New M6500 Discussion Thread

Interested in RGB LED profiles?

As I intend using my M6500 M7820 LG WUXGA RGB LED for some serious photo editing, I spent the last two weeks trying to get some accurate colors out of the internal screen. As my screen is pretty non-linear in any mode (be it NTSC, sRGB or Adobe RGB) this was pretty challenging and I was lucky to own an I1 Display 2 hardware calibrator.

Another thing that saved a lot of frustration was using the recently acquired Dell U2711 as a reference, which is very linear to start with (and even more so after calibration) and has very nice sRGB and aRGB modes.

Every individual screen is a little different of course and I have no idea if my approach and profiles work for nVidia or Samsung LCD based systems, but if there is interest, I will be happy to share my findings and icc profiles.

 

Leave it in NTSC mode or uninstall DCP. NTSC is the only full gamut mode included in the Dell Control Point software.

 

Yes, but that's only one small step of the many steps to get satisfying color on the internal screen. Moreover, even with hardware calibration and a good profile, the extremely wide RGB LED gamut of the NTSC mode will almost burn your eyes in non-color managed applications and make everything look horribly over-saturated and unnatural. A good way to emulate sRGB is a blessing for most applications and environments. The provided sRGB mode was way too off for my standards and I finally figured out a way to get decent sRGB emulation.

But without a good profile you are out of luck either way. See attached calibration curves of the LG RGB LED and U2711 (for comparison). Actually, that kind of non-linearity is not extremely bad for a laptop display. I have measured similar deviations in many different laptop displays.

 

Has anyone tried the NEW BIOS?

 

Yes, installed and found no problems - and nothing new

 

But as Crimsoned said there could be only 2 slots.
I hope it has usb3 (afaik quad version should have it)

 

This is why the first thing you do after receiving your M6500 is to remove the keyboard and check if there are 2 RAM slots underneath it or only a dummy respectively the naked board.

 

I have the Samsung display. I run Datacolor's Spyder utility to run my overall Windows 7 environment with color calibration. It matches my U2410 and 2408 well.

In a pinch you can back off the digital vibrance (nvidia's color saturation setting) to 45 instead of the default 50. This slight desaturation tames the reds and green if your display is not calibrated. This only works with the Samsung panel. The LG is a less saturated panel out of the box.

 

Well, yes in full gamut mode my M6500 RGB LED and the U2711 look *exactly* the same after I1D2 calibration. But that is not what I have been trying to tweak.

As win7 isn't color aware (except for a few applications) the only thing you are doing by running your "overall Windows 7 environment with color calibration" is using the calibrated gamma LUT. This is only "half" the full calibration that will show up in color aware applications and will do nothing regarding the wide gamut issue.

See here for further details:
Windows Colour Management

"Unfortunately if you invest in some calibration equipment and calibrate your monitor (or run the calibration tools in Windows 7) things generally get worse for unmanaged applications. That's because, as above, a calibrated monitor relies on both the LUT settings and the monitor profile for correct output. Any output from an application which ignores the monitor profile is therefore definitely incorrect. In the totally unmanaged case the user can change the LUT settings until the image "looks right"; you can't do this if you're using a calibration tool, hence the calibrated system typically will achieve less fidelity than the uncalibrated one for unmanaged applications."

And here for further details regarding the wide gamut problems:

Color Management: Wide Gamut displays in a CG Workflow | Johan Steen - 3D Portfolio, CG Artist

Therefore, a usable sRGB emulation is still essential for most users today. And this is what I tried to figure out how to get with my particular setup and calibrator profiles. Just turning down the digital vibrance (or saturation as it is called by ATI) a little won't get you there.

Therefore I wondered if there is any interested in the .icc profiles and how to get there with my, maybe not very common, ati combo.

Bokeh: It would be very interesting to compare the calibrated LUT profiles of your Samsung with my LG regarding the non-linearity. It would be great if you could post an image of your results here like I did in my previous message.

 

Actually I have calibrated an LG and Samsung panel in 2 machines. These were posted a while back. Will try to find them later this afternoon.