…
Best Lenovo laptops in 2024
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1: Lenovo ThinkPad P1 Gen 5
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If you’re looking for the ultimate photo workstation, then this ThinkPad model is for you. You’ll pay for the privilege, but having Intel’s immense 12th-gen i9 processor backed by 32GB of fast DDR5 RAM and Nvidia’s powerful GeForce RTX 3080Ti laptop GPU means it can speed through tasks like generating smart previews in Lightroom or creating neural-network-based photo effects. This is a mobile workstation out to beat the MacBook Pro at its own game, and is actually lighter than Apple’s M1 Max machine, despite being a tiny bit larger. The P1 comes with Thunderbolt 4, an SD Express card reader, and an optional SIM card slot for mobile data.
2: Lenovo Legion Slim 7i Gen 8
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This Legion laptop is from one of Lenovo’s gaming ranges, and as such lights up like a Christmas tree on the fourth of July. Sure, you could play Starfield on it, but a properly specced gaming laptop can be just what you need for processing photos and video files.
You get the killer combo of powerful CPU and GPU, plus lots of RAM. SD card readers for slurping the files off your camera, and Thunderbolt 4 for connecting to fast external storage and external monitors, are par for the course at this level, but with 1TB on board, and a 16:10, 3.2K IPS screen, there's plenty here for the photographer on the move.
3: Lenovo Legion Pro 7i 16
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Distinctly chunkier than the Legion Slim, this gaming machine contains an even more powerful GPU in the form of an Nvidia GeForce 4080 - while apps like Adobe Photoshop are primarily using a PC’s CPU, there are some effects and filters that can be accelerated by having a fast GPU on board. Premiere Pro can also use a GPU for its Mercury playback engine, and takes full advantage of it when exporting your work. So it’s good to have.
The Legion Pro 7i 16 isn’t all about its GPU, however. All its components are exactly what you need for editing stills and video, and while it doesn’t have Thunderbolt, its USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports can still transfer a lot of data in seconds, and the 99.9Wh battery means it can keep going for longer.
4: Lenovo ThinkPad Z16 Gen 1
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The first OLED laptop on this list, the ThinkPad Z16 is a relatively new line from Lenovo. It also stands out for using AMD processors instead of the Intel chips that have dominated our examples so far.
That makes no difference to its computing capabilities, of course, and the Ryzen 9 Pro CPU, with its eight cores that boost up to 4.90 GHz, will make quick work of any image editing tasks you care to throw at it.
Without a huge GPU chip to suck up the power - the Z16 relies on integrated graphics cores - you get some excellent battery life too, with up to 15 hours claimed.
5: Lenovo Yoga Book 9i Gen 8
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Due to some terrible mix-up at the factory, the Yoga Book 9i was released with an extra screen where the keyboard should be! Luckily, it has turned out to be a really good laptop design, especially when paired with the included Bluetooth keyboard and stylus.
It can become a giant screen for opening multiple documents, a pen input tablet for painting in Photoshop or masking in Lightroom, a magazine that shows pages facing each other in ways other tablets can’t. The list goes on.
The rest of the specs aren’t bad either, and Thunderbolt 4 makes a welcome appearance for connecting to external storage or screens. Powering two OLED screens takes a toll on the battery life, however, and at 10 hours of dual-screen use, it’s merely average.
6: Lenovo IdeaPad Pro 5i Gen 8
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A step down in both specs and price, perhaps, but the IdeaPad Pro 5i 16 is still an excellent laptop for photographers and spreadsheet wranglers alike. Its i5 CPU will still be able to deal with raw files and video transcoding like the i9s above, it just might take a little more time about it, and generate a little less heat in the process.
There's USB 4 instead of Thunderbolt, for connecting to external SSDs or some of the best 4K monitors, while the GeForce RTX 3050 GPU, though not as powerful as the RTX 4080 chips sported by more expensive models, will certainly give Lightroom an extra graphics processing kick.
7: Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Yoga Gen 8
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Lenovo’s X1 series of laptops are thin, light and aimed at productivity applications. That doesn’t mean they’re not useful for image or video editing, though, and the i7 processor on this model means it should be right up there when it comes to CPU-intensive tasks in Photoshop or Premiere - especially as it has 32GB of RAM on board.
The good thing about the Yoga 2-in-1 laptops is how flexible they are. With its touch-sensitive screen you can use it like a tablet, or stand it up in tent mode to enjoy your work once you’ve finished editing it. There's Thunderbolt 4 for connecting it to things via an optional Thunderbolt dock, and you can specify 5G connectivity too, to keep you in touch wherever you are.
How we test laptops
When reviewing a laptop, we assess its internal hardware features, build quality, ergonomics, performance in a variety of usage scenarios, value for money, and its overall suitability for its target buyer. 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, with special focus given to screen quality and color space coverage. Where possible, a monitor calibrator will be used to measure a laptop's display performance to assess whether it matches a manufacturer's claims, and software benchmarks like GeekBench are used to measure a laptop's processor and graphics card capabilities.
If none of these products fit what you were looking for, be sure to check out our expert guides to the best laptops for video editing, space-saving Ultrabooks with a thin and light design or even (if you have the space), the best desktop computers.
