Disappointed with LED LCD in E6400

How did you know

 

I have been to Amsterdam so many times (I was a soldier stationed in Germany for 4 years - from 1998 - 2002). It was about a 4 hour car ride from where I was stationed and we would go over weekends. We got into so much trouble, but it was worth it!

If I spoke Dutch, I would be living there or right outside the city...


It's like Disneyland for adults!!!!

 

I have the Samsung screen and its horrid. Will be returning...not sure for what though, maybe an e6500 15.4" wxga+ LED (Dell advertises this as a "wide viewing angle" screen and every 15.4" WXGA+ LED I've seen has been awesome) which should have actual contrast and usable viewing angle.

 

I would go with the WUXGA. So far I have been pretty disappointed with Dell's LED screens. If you look at the comparison chart, the 15.4" WUXGA has 2 CCFL lamps and has a 75% gamut. The 15.4" LED has the same crappy specs as the 14.1" one used in the E6400 (45% gamut, etc).

 

My LG screen gets washed out at full brightness, but the only time I use full brightness is when I'm sitting in the sun. Normally, indoors I use half brightness and that is still brighter than the screen on my previous notebook. Did you try reducing the brightness.

As for the keyboard backlight, I presume you tried pressing Fn + cursor right a few times? This cycles the backlight between on, off and ALS control.

John

 

Yeah, I have tried everything. I even tried turning it off and on in the BIOS, but no luck.

Whatever, Dell is sending a new keyboard and this laptop is by far the easiest laptop to work on (check out the service manual - opening this thing up is a breeze).

 

Glad I'm not the only one who was a bit disappointed. It is better than my old laptop LCD, but not by that much (certainly not for the price). FWIW, I use mine at 25% brighness inside by default at home (I use all indirect lighting indoors, so bright screens are kind of hard on the eyes). I also went into the nvidia control panel, and pushed the brightness (color control, not led) down to 42% which helped slightly with the washed out whites - if you go any further than that you can visibly see it start to clip grays to black. For casual users you could adjust the gamma as well for a more pleasing appearance, but for people looking for accuracy, it would require more involved calibration.

In the end, the black levels are really poor (an aweful lot of light on a black screen, seems more like CCFL to me), the color gamut, as mentioned, is mediocre, and the viewing angles are nothing to write home about. Not exactly unusual for a laptop, but not up to par for what is supposed to fall into dell's "Ultrasharp" class.

 

I read the service manual before I placed my order. Just make sure you slot the base back on properly.

I took the keyboard out to see what it looked like. Mine was a very tight fit into the chassis next to the home key (by design, I suspect). You need to lift the back of the keyboard up just enough to be clear of the chassis and then slide the whole unit towards the display. It has a blade type connector, not the usual ribbon cable.

My viewing angles are as shown in my review. I've just been into the color correction control for the Intel GPU and moved the contrast slider from the default 50% to 47% and it looks better. I presume Dell could fiddle with the system settings in the BIOS so the default display looks a bit better. However, they would need a table for each GPU plus each display option (resolution and source).

John

 

I adjusted the color to account for the slight bluish hint of my Samsung, and increasing the contrast and lowering the brightness in the Intel options made a huge difference.

Greg

 

How do you tell what brand of LCD you get?

I'm going to assume that I'm going to get a Samsung, since all the people who have recently got their laps have been reporting Samsing. Where do you look?

L.