HP ZBook Studio x360 Trial User #4
Tricia, Concept Artist & Illustrator
"An eye-opening experience and a breakthrough in screen technology!"
Overview
For the past 4 weeks, the HP ZBook Studio x360 opened my eyes to the versatility of a laptop designed for the lifestyle and demands of the modern, on-the-go artist. With its impressive color display and high specs, the workstation proved itself to be a real game-changer in the range of tablet-laptops convertibles targeted at creatives.
It was an enlightening and truly exciting trial experience!
About my industry
A little introduction here. My name is Tricia and I have been working as a full-time concept artist and illustrator for 8 years. I’ve experienced working on pre-production for animation and games.
Here is an example of the types of concepts I create. These were drawn for a personal project with a nomadic desert princess character. I made multiple variations to explore her personality and purpose through design; achieving a regal but elegant and no-nonsense look was key here.
My current job in a mobile game company requires me to visualize practical and creative concepts based on the art director’s demands, all while bringing something new to the table. On a regular workday, I read the job brief, spend a few hours doing online research, and then make the design sketches on paper. After I have a couple of satisfactory designs, I take photos of my sketches to transfer them to my PC, before spending the majority of my time fleshing out those designs. I use a pen tablet with software such as Adobe Photoshop and Clip Studio Paint PRO.
Memorable features
Wacom AES Stylus
I’m almost always messing around with drawing tools, sometimes even while commuting as opportunities to capture experiences can come out of the blue. The tactile feeling of drawing directly onto a surface and watching your work take shape, is akin to the raw feeling of working a piece of clay with your bare hands.
This is why the HP ZBook Studio x360 was such a gem to work on, with its Wacom AES pen and touch screen technology. I can attest to experiencing a similar intuitiveness and freedom I get from exploring ideas on a piece of paper, with infinitely more possibilities and quicker output that only the digital medium can offer; doodling on the go has never been easier.
Sketching directly on the screen in tablet mode to see if there are any parallax issues or lag. So far so good! The tablet is also made in a nice, slim size and the Wacom-designed nib has a nice touch feedback to it.
The Wacom AES stylus has 2 customizable buttons on the side and a button on top , which is meant for Windows Ink Workspace. It comes with a USB-C cable for fast charging, and by fast charging I mean a 30-minute charge that will get the stylus going for an entire week! A little LED between the buttons light up when you plug it in for charging.
The stylus has 4,096 levels of pressure sensitivity. It doesn’t sound quite as impressive as the Wacom Cintiq stylus that comes with almost double the sensitivity, but as someone who still uses a Wacom Intuos 3 for non-office related work (with 1,024 levels of pressure sensitivity) this felt like a MAJOR upgrade.
I really only have two qualms with the stylus. The first being that there is almost no indication for the pen’s power levels - you’ll only know that the battery is almost depleted when a window randomly pops up with a 15% or 10% warning, and after closing this window you’ll never find it again. It’s a little strange but knowing the stylus’s long battery life and fast charging capabilities, I’d say this lack of visual indication is something I can overlook.
The second being that the cursor tends to jitter when you don’t have the tip hovering close enough to the display, and it can jitter even more if your palm is rested on the screen. But since there are no parallax issues between the nib and the display, as soon as you touch the screen with the pen the jitter stops immediately so you can work like normal.
HP DreamColor Display
Anyone in the digital creative field knows the pain of dealing with screen color calibration. As a digital artist, it is of the utmost importance that I get true-to-life colors on my workstation. In that regard, HP’s DreamColor display has truly been a pleasure to work with. The display screen has an anti-glare coating, a built-in color calibrator, and an impressive spectrum of over 1 billion colors for seamless gradient blends. Reportedly, the DreamColor Engine has calibration controls so precise that artists can trust that what they see on their desk matches what ends up on the big screen.
This anti-glare screen is also one of the best I’ve ever used. With its ultrabright 600 nits display, there was little to no compromise to color quality or brightness when viewed from varying angles. It has allowed me to work comfortably whether outdoors or indoors with an overhanging light source. Testing the laptop in a non-air-conditioned setting did make the chassis heat up after about 15 minutes or so, and I wouldn’t recommend doing that for long use.
Two fans start to kick in as soon as the computer is under heavy load to help cool the CPU and GPU down. Despite the slight noise it makes, this seems to work for the ZBook as the screen managed to stay relatively cool during the duration of my usage.
360-Degree Hinge
One of my favourite features besides the screen and stylus is the laptop’s 360-degree hinge. With slight resistance, the laptop’s lid can be pushed from docked mode to stand and tent mode or pushed even further into tablet mode. When you tilt the laptop, the display will readjust automatically from landscape to portrait mode, and even flip upright if you have the laptop “upside down” in tent mode.
For my range of work, however, the tablet mode worked best. After plugging in some readily available add-ons like a mouse and a keyboard, I had a pretty solid workstation! For a more ergonomic setup, I’d suggest an adjustable laptop stand or, better yet, a height-and-angle adjustable desk. I’ve tried both and I’m definitely leaning towards the adjustable desk as I can angle the laptop freely, preventing the regular work hazards of lower back pain and neck-shoulder discomfort.
My preferred setup with the laptop propped up on a height-and-angle adjustable table.
On a side note, the laptop actually comes with its own on-screen touch keyboard for easy typing while in tablet mode. For accessing Adobe shortcut keys, an attached keyboard felt much more natural to me.
Touch Gestures
And now I’d like to gush about the gesture functions! This might not even be one of the biggest selling features specific to the HP ZBook Studio x360, but now that I’ve experienced touch gestures for work, I am a true believer. Needless to say, they were great whether in tablet or laptop mode. The setup instructions that come with the laptop lists a few touch gestures for the touchpad or touch screen of selected models. For windows, the gestures are as follows:
On touchpad:
• Tap to select
• Two-finger tap to highlight
• One-finger slide to move cursor
• Two-finger slide to scroll
• Two-finger pinch to zoom
• Three-finger swipe to minimize and return to homescreen
• Four-finger tap for settings window
On touch screen:
• Tap to select
• Two-finger pinch to zoom
• One finger to scroll
The best part about these gestures is that they are customizable depending on the software you use! I’ll cover the two painting applications I frequently use: Adobe Photoshop and Clip Studio Paint PRO.
Touch Gestures: Adobe Photoshop
Adobe Photoshop has come a long way since I doodled my first “real digital painting” on Photoshop 7 back in 2004. This photo manipulation and digital painting software practically needs no introduction. My recently unearthed discovery of touch gestures in Photoshop (introduced in 2017) really feels like a new feature that I’ve been deprived from all this while.
Below are the available gestures listed on Adobe’s own website.
I personally found the 3-finger history scrub feature to be the most impressive visually, as a timeline of your Photoshop history appears on top of the canvas. As you swipe from left to right, the canvas updates accordingly, making you feel like an unnecessarily cool Time Lord of sorts.
Touch Gestures: Clip Studio Paint PRO
Clip Studio Paint is a well-known software amongst comic and manga artists for its extensive coloring and inking tools. It also has advanced brush stabilization and blending functions, a library of ready-to-use 3D models and comic materials, and many other features. If you’re somewhat proficient with the software, this laptop will be an absolute joy to work with!
Using the touch screen, you can employ gestures for:
• Undo (two-finger tap)
• Redo (press and tap)
• Zoom (two-finger pinch)
• Rotate canvas (two-finger rotation)
• Move canvas (two-finger swipe)
With the quick access menu displayed, there’s even less need for an attached keyboard! The top button on the stylus is also set to the eyedropper tool by default. You can change these gestures by going to File> Preferences> Touch Gestures.
Other awesome features in a nutshell
1) With regards to aesthetics, the laptop has a sleek metal finish with nice cut corners on the back end of the lid. The spacious keyboard is comfortable and pleasant to type on; its backlit keys are a plus!
2) Equipped with high specs such as an 8th Gen Intel Core i7 processor, integrated Intel HD graphics, dedicated NVIDIA Quadro P1000 graphics, 1TB storage and 32GB of RAM means this workstation gets heavier workloads done more efficiently than most traditional laptops.
3) The 15.6-inch size and 2.2kg weight made it comfortable enough to carry around for work trips or business meetups.
Conclusion
Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed my trial use of the HP ZBook Studio x360. This is indeed a powerful machine that will be a great addition to any on-the-go creative working primarily in 2D. They would appreciate the stylus pen, touch screen technology, impeccable color output, the versatility of switching between laptop and tablet modes, and the ability to work from practically anywhere.