New M6500 Discussion Thread

Got a refurbished Dell m6500 (regular UXGA screen).

I have a ColorMunki for color profiling the display.

For the life of me - I cannot get it to actually set the color profile. Every time it says - "Unable to Set LUTs."

Here's a screenshot -


I have -
1. Tried completely restoring my machine back to it's factory settings
2. Install the ISS nvidia driver (I have an NVidia Quadro FX 2800M) from the official Dell site.
3. Install the latest official nvidia driver from the official Dell site.
4. Install the latest nvidia driver from the NVidia site.
5. Tracked a suppose answer on the xrite site -
X-Rite: Get exactly the color you need, every time, anywhere in the world.

And made sure I was logged in as Administrator, turned off Windows Defender, and Windows UAC.

After each of these steps I would run the ColorMunki profiling software and I would get the same "Unable to set LUTs" error message, the I would reboot and try again - and get the same error message.

I feel like someone must have run into this before - has anyone run into this and solved this problem before?

 

I was just reading up on ColorMunki last night as I have a new NEC monitor arriving tomorrow and an M4600 arriving next week..so I may just be an example of a little bit of knowledge being dangerous...

Have you contacted x-rite support? X-Rite: Get exactly the color you need, every time, anywhere in the world. I'd be very curious as to how helpful they are. I may get one of their products in the next month or so.

Second though...is the UXGA screen calibratable? I know the IPS on the 4600 is but don't know about the UXGA.

Keep us (me) posted please.

 

Ok, after wasting the entire weekend on this stuff, I tracked down...something...

If you right-click on My Computer, then select "Manage", then go System Tools -> Task Schedule -> Microsoft -> Windows -> WindowsColorSystem, there's a thing on the right called "Calibration Loader". If I right-click on it and do enable, then I could get ColorMunki to stop giving me the error message...once.

But while it stops giving me the error message, the color calibration is...a little wacky. It appears that if I do this, my best guess is that it applies the calibration twice - there's a pic with a girl lit by a reddish light, normally her skin has a reddish tint, but with the new color profile her skin is creepily red...obviously something isn't working quite right when ColorMunki applies the color profile.

 

Well...ColorMunki finally started...working...pretty much...

I don't know if it was my previous thing I wrote about with the scheduled tasks, or that I uninstalled ColorMunki then reinstalled just the latest version that I downloaded from the website (before I first installed the old version, then the new version), but now it finishes and changes the colors on the display in the way that it should.

However...funny enough, that introduced a new problem. Now color managed apps seem to apply the color profile twice. For most pics it just makes them look more saturated in a nice way. But for a few pics with red in them it's really not good.

How this looks on your monitor depends on your own monitor settings, but if they're like mine the top pic is garishly red, while the bottom pic is not (more accurate) -



So now I now I have a machine where pics look normal, but...only in...non color managed apps...pretty weird. I tried removing the color profile from the monitor (but leaving ColorMunki stuff running and everything), and that works...until I reboot the machine. I guess the good news is that the only thing I can't turn off color management in is in windows photo viewer, and I could download a replacement for that.

 

Also, I've now had several laptops in front of me -
1. An HP Elitebook with DreamColor display
2. A Dell RBG+LED display
4. My current newer m6500 with a regular UXGA panel
3. An older Dell m6500 - only usb2, 540m processor or something, with a regular UXGA panel

Brightness - the RGB+LED is definitely the brightest. The newer UXGA would come next, followed by the older UXGA, followed by the Dreamcolor in last. All of them are bright enough for office or indoor use.

Sharpness - the RGB+LED is the sharpest, followed by the either of the regular UXGA screens, followed by the Dreamcolor in last. For text, I could never quite get used to it, I tried for 3 weeks, I personally found all the dell screens sharper. The RGB+LED is really impressively sharp, and if the computer was going to be my main work computer it would be a really tough choice.

Color (color managed apps) - the Dreamcolor is the best, followed by the RGB+LED, followed by the newer UXGA screen. The differences...aren't as much as you would think. Looking at them side by side with exactly the same picture on the screen, it's often difficult to tell the difference. In some pics there's a difference but it's not huge. Dead last, noteably worse than the others, is the older UXGA screen I had. Side by side it stood out as not vibrant at all like a sore thumb - and not in a good "realistic" way, just in a "dull and lifeless" way.

Color (outside color managed apps) - the Dreamcolor is again the best, it comes precalibrated from the factory and has an sRGB mode that actually does keep it from producing weird colors in any app (as long as the sRGB mode is on, you can change it if you want). My only complaint about the Dreamcolor colors is that they can definitely be a bit oversaturated, however, they're always fairly normal looking colors.

The RGB+LED display is a really mixed bag. Outside of color managed apps, half the time the colors look rich and vibrant, but the other half of the time they look fruitilly oversaturated, often in really unnatural ways. Reds are the worst, any reds on faces gets really overdone in sometimes ghastly ways, and reds on web pages are often a loud, highly fruity look shade of red you never see in real life. It will also do weird things like really bring out pimples that in regular colors would be fairly hidden.

If windows had good OS-level color management the RBG-LED monitor would be my favorite. Alas, it does not. Flash ads are never color managed, nor is windows explorer, windows photo viewer is color managed in regular mode but not in full screen mode, and there's no way to get Windows Media Player or Quicktime to be color managed from my research. So do you take pics *and* video? Good luck with that - you'll always have oversaturated colors.

The newer UXGA screen isn't bad out of the box, though it has a blue and slightly cold feeling to it.

The older UXGA screen also had a blue and cold feeling to it, but it was much worse than the newer screen.

Backlight - the RGB+LED screen is the only one that seems to have a warm and more whitish colored backlite. I...*sigh*, really wish one could simply apply a color profile to everything.

The Dreamcolor and newer UXGA screens have a colder backlight to them that has a slight bluish tint to it. It's not terribly offensive, but I do like the RGB+LED's warmer and more white backlite more. The older UXGA screen had a strongly cold backlite to it that I was not fond of.

Anyways...I think I'm going to stick with the laptop with the newer UXGA screen on it. The RGB+LED screen would be my favorite, if windows just did full color management itself and didn't rely on apps to do some of it. I love the sharpness and warmer and whiter backlight, but I had a wide gamut display before and the fruitiness of it drove me crazy (as did never knowing what my videos would look like on other people's screens). I initially started with the Dreamcolor display, but my eyes just never quite got used to reading text on it - I really wanted to like it, but a friend of mine saw it and said the same thing - it's like reading through fine mosquito netting or something. And the older UXGA screen is definitely out, if you want a regular UXGA screen I highly recommend getting one of the newer models of the m6500 with better screens (assuming they all got better - I don't really know).

 

Also, while I had both an m6500 with an 640m processor, and another with an 840qm processor, I thought it might be interesting to compare raw conversion times.

Both were plugged in, with the "High performance" power setting. Both have 4gb of ram, and on both the jpg's were exported at max quality (10/10 or whatever). I expected that the 640m would either be slightly faster than the 840qm (as the 640 has faster overclock), or the programs would use multiple cores in which case the 840qm would be much faster.

Strangely...neither was the case. Here are my timings (again, exact same raw files copied to each computer) -

Canon's DPP -
q840 - 02:30
640m - 02:47

Lightroom, same raw files
840qm - 1:10
640m - 1:24

The one flaw in my testing is that I discovered that the 840qm machine has a 7200rpm hard drive in it, while the 640m machine just has an 5400rpm hard drive in it. That could be why the 840qm is faster...I'm not sure.

What's interesting is that either both cameras do raw conversion multithreaded, or neither of them do. I redid the conversion and opened up task manager and it claimed that all cores/cpu's were being used. However, I also tried converting just a single raw file and for both programs task manager claimed that all cores were being used while the conversion was going on as well...not sure what's going on with that. I tried converting just one raw file, but both computers did it in such similar time I couldn't even time it.

 

Hello guys!

im an hard follower of this forum and this thread pecuriarly.

As first many thanks for all these infos, the documentation is indeed better and accurated than on the one on dell network.

I god an hard trouble with my m6500

It works very well but it suffers of blacks screens on cold boot.

everyday when im back home and i start it the screen goes black and i have any other option than hold on power button and start again.
very few times i need 2 attempts to boot.

i dont think its OS related since this happens also if after the boot i go F2 and stay on bios.

I am not sure on this but i got the impression that if i leave the power supply attached and powered i dont get the black freeze.

i tried also to change memory, i used ddr3 800 and 1066 without better results.

my sistem is m6500 i5 540m, 4gb ram (2x2gb), ati 7740, no usb3, wd scorpio 500gb 7200rpm, screen wuxga.

the machine is refurbished so i dont have any warranty on it.

i own it from 1 year and i got this error since the beginning.

when i boot it after the error it will go flawlessly without any freeze so, as i told, the problem is restricted only to "cold" boots.

i see im am not the only one that get this error but i dont think there is actually a solution for it.

any suggestion?

many thanks guys

 

I've been having this problem for the last few weeks. It is under warranty and they've replaced the motherboard & RAM twice, as well as the power supply, since it doesn't blackscreen crash on battery power. But nothing has helped & they are building a replacement. I don't know what % of M6500s have this issue but it is all over the Dell forum.

It is a strange problem that has so far been impossible to figure out. No clue what it is but I think it is something in the foundation of the chipset or something since all diagnostics pass.

 

Take a look to this blog article.

 

More of the same, nothing new there.