Colour calibration & management with Dell XPS 15 UHD (9550)

Hi guys, I've tried to search for this via Google but I couldn't find any simple definitive answers. Reviews aren't much better because they aren't specific about how they're achieving their results.

Compared to my desktop monitor, I cannot get my Dell XPS 15 to look anywhere close in terms of accuracy to my desktop while using my i1Display Pro. I've tried the stock software as well as DisplayCAL and I consistently get far better results with my desktop monitors than laptop display. I'm at my wits end and disappointed that I can't get this display anywhere near as good as, say, Anandtech claims to be able to achieve. I also don't know how Anandtech managed to restrict colour spaces to sRGB to achieve their test results because the Premiercolor app doesn't seem to anything at all.

To put it simply I want to know how:

• I can change and restrict colour spaces to sRGB and Adobe RGB when needed.
• What overall settings should I be using to achieve good results via calibration? Selecting White LED backlight seems to seriously mess up my greyscale and RGB LED (which I don't think this IGZO panel is) results in something too blue.
• What is the overall process to actually calibrating the display of this laptop?

Honestly starting to believe wide gamut is a real curse rather than a blessing because its just so difficult to manage without inbuilt hardware solut

Cheers

 

I can't see any reference on Anandtech that they claim that you can do this.
They only say that you can select different profiles.

This is not possible.
You need a display with color space emuation to do this. (e.g. Hp Elitebook with Dreamcolor display)

The vendor of your hardware/software used for calibration should be able to answer this question.

It is not different than calibrating any other laptop.
remove any profile to get the native color space, calibrate it

 

Read some of the posts on this thread : http://forum.notebookreview.com/thr...g-from-fhd-to-4k-picture-guide.787821/page-18

The last 10 Pages or so.

So me and Victor finally got our panels calibrated, but calibrating our Spyder's first using the Colormunki Display and then using that to calibrate the screens.

Thing with the current gen wide gamut LCD's for laptops is that they are using a new type of backlight, which isnt accounted for (yet) in DisplayCAL or any other calibration tools. Most Spectrophotomteres are able to read this easily, but then you get clipping at the either ends of the curves.

As for restricting the color space - You cant do that in the windows environment. Only windows photo viewer and other tools like Photoshop etc use proper color spaces. You can even have Chrome and Firefox utilize the proper color space / use calibration profiles.
But end of the day you will get used to the excessive saturation.

Victor mentioned something about what type of back-lighting is being use, it a different color phosphor something something. End of the day, we spent like a week to figure things out and ended up calibrating out panels properly. You might have to fiddle around a bit as well.

 

On my desktop, I created a color profile, and set it globally, for the system. It seems to work, but is just sRGB. I can view and edit photos without worrying about the colors being off (although the monitor is really accurate out-of-the-box).

What happens if you edit photos on the 4k XPS? It sounds like there are two problems -- hard to make a profile, as the backlight confuses some of the spectrometers, and setting a global profile won't work? And with such a wide gamut display, I'm not sure that sRGB sounds right anyway. But if my printer (or remote printing I have done and mailed to me) only uses sRGB, this seems problematic. In that case, it probably makes sense to only set the color space in the photo editor. Color spaces are still a mess.

 

Yeah the only problem is getting a proper calibration profile. Once that is done, things that support proper color spaces will work without issues.
The normal windows environment only works with SRGB, but printing through applications can be told to use a proper calibration profile.

 

I hope you are aware that "calibrating" with a Spyder is like eating soup with a fork.

Where did you find the information that AUO and Sharp IGZO are using the same backlight?

I just made a comparison and I can't see that the i1 display pro is not able to handle the XPS 15 display.

 

Well try calibrating with both , and you will see. Also you might want to check 10 shades of back and white both (extremes 255,254,253 etc / 0,0,0 1,1,1 2,2,2 etc) , to make sure there is no clipping.
This was not just happening for my AUO panel but for 3 more , all purchased from different sources. A friend of mine with the Sharp panel has the same issue.

If it works for you, well and good. But before printing do check the shades once.

 

I still don't get what you are aiming for.

JeffryW has an i1 display pro and claims that it will not read the colors correctly.
As you can see that's not true.

Regarding clipping.

With a 8 bit lut you have to decide what you want - perfect colors or perfect gray balance/clipping free without introducing extreme banding.

If you start with a display with a bad characteristic you can't get both, as there are some limitiations what you can achieve with a 8 bit LUT.

 

Sorry for the late response. Can I ask what software and settings you use with your i1 Display Pro? The reason I was asking all of those questions was because I could not get the Dell XPS display looking anything like any of the Dell UP2716D monitors I have seen.

 

This video explains quite good why 2 displays often look different even if they are calibrated eprfectly.



The UP2716D monitor uses GB-LED (Green Blue Light Emitting Diode) as backlight.
The IGZO panel of the Dell 9550 uses ???

If I have some spare time I will post the spectral distribution of the 9550 and you can compare it with the one of the UP2716D.

 

Here the promised spectral distribuiton.
And yes this does not look like a standard WLED background light.

 

Hmmmm...looks closest to GB-LED only with more red bias and less blue/green. Cheers for that.

 

The curve from the Sony quantum dot tv looks very similar.

http://www.avsforum.com/forum/139-d...-quantum-dot-lit-displays-4.html#post27328386

There the recomend to use the rgb led correction for this kind of curve.

 

Tried RGB LED with the iDisplay software. Generally speaking, much better though reds/oranges are still obviously too saturated next to a calibrated sRGB display but I wonder if that's just a limitation of the laptop's LUT or whatever. The improvement is definitely obvious though.

 

I see there may be an issue somewhere between BIOS and Intel Video (from Dell) drivers.
I'd like to calibrate but I've got the issue with display brightness flickering which I'd like to resolve first. Meanwhile I found that I've also got the black levels issue.
http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/xps-15-9550-4k-black-level-clipping.789471/
Recommendations include rolling back to an older video driver or an older BIOS.
I can wait a while longer for a proper fix because my calibrator is obsolete, although the expectations for new Dell drivers don't look good ;(

Regarding the tradeoff with 8 bit you mention (perfect colors or perfect gray balance/clipping free without introducing extreme banding) I am interested if and where this may be adjusted. There seem to be color adjustments on the Intel HD graphics Control Panel, Color settings?

 

Would somebody know how PremierColor handles calibration profile switching? The profiles don't appear to be present in Windows 10 CM profiles folder. But they are stored in
C:\Program Files\Portrait Displays\Dell PremierColor\calibration\ICC\SHP143E (for my UHD panel; also APPA018, AUO109B, SHP1430, SHP1446)
Dell PremierColor appears to be an OEM CM solution from Portrait Displays http://www.portrait.com/

I assume one can use these profiles manually in Windows CM after getting rid of PremierColor.
Although the Notebookcheck review indicates that they're not very good http://www.notebookcheck.net/Dell-X...HD-InfinityEdge-Notebook-Review.156462.0.html

Is it advisable to raise gamma from default 1.0 to 1.3 in Intel Video driver before calibration? (Otherwise deep black levels are not distinguishable)