New M6500 Discussion Thread

can anyone confirm that the ambient sensor for screen brightness doesn't work still.. i tried to move the laptop from a bright room to a totally dark room to see if the brightness goes down... but nothing.

 

The spyder elite 3 seems to be a Sweet Program, have read this revue?
How does it compare, to other comparable programs.

Bokeh, I think this is causing the problems, which you are experiencing.

If you are going to use Spyder elite 3, for calibrating your displays
You need to read this first, and fallow the instructions.

How to remove Adobe gamma - on Windows

 

In my experience, with my M6400, the ALS is somewhat flaky. I haven't managed to quite pin down what exactly the issue is (but then I did not invest a whole lot of energy into this particular issue; what bugs me a lot more is that utterly useless fingerprint sensor...), but what I found is that the sensor typically stops working after a couple of reboots. It may or may not work after a fresh, cold boot, and I have a feeling that this may depend on the lighting conditions at the time when the machine is booted. I think this is a BIOS issue, since these problems can also be observed while you are in the BIOS, with no OS or drivers loaded.

I talked to Tech Support about this once, but have not received any useful replies, so far.

 

I find the NEC MultiSync 2690WUXi to be much better and very color stable for photo work and various other forms of image work, not a good gaming monitor, but I don't play games, so no loss.

 

The last Adobe suite to include the adobe gamma utility was CS2. Yes, you did have to disable it when you ran color calibration. CS3 and CS4 don't have it. I am running CS4.

 

On a related note, I've noticed that Windows 7 now has a "display calibration loader" that might "double profile" the system if you haven't disabled it. There is a very general description of Windows 7 color management settings at this link: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows7/Change-color-management-settings Scroll down to the bottom to see the steps for disabling the Windows 7 display calibration loader (under the Display Calibration section )

I suspect that with the implementation of color management settings in Windows 7, we'll have to be careful about "conflicting" settings. (i.e., we wouldn't want to assign conflicting settings in Windows 7 and in our third party calibration loader.) What a mess!

 

\

"To prevent Windows from loading display calibrations, clear the Use Windows display calibration check box."

The box was unchecked. Windows was not loading any color management of its own.

 

Is the M6500 available with the new Centrino 6300 wireless card or only the older 5300 shown on the web? As I read the info from Intel, the 6300 is designed to work with the i7 where as the 5300 is built for the previous generation of processor.

Thoughts?

 

The Intel 6300 and 6200 were not available to OEMs when the M6500 was built.
Since it is an add on card you could grab one later and install it.

So its not an option right now but you will see it available in a few months.
The only thing you are really gaining is more bandwidth for N networks that support the new features. For average wireless use the even most people dont tap into the 5300 yet.

 

Finally tracked down the color issue. Nividia was applying some Digital Vibrance even when it was set to 50%. This was present in the Dell Video Driver and the updated one from Nividia.

Disabling the nividia desktop color applications and services fixed the issue for me. Whats weird is that after I disabled everything that Nividia loads (nwiz and hotkey controls), I went to the Nivida control panel and the digital vibrance was set back up to 75% instead of 50%. Putting the vibrance back down to 50% made everything finally look right. Will wait and see if this is the same for other people.

At this point I have no control point software installed.

I am getting 6589 Kelvin as the native of the display - which calibrates very well to 6500K. I still have not figured out the native gamma of 1.8, but 2.2 looks fine after calibration.

I went back and loaded the original drive and booted into the factory image of Windows 7 Pro 64. Everything was the same with the dead stock image. All driver file dates on the factory drive were 12/30/2009. The monitor was identified as Generic pnp Display (I was hoping for the Samsung panel driver).

Bottom line: The hardware on the M6500 kicks butt. Something appears to be off with the Nvidia drivers or settings. I could be wrong on this as usual...