Giving up on Dell after a 15 year run - Page 2

Damn Rube, another zinger that fell flat at my feet

Professional photographers are 110% OCD about color, luminance and sharpness on their displays. Getting natural skin tones is tough. Making sure that the brightness and color of what you see on the screen is the same as whats on the print takes skill and the right equipment.

Even with proper calibration there is no way you can trust what you see on a Dell laptop's screen for final editing. All of them are 6 bit panels, and you have to have an 8 bit LCD to edit. Further than that you have to have an the right type of LCD panel. The 2407 with its Samsung PVA panel has great grey transitions, but it is a little bright overall. If you calibrate it once evey couple of months you are good to go.

One thing you also have to remember is that pro photographers have really only had decent digital SLR bodies since Canon came out with the D30 (not 30D) in 2000. Back then people went for 17 - 21" CRT monitors that they had to calibrate every week because of tube drift. My guess is that most people running VGA were doing so at less than 1600x1200. Running VGA on a 1920x1200 LCD will work and gets you around the speedy drift of CRTs, but you still have to deal with drifts from converting from Digital to analog VGA, then back to Digital. You also have to deal with NOT having 1 to 1 pixel representation on VGA. That lack of 1 to 1 is one of the reasons VGA is less sharp.

I know that a lot of graphic designers with high end monitors back in the 90's would use BNC connectors because they could not live with VGA 10 years ago. Sorry to shoot down your 10 years of living with VGA statement. Go read a book.

Thanks Rube. I was actually logging in this morning to apologize for you. I am known to almost always be level headed and support all of my arguments and views with facts. But yesterday was a long day and I threw a few jabs back at you. Its all misdirected frustration with Dell support and unfortunately it came your way.

The other thing is that I have lurked here for years, but as a new poster you have no idea if I know what the hell I am talking about. I think its ok to vet the knowledge of new people. I just have to get used to all of the the personalities here. Even though I am probably going the Apple way with my home computer I will still be working with Precision series notebooks at work and will continue to post.

One other thing that I forgot...

The new LED backlit LCD displays are the first LCD panels to show you more colors than you can see. The Dell 2407 is around 96% (could be 94%) of the colors you can see and the best of the new LCD panels is around 103%. As far as I know, Dell is not offering any LED backlit displays on notebooks. Apple is.

Skillz - remember that all of the 17" lcds are 6 bit panels. This means that even though your 8 bit pictures have 256 shades of R,G, and B that your panel will not be able to display all of them. It just means that where you have gradients of color or shades of grey that there could be some stair-stepping.

Color calibrators like the Colorvision Spyder Elite 3 that I use help you get an even color tones and an even mix of tones. Even really inexpensive color calibrators are better than your eyes.

Good catch! I am surprised that they don't promote this more.

I thought there was a $99 calibrator out there. Here is a good intro to color calibration - http://www.drycreekphoto.com/Learn/m...tion_tools.htm

IF I can find that cheap alternative I will send it to you.

I would also be happy to send my calibrated monitor profile from the M90 or M6300 to anyone that wants it. I can also send the one from my 1705. Since they sent the 1440x900 screen on the 1720 I can profile that one and then profile the 1920x1200 screen when it gets here Wednesday.

I know this is so far off topic, but that 1440x900 true life screen is terrible. TONS of light leakage from the bottom of the screen in a semi-circle extending halfway up the display. Off axis brightness shift is worse than my still running Inspiron 8100 even though its better than the old screen in every other way.


One more random thing.... I had to argue with tech support for 30 minutes to even get another 1920x1200 panel. They said my old one was true life, and my replacement was true life. We then played the alphabet game and the letter of the day was "U" - as in WUXGA. But, whoever talks to that tech next will get someone that understands the LCD options that were and are available. Was never able to convince the supervisor that video cards had DDR (much less DDR2 vs 3) ram though...