XPS M1710 calibrated with LaCie Blue Eye 2

Can someone translate what the heck all this means and what it does? lol

All I understand is that you improved your screen, somehow? Looks like a decent improvement as well.

-Mac

It means that the color reproduction of the M1710 LCD as shipped is piss-poor. This is actually true for most laptop LCDs; desktop LCDs are usually much better, but for professional use they need to be calibrated as well. Using a hardware calibration tool you can create ICC profiles that correct for the aberrations, and you can then load these profiles into your graphics card. As a result, you will get an LCD screen that gives you halfway decent color representation. I would add that, often, nominally identical LCD screens will vary significantly from one specimen to the next, so using color profiles obtained from calibrating the LCD on a different laptop on your own will give you sub-standard results.

I wonder how you can see that, given that you said you don't know what the data mean...

Do you have a set of Calibration Data for the screen's Native White Point of around 7,000k?

For those that are not in the OCD about color camp, these K numbers are called Kelvin numbers. The higher the number, the more blue the light is, and the lower the number, the more red the light is. Those of you with white balance settings on your digital cameras can screw around with this. Candle light is very red/orange and its around 2500K. Normal light bulbs are around 3500K. Shade is more blue and is around 9000K. I think pure blue sky is like 13,000 - some crazy number like that.

6500K is the color of normal sunlight. Its one of the common standards for the color white. So a lot of designers will calibrate their displays to show the color white at 6500K.

The Dell 2407 LCD monitor's native white point is right at 6500K - so its really easy to deal with.

The Dell 17" notebook panels are around 7000-7200k - so they are slightly blue/green. Since you can't get the red channel to go over 100%, you end up cutting the Green and Blue channels to get the screen calibrated to 6500K. To get to the 5000K settings he was talking about, you really have to make big changes to the display's R,G,B channels - enough to seriously degrade the performance.

Thats why you see most of the black triangle inside of the orange triangle on the 6500K graph. While its still not showing you all the colors, at least its not making the blues too blue (that would be outside the box).

My guess is that calibrating to 7000K would give the best measured response. As long as you ONLY used the display on the laptop you could be ok. For me it will not work since I have to have both my 2407 and laptop display at the same white point - 6500K. The 6500K 2407 would look a little red and the laptop LCD would look a little blue.

Also, if you are going to be printing then everything I said might be out the window. If you are forced to use something like 5000K because that is the whitepoint of your printer - then you are stuck - but if you are in that situation I am sure you already knew it.

Know this thread is old, but it seems pretty interesting. I'm running on an m1710 screen and colour seems damn fine, but hell if it can get better. One thing I noticed is the screen looks like crap outta the box, but I lowered brightness and contrast by about 20 and 15% respectfully, put gamma to .72, and image sharpening up by a single notch, then increased digital vibrance to a smigen above medium and it looks Great to me now, the video drivers seriously helped. But hell this is the easier way, anything I could do to improve you guys think?

(Obviously me posting a screenshot isn't going to do it justice for you guys, and I'm too lazy right now to take a 'good' pic and post it up)