Hello everyone,
Ever since I got my iXPS last week, I have enjoyed every single minutes of it...
In the past I was a pure desktop loyalist, but made the change to laptop-land due to my need for portability from home to school, mixed with a grain of my love for gadjets
On top of being a desktop loyalist, and that for almost 10 years, I am also a very active gamer and, to top it all off, a 2D artist. All these three aspects of my computer usage require me to have the following : A powerful processor, plenty of ram, a good GFX card and, very importantly, a god-like screen... In other words : A beast.
At first I looked at the sony for its gorgeous screen. Boy did I love that screen... But the price and lack of financing just scared me off.
And so I turned to Dell...
My iXPS (look at the sig) is a monster in performance: with it's processor rivalising the entire MAC network at my under-financed school, it's GFX card that can handle anything thrown at it from 3D to hardcore gaming at maximum detail, and it's RAM deep enough to absord even the biggest photoshop project with impressive recall times ...
But it lacked something I was just dying to have, a kickass screen.
See, when I received my iXPS, I for one was very happy, the thing looked great and would satisfy my need for portability and gadjets for a long time to come indeed. But my first visit into the XP main theme, which I half-sarcasticly call teletubies-valley, lacked the pure green and blue shades of its good old desktop predecessor. I had been fed with pure Sony desktop LCD goodness for almost 2 years... Having flashbacks of my good old colorful days, The iXPS suddenly felt less attractive.
After a few hours of roaming around in my new-found powerhouse's settings and hardware, I came across the display panel and the serveral ATI tabs there. My eyes crossed the "color" tab with much joy, picturing already how I could tweak my monitor to have a much-improved image quality in every ways possible.
This tab became a life-saver, and inside I came up with a very efficient tweak for my own needs, with much satisfaction. :
Note: This tweak is based on my own tastes for color and how contrast should be on my computer. This tweak is also very simple and explained in a way so everyone could do it, even your next door monkey.
Ok, time to drop the romanesque approach, cut to the chase, and explain the tweak
Before/After image... Pretty encouraging ! (this is an approximate, but pretty accurate)
First of all , open your display panel... The same panel where one would set his screen saver, desktop background and windows Theme... Now click on the "settings" tab, where you would usualy go to change the resolution of the screen.
Look down and find the "advanced" tab.
There you will see several other tabs waiting for you, most having the "ATI" icon next to them. The one we are looking for to carry this tweak to sucess is the "color" tab.
The colors tab.
What you see on your screen should be a color curve relative to your desktop environement that reflects all colors combined (those colors are what we call the RGB. Those three colors (red green and blue) are mixed together to create other colors as well as black and white).
On the default settings, those curves give a pretty low contrast view for a laptop screen, since laptop screens are already low contrast. To be exact, they usualy have low color saturation and contrast, with a slight color dominance, be it from the blue or red (rarely the green).
What we are gonna do here is counter-balance these built-in settings, with a hardward compensation.
The dell iXPS screen I received had a color dominance in the red tones, so the tweak is based upon correcting that as well. If you see blue, for example, is dominant, then inverse the settings for the red and blue colors
What we will do now click on the desktop profile (you should already be in it by default) and uncheck the "all colors" checkbox. Now, going back and forth between the three RBG colors, you can see the settings are all the same.
Now lets tweak the settings, those will counter-balance the effects effectively.
__________________________________
Red
Gamma --------- 0.5
Brightness ------ 0
Contrast -------- 154
Green
Gamma --------- 0.5
Brightness ------ 7
Contrast -------- 154
Blue
Gamma --------- 0.5
Brightness ------ 5
Contrast -------- 169
___________________________________
Note: Make sure you press apply. Else it wont save
You will see the difference is somewhat radical. You might find it a bit too bright, or contrasted at first, give it time... Your eye needs to adapt to it, then you wont be able to go back
Do the same with the 3D profile. You will notice it does not have the option to tick "all colors" off. Thats ok, what it means is that the color that is most dominent cannot be fixed but its not that much of a problem since it is by far the least noticable factors of the 3.
Enter the following settings. :
____________________________
Gamma --------- 0.5
Brightness ------ 2
Contrast -------- 160
____________________________
make sure you save the customised settings under a name, like "Generic Profile". This will be useful later on...
Now that our colors have been set, there is one thing left to set : Hotkeys ...
As minor as this sound, its actualy mandatory for the settings to appear in your 3D games.
You see, the radeon has a nasty habit of not applying the settings when a 3D application goes full screen and reverts back to default. This is where the hotkeys come in, to remind the card the profile has been altered.
The hotkeys screen.
When you enter a game, the settings revert to default, as long as you do not touch the brightness and contrast again, and the only way to do that in a full-screen game, is to set hotkeys. (if you alt-tab and tweak, the moment you will restore the game back to fullscreen, the colors will go back to default as well.)
I personaly have set some for the contrast - brightness - gamma controls in case I find a game too dark or too light. If that where to be the case I could tweak it on the fly
That is my preferences, but you can keep it to only set "load current profile" as a macro... It will work fine.
MAKE SURE YOU UNCHECK "DISABLE HOTKEYS", checked-in by default !
The next time you load a full-screen 3D game, just hit your "Load current profile" hotkey in-game, and voila
There we go, all set !
Enjoy your new brighter, true black-white, contrasted laptop screen
note: the introduction story is slightly exagerated to add some interest... Oh and there might be typos, but I'm slightly too lazy to re-read all this over again
- Kierrato
Ever since I got my iXPS last week, I have enjoyed every single minutes of it...
In the past I was a pure desktop loyalist, but made the change to laptop-land due to my need for portability from home to school, mixed with a grain of my love for gadjets
On top of being a desktop loyalist, and that for almost 10 years, I am also a very active gamer and, to top it all off, a 2D artist. All these three aspects of my computer usage require me to have the following : A powerful processor, plenty of ram, a good GFX card and, very importantly, a god-like screen... In other words : A beast.
At first I looked at the sony for its gorgeous screen. Boy did I love that screen... But the price and lack of financing just scared me off.
And so I turned to Dell...
My iXPS (look at the sig
) is a monster in performance: with it's processor rivalising the entire MAC network at my under-financed school, it's GFX card that can handle anything thrown at it from 3D to hardcore gaming at maximum detail, and it's RAM deep enough to absord even the biggest photoshop project with impressive recall times ...But it lacked something I was just dying to have, a kickass screen.
See, when I received my iXPS, I for one was very happy, the thing looked great and would satisfy my need for portability and gadjets for a long time to come indeed. But my first visit into the XP main theme, which I half-sarcasticly call teletubies-valley, lacked the pure green and blue shades of its good old desktop predecessor. I had been fed with pure Sony desktop LCD goodness for almost 2 years... Having flashbacks of my good old colorful days, The iXPS suddenly felt less attractive.
After a few hours of roaming around in my new-found powerhouse's settings and hardware, I came across the display panel and the serveral ATI tabs there. My eyes crossed the "color" tab with much joy, picturing already how I could tweak my monitor to have a much-improved image quality in every ways possible.
This tab became a life-saver, and inside I came up with a very efficient tweak for my own needs, with much satisfaction. :
Note: This tweak is based on my own tastes for color and how contrast should be on my computer. This tweak is also very simple and explained in a way so everyone could do it, even your next door monkey.
Ok, time to drop the romanesque approach, cut to the chase, and explain the tweak
Before/After image... Pretty encouraging ! (this is an approximate, but pretty accurate)
First of all , open your display panel... The same panel where one would set his screen saver, desktop background and windows Theme... Now click on the "settings" tab, where you would usualy go to change the resolution of the screen.
Look down and find the "advanced" tab.
There you will see several other tabs waiting for you, most having the "ATI" icon next to them. The one we are looking for to carry this tweak to sucess is the "color" tab.
The colors tab.
What you see on your screen should be a color curve relative to your desktop environement that reflects all colors combined (those colors are what we call the RGB. Those three colors (red green and blue) are mixed together to create other colors as well as black and white).
On the default settings, those curves give a pretty low contrast view for a laptop screen, since laptop screens are already low contrast. To be exact, they usualy have low color saturation and contrast, with a slight color dominance, be it from the blue or red (rarely the green).
What we are gonna do here is counter-balance these built-in settings, with a hardward compensation.
The dell iXPS screen I received had a color dominance in the red tones, so the tweak is based upon correcting that as well. If you see blue, for example, is dominant, then inverse the settings for the red and blue colors
What we will do now click on the desktop profile (you should already be in it by default) and uncheck the "all colors" checkbox. Now, going back and forth between the three RBG colors, you can see the settings are all the same.
Now lets tweak the settings, those will counter-balance the effects effectively.
__________________________________
Red
Gamma --------- 0.5
Brightness ------ 0
Contrast -------- 154
Green
Gamma --------- 0.5
Brightness ------ 7
Contrast -------- 154
Blue
Gamma --------- 0.5
Brightness ------ 5
Contrast -------- 169
___________________________________
Note: Make sure you press apply. Else it wont save
You will see the difference is somewhat radical. You might find it a bit too bright, or contrasted at first, give it time... Your eye needs to adapt to it, then you wont be able to go back
Do the same with the 3D profile. You will notice it does not have the option to tick "all colors" off. Thats ok, what it means is that the color that is most dominent cannot be fixed but its not that much of a problem since it is by far the least noticable factors of the 3.
Enter the following settings. :
____________________________
Gamma --------- 0.5
Brightness ------ 2
Contrast -------- 160
____________________________
make sure you save the customised settings under a name, like "Generic Profile". This will be useful later on...
Now that our colors have been set, there is one thing left to set : Hotkeys ...
As minor as this sound, its actualy mandatory for the settings to appear in your 3D games.
You see, the radeon has a nasty habit of not applying the settings when a 3D application goes full screen and reverts back to default. This is where the hotkeys come in, to remind the card the profile has been altered.
The hotkeys screen.
When you enter a game, the settings revert to default, as long as you do not touch the brightness and contrast again, and the only way to do that in a full-screen game, is to set hotkeys. (if you alt-tab and tweak, the moment you will restore the game back to fullscreen, the colors will go back to default as well.)
I personaly have set some for the contrast - brightness - gamma controls in case I find a game too dark or too light. If that where to be the case I could tweak it on the fly
That is my preferences, but you can keep it to only set "load current profile" as a macro... It will work fine.
MAKE SURE YOU UNCHECK "DISABLE HOTKEYS", checked-in by default !
The next time you load a full-screen 3D game, just hit your "Load current profile" hotkey in-game, and voila
There we go, all set !
Enjoy your new brighter, true black-white, contrasted laptop screen
note: the introduction story is slightly exagerated to add some interest... Oh and there might be typos, but I'm slightly too lazy to re-read all this over again
- Kierrato
