M6600 Owners Thread

Thanks Bokeh for the great review!

By the way, I just received my M6600 with a LG 1920x1080 matte screen non IPS since it's not yet available in Canada (my last laptop was a XPS M1730 with glossy display). The M6600 is an outstanding laptop but to be honest I'm disapointed by the screen versus my XPS M1730. When I look at pictures they look more pixelated and I can see the grains. Colors seems less vivid and text don't look as sharp. Is it because the M6600 is using a matte panel? Is it standard for matte vs glossy panels?

 

Even i have some confusion regarding the same, i have Dell m2010 and M6500,

m2010 have 1600X1200 20.1 inch panel LED backlit i believe - its simply best panel i have used in terms of sharpness and vibrant colours, even its viewing angles are suberb- its glossy


M6500 RGB LED display is matt- has better colur gamut by a wide margin, is sharper, is birghter by great deal viweing angles looks same or may be bit inferior still somehow if you play games m2010 looks better, colours look more fluid, if it makes sense, reflections look more real, photos looks more natural.


all the above is on non calibrated screens, i have used no professional software for measurement.

I think it boils down to glossy verses matt a great deal

matt screens reduces colour vibrancy, sharpness thats what i preceive even when i apply matt based film on my iphone or on display i see a reduction in sharpness and fluidity of colour, if it makes sense. but on the other hand - lack of reflection is big boon even inside. it reduces eye fatigue and reading documents feels more natural on it.

Bokeh will be certainly able to provide a lot better , factual answer. i replied also to confirm whether i am right in believing so as there is no glossy IPS RGB display available for M6600 which i would have certainly considered if it added sharpness, richness of colours

 

The matte finish does slightly blur the edges of the individual pixels, but on a high resolution screen, you should not really notice it. The idea is that the screen scatters incoming light so that it is not reflected. To a much lessor extend, outbound light from the screen is also scattered. The net effect is that you might not be able to see the tiny lines in between pixels.

On colour (just spelling it that way make me start typing in the voice of James May) vibrancy, your observations are correct, but the reasoning behind them is a bit off. The matte screen does not reduce the colour vibrancy, the glossy screen enhances and aims it.

All glossy screens will have a polarizing film on them. This allows light coming from the panel to pass (going in a direction away from the screen) through the glossy layer, but reduces the light coming in and being reflected from other directions (going towards the screen).

Some glossy screens will also have a slightly darkened pane so that the black levels of the screen are lowered. On screens like the Alienware R17X R1, this will make the screen have a lot of contrast, but may reduce overall brightness.

Glossy screens have the obvious downside of having glare. Another not so obvious downside is increased banding in gradients. On a 6 bit panel, this is not such a big deal since there will be some gradient banding inherent to the design of the panel. There are lot of ways to mitigate it and simulate 8 bit performance, but it will never be perfect.

On the 10 IPS panels that Dell and HP use, any glossy screen would have to be carefully designed to not induce banding.

 

Hey guys, sorry if this has already been brought up but I couldn't find it in the thread. I just got a M6600 and it refuses to recognize my external HDD. It is a USB 3.0 Toshiba Canvio Basic. I have tried every version of the Renesas/NEC drivers I can find, run Dell's Client System Update several times, had dell.com analyze my system, and no luck. I get the little yellow ! and the error "This device cannot start. (Code 10)". I have tried resetting my reg values as well as uninstalling my device drivers and reinstalling. I have tried disabling and re-enabling. I am out of ideas.

 

Does the Canvio work on any other computers?

Does the M6600 recognize any other external drives?

 

I'm getting a laptop upgrade soon and is deciding between M6600 and Alienware M17x. Internal hardware performance is not that much of a issue as I will probably be waiting for M6700 with the GPU and IB updates. I'm currently looking more at precision because with the consumer grade GPU i'm using right now, it gives me lots of headache with crashes and visual defects in 3ds max and maya.

However, there is one very important deciding factor for me which I can't seem to find an answer any where. Which is - how is the palm rest? The biggest problem I had with Clevo/Sager is that I can't stand the palmrest. It's smooth plastic, I type a lot hence when my palm starts to sweat, the accumulating sweat and grime on the smooth plastic palm rest feels and looks horrible. Personally, I loved the M15x (and probably same for M17x) palm rest which is a rough surface.

For the screenshots for M6600, the palm rest does looks quite smooth though I can't really tell exactly. So anyone know if the palm rest on the M6600 is smooth or rough plastic?

 

Actually, it's absolutely smooth on mine.

Piotr

 

Oh thanks.

That's too bad... more factors to weigh and consider now.

 

I'm not a writer, but 90% of my work - the pressure on the keys...
The palms do not sweat.
I would say "a little roughness"...
Smooth - this is a M6400.

Best Regards, Alex.

 

thanks for good technical explanation, was not aware about banding issues as never used 10 bit panels. when i used alienware r1 and r 2 both had 720p ccfl backlit panels and were pathetic in colour accuracy, so much so i used to find colours odd.yes contrast was good but still quite less then m2010 and m6500

by the way, do you watch top gear?