E6520 Owner's Thread

Re. my earlier post mentioning the Notebookcheck.net review of 2 E6520 configurations: it said of the screens the 1366x768 awfull, the FHD excellent... The FHD LCDpanel was a MC6JN-156WF1. They said it has Avg 307 Nits, Contrast: 669, Brightness uniformity of 90%, sRGB spectrum almost covered - all 4 parameters excellent for photography/video editing - which is what I want it for.
Unfortunately they didn't test the 1600x900. Read it's well known 1366x768 screens used by Dell are crap so don't know why they didn't review the 1600x900 for their 2nd E6520 config.

The MC6JN-156WF1 FHD is a new one on me - googling gives no other info.
Does anyone know name of the panel maker or its use in any other reviews ?

Interesting your E6520 has a 'SEC544B' and useful link to its use in the Precision M4500: the owner said "I am definitely not impressed with it. I went for the middle-spec 1600x900 screen, and it has a definite blue tint to it." (the next post in that thread said his M4500 had a LG with strong pink tint - indicating you cannot be certain WHICH LCD make is fitted to YOUR build)

In my attempts to find 'good' 14 & 15" LCDpanels from Dell I came across the 'SEC544B' before. Googling 'Samsung SEC544B' indicates it's a generic line around some years, fitted to all screen sizes from 'budget' (cnets words) 17" Samsung R720 down to the 14" Latitude E6420. The notebookcheck minireview on 30/7/10 of the SEC544B in the E5510 states Avg Nits: 218 -passable, Contrast: 571 - v. good, Brightness uniformity: 72% - poor. No test of gamut. Their test of the E6420 with SEC544B gave a poor review Contrast only 127, narrow gamut and viewing angles, not suitable for multimedia (why the widely differing Contrast for same 'model' in the 14" & 15" Latitudes I don't know) -my conclusion from this, far lower quality than the MC6JN-156WF1 FHD on the E6520.
The Samsung site I found for Notebook LCD panels is :SAMSUNG's Digital World - last year I found specs for specific part nos, but this year seems to be just a table of screen vs resolution table, with popups of brief specs, which for 15" HD+, the popup says 250 Nits, Gamut 60% - no Contrast, Viewing angles or part no., so maybe a different part than the SEC544B.
Has anyone found a more detailed review of the Samsung SEC445B HD+ ?

 

Thank you very much ranranran! I appreciate that you took some time for this.

I do run Virtualbox in Linux, VirtualPC sucks....but it is a MS testing tool and as such it must say VirtualPC is supported

Well this made me sure, I will buy an E6520.

Thanks again

 

Just get the FHD. If you care this much, get the best there is.

 

I think the 'Help Me Choose' popups simplistic, aimed at new users, and although going on about "brightness, contrast ratio, color gamut and viewing angle.", do not in any way state the actual quality or specification of THEIR 'screen options'. Another example: the 'Help me Choose' for the Memory simply says the fairly obvious 'more is faster' but does NOT explain if there's a performance difference between choosing 4GB as a single DIMM or as 2 DIMMS - now that would have been quite useful, as I remember in older desktop architectures 2 channel memory was best. What is the answer for Sandy Bridge/Huron River ?
See my reply on LCD panels to @ranranran a few minutes back. Unfortunately its not so easy to ascertain an order WILL result in a photo editing quality lcd

 

Having mine now for 2 weeks I've grown to love this machine. Coming from a C640 loaded with options and XP this machine took some getting used to but once I got the text the size I wanted it is pleasing to the eye. I have the FHD screen. My Latitude had the Sxga which was the best screen for that unit.
I think this machine is solid and very well built all around. I am again so pleased. Win 7 has been a learning curve and I've grown to like it as well.
I got the 2nd 320 gb 7200rpm drive and use Win 7's system image often to both save and import back as I corrupted sometimes in the learning curve.

 

Of course they are simplistic. But they do state option specs in a comparison format, which is helpful.

If you want the machine, you've got two premium display options that many users here have said are fine quality for a notebook. Given the 15.6" size, both are probably acceptable resolution-wise, but I would hesitate to put the higher res on a 14" E6420... and I would probably be happier with 1600x900 on the E6520.

The image quality is fine and the color and contrast is notebook LCD imperfect. If you need a really great display, you'll need to see them in person before you can decide to your satisfaction... or add your own external display for highend graphics work.

GK

 

Hi All,

Just received my E6520 with the discrete graphics option (nVidia NVS 4200). I chose this option specifically for use with Adobe Photoshop CS5, among other graphics-intensive software. All drivers and system software is updated to the currently-released versions of this notebook.

Upon first-use of PS CS5, images in open documents flickered and resulted in not being able to be edited. I found the "GPU" option in the PS "Performance" preferences section and when disabled, everything worked as expected, albeit not as fast as could be.

I searched nVidia's web site for an updated display driver and found that there is a newer driver that specifically addresses this issue, but Dell's site still only offers a far-downlevel driver as the officially supported driver.

I contacted both nVidia and Dell tech support and all they could say is that there is a newer driver from nVidia but only the down-level driver from Dell can be installed right now.

Has anyone else experienced this issue and perhaps have a workaround other than waiting for Dell to approve the newer (fixed) driver and make it available for users?

I specifically chose this laptop and graphics card to speed up my work in Photoshop and this really prohibits that.

Thanks in advance!

 

My suggestion is to make a restore point, and try the newer nvidia drivers. Most of the time, I don't have a problem installing video drivers from nvidia/ATI as opposed to the OEM "modified" drivers...but sometimes I do.

If it doesn't work, just rollback the driver install.

 

Did anyone replaced the primary HD with an 2.5" OCZ vertex 3 ssd or intel ssd (both sata-3) ? The price Dell charges for a 256gb ssd is absurd but compiling large source trees with slow i/o is a pain

 

Nope, my plan is to use the internal mSATA port for a primary SSD drive, maybe Intel's 80GB mSATA drive or something but the price is a wee bit high for me right now.... especially considering what I just shelled out for this thing....