17" RGBLED WUXGA vs CCFL WUXGA review (M6400)

The CCFL WUXGA screen belongs to a precision M90 and is almost 3 years old. Keep that in mind for this review.

The RGBLED is way brighter than the CCFL; at nightime, I would only use the minimum brightness setting.

The RGBLED needs to be calibrated, the reds are off, more pinkish. I have not done any calibration. I am using XP 64 bit.

The contrast ratio is more. Whites are a bit whiter. The colors are more brighter. Its like the colors are on steroids. Especially the reds and greens. I used deadpixelbuddy to check out the screen, and it makes me uncomfortable to look at the red/green screens. Color overload.
But in normal usage, the vivid colors are nice.
Reading comics is more fun on the RGBLED due to the enhanced colors.

Blacks are about the same on both screens, perhaps they are a tad more blacker on the CCFL. The viewing angles for the blacks degrade faster on the RGBLED (in that blacks become grey faster on the RGBLED).

EDIT: The following can apparently be fixed by color calibration.
I was only changing the color calibration under "Display" in the NVIDIA tool.
I also needed to change the color settings under "video & television".
/end{edit}

Watching DVDs was way better on the CCFL. This was due to the following three factors:
1) Incorrect calibration, there is too much red (pinkish unnatural red) in the RGBLED.
2) The blacks are way greyer in the movie for the RGBLED. That is, if there is any black in the movie, it appears greyer in the RGBLED. I'm puzzled by this.
I checked, eg., sometimes the movie goes to a black screen. The black letterbox portion would be more greyish on the RGBLED. The black stripes above the movie portion would be the same on both screens.
3) Movies looked washed out on the RGBLED (partially contributed by blacks beling less black, but also for other colors), again quite puzzling as the screen itself looks great (as I mentioned for comics). The color depth was more for the CCFL. It seemed if the movie on the RGBLED was "hazier".

Thus, the RGBLED seems to have some software/driver issues. Disappointing

EDIT: The screen just needs some color calibration.

 

i thought its a common issue with very wide gamut displays, all of them have to be calibrated or its worthless??

 

Is The watching movies problem also a calibration issue
There was a "colors are off" issue which was calibration related.
Then there was "it looks hazy and washed out" which did not seem calibration related ?

How does one calibrate a screen ?

Can it be done in linux ?

 

I found the blacks were rather grey with my M4400 RGBLED. I got around it by fiddling with the "Video Colour Settings" in the nVidia control panel (brightness set to 49% and dynamic range at 0-255). I also calibrated my screen with a huey.

I find that the above settings work best if you turn the screen up to full brightness when watching videos.

 

RGBLED screens are considered wide gamut screens and are NOT supported by XP or Vista. This is why the colours are off. There is huge ammount of data about it in the net and here too. As usual Google is your best friend .

This is supposedly solved in Windows 7. I dont know if there is anyone running Windows 7 beta and can confirm or deny that.

It would be even better if any of the RGBLED screen users has Win7 in a virtual machine and could compare side by side the two OSs.

 

When you want to watch DVD without the extra colors, you can adjust them in the NVidia control panel. Simply reduce the color brightness of all colors to 35-40% and reduce the gamma to 25-35% After that the screen doesn't show those grey shades and simply shows similar dark scenes like old ccfl screens.

The other solution is to calibrate the screen, which helps a lot. You still will have different dark scenes, but I like the more Details you see with the RGB-LED screen.

 

Tried that, did not work

 

Post some pics, please. Without them it's hard to give you help for adjustment. For me the tweaking of the color setting worked. Here are some "Dark Knight" pics of my M6400 RGB-LED compared to a Dell 2007WFP (ccfl MVA screen, should be a lot better than a notebook TN ccfl):







Of course it look a bit different because of the wider color gamut, but I think compared to a desktop MVA panel the RGB-LED TN panel looks really great!

 

Doh

I was only changing the color calibration under "Display" in the NVIDIA tool.
I also needed to change the color settings under "video & television".

Thanks for the pointer.

My reds still appear pinkish. ANy way to change that ? I want my reds to be stoplight red, not highschool girl pink.

Also, the pinks/reds dominate, and aslo greeens to a smaller extent.


Your screen does indeed look very neice

 

Those shots look pretty good. I can definitely see too much red in the shots though. Especially the second set, the MVA panel has colors that more closely match the look in the movie theatre. The RGB-LED looks much better than a normal TN but is shifted too much to the red.