New M6500 Discussion Thread

You can go to the device manager and see propertities of the monitors and choose details, there are lots info about the screen.
Also you can use some testing sofware like Everest, MonitorTest (free 30days to use)

 

Yep. Well put there. I used to teach a college course in basic design and it was always fun to ask what color chrome was. Chrome is just chrome because its much brighter than the things around it. Its still a mix of greys.

 

I agree wholeheartedly with this. It would be wonderful to get an accurate "out of the box" color-calibrated system. The only one that I know of that comes close is the 24" HP Dreamcolor display, which you can find "on sale" for a mere $2,000. I suspect that in order to get a high-quality "out of the box" color calibrated laptop, we'd have to pay a significant bit more than what we're paying for the M6500. Most pros would probably rather save the money and calibrate the system themselves.

 

Your monitor has very limited ability to display the color differences between aRGB and ProPhoto, so you probably won't see the differences. In order to see the differences between color spaces, you will have to convert to a color space smaller than your monitor color space.

 

I meant to say converting RAW to ProPhoto and aRGB then doing soft proofing down to sRGB that you were talking about

You got me a little paranoid about losing gamut from r g b gain tweaking. I am thinking your soft proofing idea would show me what i lost by comparing any differences onscreen and from resulting prints. My theory is that any differences i could not see onscreen, i could see in the prints. I know the colors are better on the u2410 than my gamut limited 2407, but maybe i can see how much.

Thanks again Keith for all the food for thought. My wife is ready
to kill me for reasearching qnd talking about color so much tonight.

 

My wife very nicely took care of the kids tonight so that I could prepare for an upcoming conference. Luckily I'm not in the dog house too much for getting off task.

 

Hi Bokeh & Keithsnell,

Ok what’s the bottom-line come on guys you are killing me.This is excellent
information don’t stop now I need more input where are you getting
this information post a link please I need more input.

Your wife’s ken kill you afterwards

Thank You

 

I would go with with the rgbled over wled. I would not go with any ccfl
display on the M6500. Dell will get the issues with the rgbled worked
out. In the mean time we have to learn to deal with a few
issues.

Bottom line is that the rgbled is an excellent panel. It is probably the best laptop panel money can buy. It is just unrefined as it comes
from the factory IMHO. Just leave it in NTSC mode if you want
to run control point. Make sure to leave the brightness down to 5-7up (out of the 15 levels) if you want the brightness onscreen to match
prints. Calibrate the display with something if you are a pro and get paid for prints or just really care a out white points and color.

I know the whole discussion can seem blown out of proportion, but we really care about color. 24" x 36" photo prints are something you want to get right the first time when you are paying $10 a pop for them.

The rgbled kicks every ccfl laptop display I have used. I just hope
to reign it in a little.

Dell could come out with new aRGB and sRGB curves tomorrow
that render this whole discussion moot. Lets hope they do.

 

Too much coffee??

The information is a "synthesis" of what we know as photographers familiar with the way that color gamuts work.

The bottom line is that all colors that are displayed on the RGB LED screen (a wide gamut display) by applications that aren't "color managed/aware" will be too saturated. The only way to get accurate colors on this display is to use a color managed application (like Photoshop), and calibrate the display with a colorimeter or spectrophotometer designed for wide gamut displays. (Spyder3, eye1 display 2, eye1 display pro, or ColorMunki. Older colorimeters may be made to work if you know how to compensate for the whitepoint shifts (but only if you know what you are doing.))

If you don't need to see colors outside of the sRGB color space (most web developers don't) then use a calibrator and software (like Basiccolor) that can calibrate the system to an sRGB gamut. That will help colors displayed by non-color managed applications look more natural.

The RGBLED display is potentially a great display, if you know how to handle the wide gamut.

 

Wow, kiethsnell and Bokeh. Thanks for the primer on how color spaces work. I run into those terms occasionally in my development endeavors. Most recently, it was in learning how Cocoa (the Mac OS X framework) handles color. When you create color in Cocoa, you have to pick a color space for it. This was pretty foreign to me, being a .NET developer by trade. I just picked "device RGB" and moved on. Now I have a little better understanding of what consequences of that decision were.