Precision M4400 Owner's Lounge

Here's a photographic comparison between my Lenovo T61p (a 1-year old WSXGA+ display) and my new Dell M4400 (RGB LED WUXGA display). Most of these test images came from here: http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/

Prior to taking the images, I calibrated both panels using the lagom.nl LCD monitor test images. I don't have a professional calibration device, so I had to eyeball it.

Unfortunately, I forgot that my Fuji F20 digicam doesn't let me fix the camera aperture, making it tough to compare the low brightness photos to the high brightness photos. My apologies...it makes these pictures less than empirical and not as useful (along with the fact that my crappy digicam couldn't hope to capture the full gamut being displayed by the RGB LED). So don't use these pictures to get a good idea of the color differences between RGB LED and the T61p. The color difference is much more noticeable to the human eye than it appears in these shots. In some cases, these pictures make the RGB LED look noticeably dimmer or lower contrast, where to my eye, it looked better than the T61p display almost every time. /sigh...take these with a grain of salt.

You can sort of compensate for the camera aperture differences by noticing how bright the display reflection is off the laptop, and how that changes between the left photo to the right photo (low brightness to high brightness). You might also notice that the lamp in the left photo looks a little brighter than the one in the right photo...same thing.

Also note the vertical viewing angle abberations in these photos, for both LCD screens.

 

FYI, I just finished installing Windows 7 on my M4400, and have spent the last hour playing with it. It might have just changed my mind about returning this laptop. It really shines now. I figured out that the jerky touchpad movement was probably due to setting the movement speed too high...apparently if I raise it at all from the default, it starts skipping all around. The DPI scaling looks so much better in Windows 7 than either Vista or XP, turning my WUXGA display into a boon rather than a bane. 125% scaled text is crystal clear now, and web surfing in IE8 looks great. Looking forward to playing with this more...

 

Are there any other M4400 owners out there who have issues using the touchpad? I've tried it under XP, Vista, and now Windows 7, and it seems like it has the same problems in all three. Specifically, the cursor "freezes" in place sporadically, and no amount of gesturing on the touchpad works, until it unfreezes itself. It usually only lasts a fraction of a second, but sometimes longer. I didn't notice it on Windows 7 until I installed the touchpad drivers from the installation CD.

Last time it happened, gesturing in counter-clockwise circles would get it to happen quite obviously. For some reason, clockwise circles didn't cause it to happen, no idea why.

 

did you disable touchcheck in the mouse properties? try doing that

 

The RGB-LED screen looks way too red. Try to borrow a calibration tool, it will improve your screen a lot! At least change the color setting of windows to Adobe RGB (from sRGB).

Btw. please use the "edit" button!

 

just installed XP on my m4400...hope that this time everything will be ok!

So,which driver would you suggest for gaming?also,is A12 bios stable?

 

Thx, yep...I have Tapping (and by extension TouchCheck) disabled for both the touchpad and pointing stick.

 

I saw that too, especially in the settings photos...it didn't "look" too red to me IRL, if anything it looked too blue. I figured the camera was just having problems with the wide gamut, but I'm sure you're right. There's no point in trying to "empirically" test without a good calibrator handy (and a better camera!).

Too true, man!

 

I think the difference between the two is quite a difference. Yes, some shots look too red, but that could be the camera as well in certain shots. Especially if you taking pics from a cam that uses srgb by default and you're taking pictures of an adobe rgb screen, the one area you'll see that is in the red channel. Happens quite a lot to the pro-digicam crowd

I'm really liking that screen though, the richness of colors versus that "washed out" look really has me wanting my M4400 NOW!!

Speaking of that. I just checked my order status and it wasn't scheduled to ship until the 24th, but the status has changed to shipped last night. There is no tracking number available, says "data temporarily unavailable". It also has an estimated delivery date of March 12th, which is the same as the ship date which is weird. Does anyone know where these ship from or how long it takes before a tracking number shows up?

Thanks,

Kevin

 

You will get a tracking number usually 24 hours after it says it has shipped. Sometimes a little less, sometimes a little more.