The Lenovo ThinkPad A285 (12.5-Inch) Review: Ryzen Pro Gets Down to Business
by Brett Howse on December 18, 2018 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Laptops
- AMD
- Lenovo
- ThinkPad
- Vega
- Ryzen
- Ryzen PRO
- Ryzen Mobile
- Vega Mobile
Display Analysis
Lenovo's default panel in the ThinkPad A285 is a 1366x768 TN panel, while a 1920x1080 IPS panel is offered as an upgrade option. I find it hard to believe that anyone really wants the TN, but clearly people are still buying it to save a few dollars, especially when they buy in bulk. Some day laptops that cost this much won’t ship with TN displays, but that day is not today. Luckily the review unit is the IPS panel, which also offers touch.
Unlike most device makers, Lenovo still offers a matte coating on their touch displays, which you can see in the image below.
The matte coating blurs the pixels, making it not quite as crisp as a clear coating, but in the office, matte still has a lot of support. It generally helps with lighting, although a quality anti-reflective coating can help as well.
While not high-DPI by most PC standards, the 12.5-inch panel still offers a respectable 176 pixels per inch. There is always a trade-off between resolution and battery life, although TFTs like LTPS and IGZO can help claw back some of the extra power drain.
To measure the display accuracy and characteristics, we use SpectraCal’s CalMAN software suite, along with an X-Rite i1 DisplayPro colorimeter for brightness and contrast readings, and an X-Rite i1Pro2 spectrophotometer for color accuracy testing.
Brightness and Contrast
The ThinkPad A285 is rated for 300 nits, and manages to achieve a bit over that at 325. It isn’t the brightest device, but the anti-glare coating should help outdoors. The black levels are quite good though, leading to a decent contrast of almost 1300:1. The brightness also goes down to an impressive 3.4 nits.
Grayscale
The laptop has a good average grayscale result, although there are definite issues when looking past the averages. The red drops off quite a bit before 100% white, while the blue is too high, leading to a fairly cool display temperature of 7400. The gamma is also too high for most of the range, but then falls off as the brightness gets close to 100%. It isn’t terrible, but it’s pretty average for an IPS panel and clearly there’s no calibration here.
Gamut
When looking at the sRGB gamut accuracy, we can see that blue is well beyond the correct amount, which pulls magenta off as well. Red is not quite able to hit 100% sRGB, and green is close but slightly out of line.
Saturation
Looking at the 4-bit spaced saturation sweep, you can see that there’s a consistent error level which increases linearly to the 100% levels. None of the colors are in their range, although the average error level isn’t too bad since it’s much closer near the black end of the scale.
Gretag Macbeth
The Gretag Macbeth colorchecker tests various colors, and not just the primary and secondary values. It also includes the important skin tones. As you can see in the graph, there is quite a bit of error on some colors, and others are much closer to where they should be.
Relative Result
This image shows the requested color on the bottom, and the relative result on the top that the display output. The result is relative due to errors in your display, but it does make it fairly clear as to the color drawbacks with this display.
Display Conclusion
The TN option would be better for everyone if it was just gone, so lets just pretend it is. The IPS is very much just a middle of the road display. It offers a good choice in resolution, but it’s not a high-DPI panel. The IPS display offers good off-axis viewing and good contrast levels, but it’s not the brightest around. The color accuracy isn’t great, but it isn’t terrible either. If you’re just doing office tasks, then there’s likely no issues here regardless, and offering the matte coating on a touch display is something that most office workers will appreciate.
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DanNeely - Tuesday, December 18, 2018 - link
Just multiple copies of visual studio combined with being a tab junky in my browsers is enough to make 16gb start to chug. Generally ~20GB used is where it's no longer possible to push only unneeded stuff to swap and performance starts to chug.HStewart - Tuesday, December 18, 2018 - link
Maybe so - but in my development situation at home, I have entire lab with multiple machines - so Visual Studio is primary used for compiling code - I do occasionally use it for debugging like today - but I am old fashion and use a brief editor for writing code.It is funny how extra memory has made developers lazy with development - I remember the old days of even counting clock cycles.
YukaKun - Wednesday, December 19, 2018 - link
"At Home". The context is "Enterprise". If you develop at home, then you have zero clue what we're talking about here?And why blame the developers on management decisions on what they want to utilize inside their ENTERPRISE laptops?
And in particular for how IDEs now work, that is a completely separate discussion. They have way more nanny features, but also better debugging and helpful things as well. When you're developing complex solutions that are far from the old monolithic stuff you might remember, you need to run different flavours of applications and full platforms for testing and developing.
You're really barking at the wrong tree here.
Cheers!
Samus - Tuesday, December 18, 2018 - link
Personally I've always felt 8GB is fine in a mobile device (unless we're talking a Zbook where heavy productivity will take place)The obvious advantages of 8GB in a laptop are faster suspend\sleep\resume times, and less wear on the SSD in doing so, in addition to longer battery life (assuming the tasks you are performing aren't paging to the SSD because you are out of memory) and a lower price.
The base configuration for many PC's, even Microsoft's own Surface, is 4GB, and Windows 10 runs pretty good on 4GB with an SSD.
Again, there are obvious scenarios where 16 and even 32GB will be desirable, but MOST people will not need 16GB with current software and usage trends. I have clients with 30GB OST files and 30 Chrome tabs open on machines with 8GB and they perform great.
YukaKun - Wednesday, December 19, 2018 - link
Do you work for a big Corporation with complex infrastructure and products?I'm not really trying to be an ass, although it might come off as that, but this is one of those where you really need to see it with your own eyes to understand it. I know others know exactly what I'm talking about, so my point is just for the Author of the article to realize some "new facts" about the Enterprise world.
Cheers!
RSAUser - Wednesday, December 19, 2018 - link
That's why it should exist as an option. I no longer have a PC in my household with less than 16GB of RAM. (3 desktops, 4 laptops).For enterprise like e.g. software developers, that extra RAM is basically a requirement for most workloads. I'm currently using 9GB of RAM, 3GB of which is the IDE due to the index on it, and I haven't even started the test bench.
YukaKun - Wednesday, December 19, 2018 - link
Eclipse uses 4GB on it's own; then I have multiple JBoss'es running for different things; each sucking 2GB (sometimes doing 8GB tests) on their own and the rest of the bloatware crap our dear Company decides to pack into the machine. I'm currently with 16GB, but I'm about to ask for another evaluation of needs, because it's just not enough anymore.And this is just Java. Dot Net garbage uses even more, specially when you need to run local DBs and other stuff.
Cheers!
CurbedLarry - Tuesday, December 18, 2018 - link
20 years ago 16 megabytes was enough for office suite and web browsing... Are the machines of today really giving us 1,000 times the performance and functionality?Even mobile apps are now bigger than 90s office suites!
HStewart - Tuesday, December 18, 2018 - link
That is because with extra memory, developers have gotten lazy - I am actually surprise with how small .net executables are - but then that does not count the runtime.Flunk - Tuesday, December 18, 2018 - link
Sorta, you're also forgetting the never-ending requests for new (and quite often stupid) features that bloat codebases. Devs, users, management, everyone is to blame really.