u/AkhlysShallRise

Hi, I recently got the Wise card for a trip to Portugal. I already have a EUR account in my Wise account and have my Canadian bank account connected to it to add funds.

Some questions:

Can I transfer funds from my Canadian bank account to the Wise card while I’m physically in Europe, like “topping up”? I don’t need to transfer however much I think the whole trip will cost in advance, right?
I know that Wise can auto-convert currency on a per-transaction basis, but is there a downside to that (e.g., fees, issues with the point-of-sale machines etc)? Should I convert CAD to EUR in bulk first (like have 3000 EUR ready)?

This will be my first time visiting Europe and it’s my first time using the Wise card as well, so apologies for any silly questions. Thank you!

When people discuss the displays on laptops, it’s always the refresh rate and LCD vs OLED. I understand that high refresh rates and true blacks are appealing for gaming and media consumption, but when it comes to colour grading for video and photo, those are almost irrelevant. Instead, things like colour accuracy and IPS matter tremendously, and that’s what I want to highlight here as a photographer and video editor.

For reference, Neo’s display has a ΔE of 1.45, which is slightly better than a nearly $800 Dell UltraSharp U2725QE, which has a ΔE of < 1.5 (the lower the better), and better than the the MacBook Air M4 (ΔE 1.54). While ΔE isn’t the only factor that matters regarding colour accuracy, it goes to show the quality of Neo’s display.

Regardless of what you think of Apple/macOS/MacBooks, it’s undeniable that the MacBook Neo is now the most affordable laptop if you want a decent level of colour accuracy to get into photo/video/graphic work (in sRGB/Rec709 at least)—you will not find any other laptop with similar colour accuracy in this price range.

I’ve included a comparison of a series of photos I took displaying on the Apple Studio Display (2022) and the MacBook Neo display. I’m not attempting to make a scientific comparison with these sets of photos, but you can see that the colours and contrast in the photos on Neo’s display look almost identical to those on the ASD.

While the Apple Studio Display is not the same as “real” reference monitors costing 5 figures and more, it has remarkable colour accuracy right out of the box (based on objective tests), and it’s why many media professionals—including myself—use it for our professional work.

In my real-life experience, photos I edited on the Neo look exactly the same when I view them on the ASD. This even makes the Neo an extremely portable photo editing laptop to take with you on a trip, for example.

Yes, Neo can only display sRGB, but again, remember the target audience for the Neo. A student just starting to dabble into photography has a lot of other fundamentals to learn before they get to proper colour management, and I’d argue that unless you have a proper understanding of colour management, it’s better to stick to sRGB to begin with—most budding photographers share their photos digitally rather than printing them anyway.

I’m genuinely excited about this for students and those on a budget because I was once a broke student trying to get into photography. At the time, I learned about the importance of using a colour accurate display for photo editing, and because my $600 Windows laptop had horrendous colour accuracy, I ended up stretching my budget to buy a dedicated monitor for it (it was a BenQ PD2500Q, which actually had a ΔE of ≤3 so it still wasn’t a very good one). If I had the Neo back then, I would already have a very colour accurate display ready for photo editing.

Some questions about using the Wise card for a trip to Europe (Portugal)

An underrated feature of MacBook Neo: Very colour accurate display! Neo vs Apple Studio Display