What Happened to Precision's Premier Color IPS Panel??

Anyone know what happened with the Precision's Premiercolor IPS Panel? I was all set to order it, and the option was just GONE. What happened here?

I chatted up a rep. about it, and he made some vague comments about "upgrading the system" that cannot include the IPS panel.

If I were to guess, the rep. was BSing me about why they removed it. So.. does anyone know the real story? Were the IPS panels defective when they sent them out (my guess)? Did anyone experience a malfunction with the premierecolor ips panel? Is dell planning to return the option, once the issue is fixed?

Any information on this subject would be helpful.

Thank you.

 

Maybe the corner tint problem with M4x00? I ordered mine (M6700) 3 days ago with an IPS-screen.

 

If you are talking about the M4700, there is a corner tint issue. I don't think anyone has received an IPS panel in the M4700 that doesn't have it. Check the M4700 owner's thread before purchasing.

 

The IPS RGB LED screen (with Premiercolor software) is listed as an option on every Dell Business configuration page I justed checked. It is in the same place, for the same price, with the same description. Some M6700 configuration webpage entry points contain certain features already (pre)-configured such that you do not have an option about them when configuring through those entry points. Or perhaps Dell was doing an edit on the text a bit on their webpages when you could mot find it. In any case, I can easily find it now through several M6700 configuration webpages.
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Nonetheless, if M6700 IPS RGB LED users are indeed really having problems (or benefits!) please report them here. Is your M6700 IPS RGB LED screen generating too much heat? Is the graphics card running high temps? Is the graphics card always running at all full power to control/display/power the monitor? Any big tint issues? What do you find?

 

They're referring to the RGB-LED backlit IPS panel for the M4700 only. It appears it has been removed from the Dell US site, for both small business & enterprise web stores. It still exists on the UK site however.

 

Out of curiousity, I did a brief test with my personal Sekonic C500R, which is a photographic incident colour meter that gives readings on the standard axes: Light Balance (blue-amber temperature) and Colour Compensation (green-magenta tint). This is a far from scientific check, since given how the head is designed like this and that the colour response is like this (based human visual response), the readings fluctuate wildly depending on what precise backlighting led is over the particlar sensor in the head by several hundred K. I would check with my i1Pro spectro, but it's currently on loan to a friend and I will get it back shortly next week.

Edit: My panel is a LG Philips LP156WF3, aka LGD0308 according to HWiNFO. DELL P/N: M12PR.


I set the screen to full, and let it warm up for 20 mins, then set the screen to Adobe RGB. The screen is utterly uncallibrated so this isn't very fair as a representation of accuracy, set to 6500K gamma 2.2 max brightness, using a notepad window in full screen. I held up the meter to the face of the screen and took about 10 shots at each position and wrote down what a close average was, but as I described there were enormous swings with tiny movements of the meter.

Full:

6490K-0 6650K-0 6850K-0
6360K-0 6630K-0 6770K-0
6580K-0 6750K-0 6850K-0

AdobeRGB

6380K-0 6600K-0 6750K-1G
6230K-0 6550K-0 6770K-1G
6400K-0 6580K-0 6760K-1G

1G in this means 1 unit green along the green-magenta axis, equal to 2.5 of a CC filter.



Again, caveats apply: this is a *very* imprecise measurement using something not designed to measure light sources close up on an uncallibrated screen that has been set to max brightness (210cd/m^2) which may well be sub optimal. If reduced to a less eye-searing brightness which people would actually work at e.g. 100 cd/m^2 the screen does to my eye look more even. That said, in strict fairness, by eye alone, the screen does look signficantly more even than those numbers would suggest. How critically sensitive you are to 100K shifts in colour is entirely subjective.

Screen accuracy aside, it is worth considering the gamut. I am well familiar with RGB-LED backlit LCDs, I have used and owned multiple Samsung XL30/Lacie 730s ($5.5k USD displays), as well as Sony XBR 8 / X4500 TVs for some years. The panel does indeed have a rather pleasant display of colour, especially the quality of the reds which are so very lacking in ordinary backlit LCDs. Obviously, I cannot pass any evaluation of the colour until I get my spectro back.

 

Having given these numbers, I feel I should offer some commentary on what they actually might mean.

Assuming that these numbers measured thus have any validity (rather questionable), they would mean that there was a ~300K shift across an uncallibrated panel at maximum brightness from left to right from amber towards blue. Again, at maximum brightness & uncallibrated, there is no particular corner bias and in a straight column, the panel is relatively uniform.

The next obvious question is how large is 300K, and what are the implications of such a shift. For some basic reference, with a $7000 top-tier professional camera (Canon 1D-X), in custom white balance settings, the minimum increments you can set manually is 100K LB and 2 CC index number. I am unfamiliar with the main competitor (Nikon D4), but I daresay it would be the same. How critical this is depends on your precise requirements. Obviously, if colour accuracy is 100% of your need, then you should be using a seperate Eizo/NEC/Samsung XL/Lacie 7.

Obvious avenues for investigation would be the accuracy with the backlight lowered (which I would say is entirely acceptible), and what the accuracy is like with pure red/green/blue instead of white. However, I'm not going to waste my time playing around with the Sekonic when I will have my spectro back next week.

I haven't used the panel myself for anything that involves colour (I do this stuff on a hobby level but as you can tell from the fact that I have a C500R & i1Pro I take it rather seriously), and won't be until I can callibrate it. However, I can say that from my day's experience with it so far, I think I'd be happy to use it (at much reduced brightness).

 

Honestly, this is just so disappointing to me because spec-wise, I considered dell's m4700 to be the near perfect mid-level workstation laptop that I was looking for, and now after having read the IPS panel issues with the m4700, I just don't know that I can trust dell anymore.

It's great that they took out the IPS option, but what if I had ordered the m4700 just a month earlier? I would've had to deal with that corner tinting problem first hand? What an awful thought. I'm getting a headache just thinking about it.

 

Does anyone have any short/simple or long/elaborate hypotheses, expanations, and/or guesses as to why this is happening with the Dell Precision M4600 and/or M4700 series and not with the Dell Precision M6600 and/or M6700 series? Could it involve amount of heat generated by the screen? Could it involve different positioning of different relevant hardware components for different sizes? Is this problem (and any related IPS RGB problems) strictly limited to the M46/700 series? Are many M6600 or M6700 IPS RGBs affected too? If not, does anyone know why not?

 

It looks like it is the 15" IPS panel offered by LG. It's just plain bad. The 15" HP EliteBook uses the same panel and has the same issue. Not sure if there are any other manufacturers that offer a good 15" IPS panel as Dell doesn't seem to be able to solve the issue by replacing the panel. Several people have reported that the issue persists after having the panel replaced (multiple times, even). I actually haven't seen any reports of a good IPS panel on the M4700 (if anyone has one, please speak up ).

For whatever reason, the problem is limited to the 15" panel. The M6600/M6700 are not affected.