HP recently introduced its ZBook series of mobile workstations. After attending the product launch in NYC, I was fortunate enough to get a top of the line HP ZBook 15 mobile workstation to evaluate and discover if this sleek new beauty’s performance promise was more than skin deep.
My evaluation unit was über equipped with the highest performing NVIDIA GPU, included a built-in HP DreamColor Display system and came with the following specifications as supplied:
O/S: Windows 7 Professional 64-bit Service Pack 1 CPU: Intel® Core™ i7-4800MQ with Intel HD Graphics 4600 (2.7 GHz, 6 MB cache, 4 cores) GPU: NVIDIA Quadro K2100M (Designed specifically for mobile 15.6″ Platforms and the high end of offered GPUs) Storage: Hard Drive – 500 GB (Includes 32GB Flash Cache and is Expandable to 1.87TB) System Memory: 16GB RAM – (Expandable to 32GB with 64bit O/S and Quad Core processor) Display: Full HD 15.6″ diagonal LED-back lit UWVA eDP anti-glare (1920 x 1080) screen with integrated HP DreamColor Display system providing more than a billion color possibilities. Ports and Connectivity: 2 USB 3.0; 1 USB 2.0; 1 USB 3.0 charging port; 1 Thunderbolt1; 1 DisplayPort; 1 stereo microphone-in/headphone-out combo; 1 RJ-45 Ethernet; wireless;1 docking connector; 1 secondary battery connector; 1 VGA port; 1 SD compatible memory card reader Other: Webcam with Cyberlink YouCAM control software installed; Optical Storage with Blu-ray read, DVD/CD read/write; fingerprint reader; Kensington lock port Weight with batteries: Starting at 6.2 lb (2.82 kg) Warranty: Protected by HP Services, including a limited 3 years parts, 3 years labor, and 3 years on site service (3/3/3) standard warranty.
HP Grows Designjet T-series Portfolio with New High-end eMultifunction Large-format Printer
HP today announced the HP Designjet T2500 eMultifunction Printer (eMFP), which brings new customer-driven design features to a single, compact device that scans, prints and copies to help highly mobile teams work together better and faster.
For architects, engineers, construction (AEC) and geographic information system (GIS) firms, as well as government agencies and enterprise customers, scanning large-format color documents is one of the most effective ways to review and communicate changes. However, large-format scanning is a time-consuming and complex process. In addition, many scanners today are still separate devices from in-office, large-format printers.
This year’s HP workstation product launch event was the biggest I’ve ever attended, and the most exciting in terms of the revolutionary new product offerings presented and the people I met and interviewed.
We gathered early on Wednesday morning in a large hall in the NYC Sheraton Hotel, right in the midst of bustling Times Square, and to get the ball rolling were treated to speeches by some heavy hitting HP workstation users.
The Appetizer
Mark Russell – Director, Producer, and Vfx Expert
First at bat was Mark Russell, and he hit it out of the park. Mark is an independent Vfx creator and supervisor who headed up the special effect team during filming and now working post production on the upcoming Martin Scorsese film ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’ that’s destined to become a blockbuster when it hits the theaters later this year.
We were treated to some video outtakes from this production that showcased the VFx work that Mark produced for this film that was primarily shot and produced on Long Island and in Manhattan, just a quick subway ride to Brooklyn where Mark lives.
When you watch the film you won’t know where reality ends and CG takes over, it’s done that well. One series of fly-over shots were taken of a mansion in the Hamptons with multiple takes from a 4-bladed radio controlled miniature helicopter equipped with a super high-definition camera that transmitted the video wirelessly to an HP workstation on the ground for processing and viewing in real time. The mini-copter stays in the air for less than a minute before running out of juice and the ground crew had to plop in new batteries fast to get this small bird back in the air before the ‘magic’ light evaporated. The perfect lighting conditions occur close to sunset and the perfect light window lasts only around thirty minutes, so the film crew had to be super organized to shot this series in the allotted time, and keeping everyone and everything organized was a major part of Mark’s job. Oh, and they did make a rendered CG Model of the mansion that you can’t tell from the real thing for shots that the mini-copter just couldn’t cope with.
HP is furthering its commitment to providing the highly mobile AEC community with solutions that connect them to HP’s web-connected, large-format Designjet ePrinters and eMFPs for printing on the go, whether at a partner’s office, in a taxi or at the construction site.
The new offerings include:
An expansion of HP’s partnership with Autodesk to enable remote printing from the highly popular AutoCAD WS. As of today, by registering for HP ePrint & Share, AutoCAD WS users can use the new Plot to Print function to print their designs and automatically archive a copy on any web-connected HP Designjet or HP ePrinter. This new feature provides full control over plot styles, paper sizes, layouts and more.
Additional capabilities for the HP ePrint & Share mobile application, HP’s free, cloud-based printing and sharing tool for Designjet users, including full functionality for the iPad® and the ability to send PDF e-mail attachments to print. Previously, all documents printed from the mobile app were selected from the user’s HP ePrint & Share library. Now, users can print PDFs received via e-mail as well, providing access to more documents when and where they need them.
I recently had an opportunity to interview Tom Salomone, MCAD & AEC Worldwide Segment Manager at HP at the Autodesk University, 2011 in Las Vegas. This is a transcript of the interview.
Sanjay: How has the show been going for you?
Tom: The show has been going awesome for us. We’ve got a lot of traffic going through out our booth. We’re showing out our workstations. So we have five desktop workstations and three mobile workstations that we are showing.
So we even have a small form factor work station that is sixty five percent smaller than our other work stations. This is for those in the auto-CAD space that are looking for something inexpensive and who are moving into the line. We have our higher end workstations for those people who are looking at 3dS Max. We have an ideal work station for Revit that we have here today as well. So we really have the full spectrum of work stations for auto-CAD.
With our mobile workstations, we have a fourteen inch, a fifteen inch, and a seventeen inch. So if you want light, you can get the fourteen inch. If you want power you can get the seventeen inch. If you want to compromise, you can get the fifteen inch. We have our tool-less chassis, not just with our desktops, but, also with our mobiles. So you can actually take apart the bottom of our mobile workstations and access the components the same as you can with our desktop workstations.
So, we really have a lot of cool products that we are showing. We also have some brand new technologies that we are showing at this year’s Autodesk. For the first time ever we are showing our new touch panels, our new touch monitor with Autodesk. So people can see that and see how they can really use the new technology. You can do ten fingers touch on the wall; you can do one hundred and fifty, one hundred and eighty finger touch. It’s very, very powerful.
The other thing that we are showing that is new since September is that we have our workstation cluster technology. You can actually cluster work stations together to maximize your power for things like analysis, things like rendering. So you can get a whole lot more power applied to those problems locally, just by leveraging unused cores that are available on your workstation.
So we have a lot of really cool things. We have our new printers. We are talking about E-print and share. It’s a free software where people can sign up for it, where you can print anywhere on the web. So you can be here in Los Vegas, and you can print back home if you wanted to. It’s really cool.
