E6420 Owner's Thread

I work with both e6420's and e6520's...I used to have a e6410 and prefer smaller laptops...the e6420's screen quality is so poor, I ultimately chose the e6520...FWIW.

 

Haven't seen a e6520 but I can back up the terrible screen quality on the e6420. Unfortunately I got the 1366x768 screen (not my choice) but compared to my D800 and D830 (and even a D600 that I've used), the picture quality on the screen is absolutely terrible. I don't game on it but I watch a lot of video and it really does spoil an otherwise excellent laptop. It also does this annoying brightness adjustment at random points while watching videos.

I'm ordering a new LG screen to replace this one. Fingers crossed it fits!

 

I wouldn't go as far as to say poor, but the FHD of the E6520 just blows away the E6420 on my 1600x900. Given the choice, I would've taken the E6520 with FHD if it weren't for the fact that it had a keyboard numpad.

Also, the first time I looked at this thing, it felt I was looking at a grid. The sharpness does help with readability but it probably subtracts from things if you do a lot of graphics.

 

Let us know if the LG screen works, I went with the e6420 because of the size but I will most likely use an external monitor with it.

 

Do you mean LG 1600x900 or LG 1366x768?

You might want to take a look at your display cable connector to make sure it's a dual-channel cable (has all 40 pins) to find out if Dell cheats and saves a few copper traces for the 1366x768 screens.

 

Can someone please comment on this ?

Speakers

We were pleasantly surprised with the single speaker in this laptop. Despite the Dell Latitude E6420 being equipped with only one speaker (see the picture with the bottom of the case open), we were fairly satisfied with the resulting sound quality. No driver settings were found. There's still the possibility of a electrical contact problem hiding an elusive second speaker.

The sound quality of the one speaker was decent and could have made for good sound quality with the potential second speaker working when you consider the expectations of a business laptop like the Dell Latitude E6420.

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taken from Review Dell Latitude E6420 Notebook - Notebookcheck.net Reviews

 

Huh? One speaker? I seem to have two magnet thingys on the front of the case (as evidenced by the two dimes hanging to the front) and the balance works just fine...

 

I got a 1600x900.

What happens if it's not a 40 pin cable? I installed the screen and it displays stuff but not properly. It's like it's up-scaling a lower resolution to 1600x900 so it's very blocky. Does this mean they don't have 40 pin cables or is this a different problem?

 

Does it show up as 1600x900 in the Control Panel?

 

Yes, and the BIOS recognises it as a 1600x900 resolution monitor too. Dell diagnostics don't find any errors and colour bars seem to appear correctly during the tests.

Changing it to 1024x768 makes the text more readable but still not good with sawtooth edges on anything that's angled and at that resolution I was expecting black bars at the sides but instead they're blue. In fact, the screen turns blue immediately when it's powered instead of black.

The model I have is an LP140WD1-TLA1. Device manager shows it as a Generic PnP Monitor but HWiNFO32 lists it as a H486N€140WD1.