E6500 LED Screens: everyone happy?

Hi,

I saw that the contrast ratio of the E6500 screen is something like 650 as is the Studio 15 's 1440x900 screen.

Is there a general consensus that these are superior to the 14.1" LED screens? I am led to believe that the T400 and E6400 are using the same Samsung/LG LED screens. I have seen the T400 and sent it right back b/c I got a Samsung screen that looked like milk. It was bad.

Is there a lottery to the Studio 15 and E6500 or will any LG or Samsung or AUO or Chi-Mei panel do? Are you guys pretty much happy with these screens? The notebook check or notebook journal numerical evaluation would put these screens on par with macbook pro, at half the price.

 

I had an E6500 with a LG LED screen. Ended up returning it. The 'sparkles' of the screen was unbearable for me. I have a Chi-Mei panel on my D630c and it is probably the milk-look you are talking about. For text readibility, I found the smooth milky white CMO panel to be far superior to the Sparkly LG Panel.

 

Which make of display you get is a lottery but, with the Latitudes it is usually easy to get Dell to provide a replacement (but there is no certainty that this will be a better, so you ask for yet another replacement ....).

Sparkles, graininess, etc are more to do with the panel manufacturing than the LED backlighting which is just an alternative method of providing illumination.

LED backlights are the way forward because they are brighter and/or more power efficient and should be more reliable because there is no inverter (which sometimes die) or fluorescent tube (which gets dimmer with age).

John

 

The 15.4" matte WXGA+ LED backlight displays used in the Latitude E6500/Precision M4400 are the same displays that Apple used in the previous (non-unibody) MBPs, they come from four different suppliers (AUO, CMO, LG/Phillips, Samsung) Apples had used all of them, Dell probably does as well. And, yes, there will be some differences between them, some of them generated some complains (grainy, sparkle etc.) in the Apple forums before.

http://www.notebookcheck.net/Review-Dell-Latitude-E6500-Notebook.11958.0.html
http://www.notebookcheck.net/Review-Dell-Precision-M4400-Notebook.11959.0.html

Also, the Precision M4400 has an optional glossy WUXGA RGB LED screen, which is a wide gamut screen and has far better color reproduction that the average notebooks displays but let's say that wide gamut screens currently lack of software support, so they need calibration and adjustments as they look over-saturated outside of color managed applications.

This will give you a general idea.
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?p=4311761#post4311761

And yes, these 15.4 displays use better quality TN panels (better viewing angles, far batter contrast ratio etc.) compared to the 14.1 ones and are decent for the standards of the notebooks industry.

The matte WXGA+ displays on the 14.1" business notebooks from Dell, HP, Lenovo or anyone else for that matter, use the cheapest lowest quality TN panels from the ice-age (literally), they have very narrow viewing angles, poor black levels as the panels don't block the backlight well and low contrast ratio as a result, which is what you call "milk" or washed out colors.

http://www.notebookcheck.net/Review-Dell-Latitude-E6400-Notebook.12875.0.html
http://www.notebookcheck.net/Review-Dell-Precision-M2400-Notebook.12624.0.html
http://www.notebookjournal.de/tests/dell-latitude-e6400-641/4

That's been the case with the 14.1" screen for years, they only changed the backlight recently (CCFL -> White LED), which improves the brightness, but that's about it. The used TN panels are still the same low quality, slightly less or more mediocre depending on the manufacturer, but definitely mediocre.

And since that's not new some of those notebook companies have been asked many times why they don't offer better quality screens... the answer they usually give is that corporate market, which those notebooks are turned to, doesn't want to pay for screen quality, they want notebooks for office related (word&excel) tasks for their employees, and the low quality screens and fine for that purpose.

So if you care about screen quality, I would advise you to avoid the 14.1" notebooks in general (you already tried them anyway), choose any other form factor and you will have much better options.

Also, screen quality isn't a matter of opinion or anecdotal reviews based on such, but something that can be quantified, Notebookcheck and Notebookjournal do a good job at that.


Good luck.

 

Dreamer, you're awesome. This is exactly the kind of info that I wanted and more. I was sure that not only apple had the monopoly on great screens and that since all of these screens are more or less being produced in the same places all over Asia, why pay $2000 for a macbook pro screen when I can get one for half that. Now I know that Dell is using these exact same screens.

I have seen all of the macbook pro screens and really don't care which manufacturer I get. I think that they all look comparable and I just want to get in the club, so to speak, rather than nitpicking about which one has a better shade of bluish white or yellow-white, because my eyes personally adjust unless I have two laptops side by side.

I also had a suspicion that no 14.1" LED screens, even the vaunted LG, would be very good. I had a Samsung one that was bright but other than that, was terrible. I'm currently on a W500 with an LG screen SXGA+ which is really good, but I need more brightness for movie watching. In all other ways it's good and the new owner will like it when I get ready to sell.

I will pick up an E6500 and see how things go with the screen.

 

I originally was interested in the E6400. It would have been nearly perfect except for the complaints I read on this forum about the screen. So I researched the specifications of the display and according to notebookcheck.net it had fairly terrible numbers. Contrast was around 150:1 and black level was around 2 nits. Vertical viewing angle from Dell documentation listed 15 degrees. These specifications are similar to the screen in my Macbook, and it was my Macbook's horrible screen that prompted me to go looking for something better, so I knew I wouldn't be happy with the E6400 screen. Just to be absolutely certain I picked up a Lenovo Ideapad Y430 with a 14 inch screen to see if 14 inch screens had really improved. Sadly this was not the case.

From the specifications at notebookcheck.net the E6500 has about 600:1 contrast and a black level around 0.4 nits. Vertical viewing angle from Dell lists it at 45 degrees. This puts it at exactly the same specs as the screen on the Macbook Pro. I tried the Macbook Pro at the Apple Store and was quite happy with the quality. After a bit of research, I discovered like the user above me posted that the screens from the E6500/M4400 and the Macbook Pro are the same. This cemented my decision to buy the E6500.

After that I spent a lot of time carefully reading every post in this forum on the E6500 and M4400 machines and came across a post where a user had pictures of two M4400 machines (I think, could have been two E6500) next to each other, one with the LG Philips panel and the other with a Samsung panel. The panels looked very similar but the LG looked warmer and better to my eyes. This confirmed to me what many Macbook Pro owners have stated. In the Apple world, almost every Macbook Pro owner looking for a screen wants the LG Philips panel over the Samsung one. Nobody wants the Chi Mei panel. Many return their machines until they end up with an LG Panel.

In the Dell world, I've seen a few complaints about owners returning their LG Panel due to graininess and sparkles. The Samsung model seems preferred by them.

Since I found more Apple users praising the LG panel than the found Dell users complaining about it, I decided to look for an E6500 with an LG panel.

And this is where the story ends. I recently got my E6500 with an LG panel and fortunately my particular one has no graininess or sparkles. It has very even backlighting, does not noticeably dim towards any of the corners, and when viewed in a dark room with a black screen it shows no evidence of any stage lighting artifacts at the bottom of the screen. I had a Thinkpad X60s a while ago that had graininess, so I know what to look for.

I am extremely happy with this screen. It is exactly as good as any Macbook Pro I have seen and on top of that is a matte display. What held me back from the Macbook Pro was the glossy display. When I work I prefer not to be distracted by reflections.

 

Tubby, thank you for your quote. I'm going to get an E6500 as well. How did you ensure that you got an LG panel?

 

i am perfectly fine with the LG panel on my E6400 if it helps at all....no sparkles or milkiness, or any flickering.

 

Looking over ebay listings until I found one with an LG panel in the description. I don't recommend this technique unless you have quite a bit of patience. When I know what I want I sometimes go to extremes to get the configuration I've decided upon