How to do Screen Adjustments on T400?

I've read through the past posts on different LCD screens and realized my disappointment with my T400 is due to my getting the crappy LCD with bluish hue and washed out blacks.

I'd like to follow the advice of "updating the Nvidia drivers to the latest and adjusting the brightness, contrast and color" but not sure how to do either. For example, there's no Nvidia icon in my taskbar...

I'd appreciate any pointers to try to get the screen reasonable, at least.

Thanks,

Jon

 

There's a free program you can use to calibrate your screen in the thread "T400 - Screen differences"

Not sure of the exact thread title, but it's also got calibrated ICC profiles from other T400 users that you can download and use yourself. I think those ICC profiles were done with some really expensive, professional hardware. Easily better than anything you can do manually.

I'd use those.

 

Um, the T400 has an ATI card so you won't see anything with Nvidia related to it

I'm also disappointed with the LCD. I'm going to try buying a hardware calibrator.

 

if you're going to buy a hardware calibrator. unless you're going to profile your printer as well(then you'll need a spectrometer), i highly recommend i1 display 2. I have compared many and i1 display2 offers very good quality for the money.

 

That's the one I was looking at. Pretty pricey though

 

there're couple of facts/suggestions which might help you decide:
- monitor calibration is not a one time thing, so you'll not just use it once and dump it in the drawer forever. because every monitor shifts its brightness & color from time to time. LED behaves better because it doens't have the slow "warm up" time exhibited in other types of monitor and doesn't loose much brightness as time goes by, but still, generally, monitors should be calibrated at least once a month for color critical work. so i think it's a very worthwhile tool to have around. I know some people warm up their CRT for 1 hour and calibrates it everyday for professional use!

- if you really want to save money on it, you can just do buy it, calibrate all your monitors, then sell it on ebay as an open box item. or better yet, buy it straight used from ebay. this shouldn't cost much.

 

I'm assuming that the ICC profile is only good for a particular manufacturer's LCD panel? I'm not sure who made the panel that the calibration was done with, but I know that it doesn't seem to help my Samsung.

I've got an older program called CheckeMON that was mainly meant for CRT calibration, but it does have a mode for full-screen solid colors. Using that, I've noticed that my red is what looks really awful. It's a sickly, washed out red. Green looks better, and Blue generally looks ok. There does seem to be a lot of backlight bleed at the bottom, although I can't tell if that's what it is or if the vertical viewing angle is so bad that it appears that way. =(

Is there a simple way to try and fix the red by itself? Every time I try and mess with the red gamma, I end up with a pink tinge on my whites, but the red never really looks `red.'

Edit: Well, I called Customer Support and they're sending me out a box to send it in to the service center. I'm nervous since I won't have the laptop for a week and who knows if they'll actually fix it or not. =( I took a picture of my old Dell Latitude next to the Thinkpad and you can really tell that the Thinkpad looks more orange than red.