Difference between Pavilion and Envy?

Hey everyone, sorry for all the threads i have been making. I just want to be sure on my purchase. As of right now, i will wait till the end of January for a release date on the Envy. If there is not one, i will be the Msi, or maybe now i am considering the Pavilion.

What is the difference between the two? I know the major differences are:
no 1080p screen on the pavilion
The envy has a way better build
Graphics card seem the same?


What would you do? Would you get the Msi if the Envy isn't being released for another 3-6months? or would you get the pavilion over the msi sandy bridge?

 

The envy 17 is coming in February (i dont know when exactly).
The GPU for the envy is much better than the pavilion line, but it exchange it probably runs hotter and uses more power.
Also, the envy has CoolSense, which is supposed to help in the cooling in the laptop since it was an issue in the previous model.
Has a backlit keyboard.
No fingerprint reader (if i remember correctly)

 

I do hope its coming in February, or sooner. Gotten so used to my laptop, and my desktop computer can't play .....

 

We also have the Coolsense software.... we'll test if the hardware behind it works too. (soon)

 

I was wondering about the hardware aspect of it too, thanks

 

GP and display are the big differences today. Envy display is brighter and supports the full sRGB color gamut. Envy has backlit keyboard, different case, 2 wireless antennas, and slot load optical drive (someone correct this if wrong -- does the new dv7 SB have a traditional or a slot load optical drive?)

I've also found that the Envy is specified with a shock tolerance and the dv is not, whether or not that omission is intentional or not I don't know.

Jurry is still out on the Envy SB implimentation of CoolSense -- if there is some venting or anything differnet from what is present on the most recent dv's. right now we dont' know if the dv's have the accelerometer-based usage detector (they appear to but hasn't been confirmed)

 

The Sandy Bridge Dv7 I have, 4290us and do have
- 2 wifi antennae
- traditional tray loader (Sony Opti-Arch BC-5541H blu-ray combo)
- HP ProtectSmart (HDD shock protection, w/ accelerometer in hardware)

 

Great; then the dv quads do have the dual antenna's only the older Dv7s that are not select edition and not quads, have single antennas.

What we dont' know yet is if the accelerometer in the HDD shock protection is used for CoolSense, or if CoolSense uses a differnet device for this. I see no reason why CoolSense couldn't use it: If the accelerometer is used to detect when the laptop is on its way to the floor, the same one can be used differentiate whether it is sitting on your lap or on a table: It would just take the software to interpret accelerometer information accordingly (i.e. CoolSense for laptop orientation and ProtectSmart for HDD impending doom). My guess is that HP has done this, but I have no proof, and I don't know if there are any technical constraints that prevent such.

Also, while both the Dv7 and the Envy7's both have HDD shock protection via protectsmart, this is not the same has having a shock spec for the laptop itself. I just find it interesting that a drop test shock specification is present in the Envy manual (125g operating and 200g non-operating) and conspicuously absent from the Pavilion manual.

If you ask me, its looking like CoolSense on the Envy 17 will be no different from CoolSense on the Current Dv quads -- we'll just have to check the case venting.

 

Well, the new Pavillion DV7 maintenance manual also says only Dv7-5xxx are sandy bridge cpu'd laptops... so that there and then is a quandry.

 

yea it's funny, those manuals. whether or not the shock spec omission is important I don't know .

 

Is the Envy 1600 X 900 display better than the Pavilion or are you just talking about the Envy 1920 X 1080 display being better?

 

Hmm. This has me concerned. Are you saying that the Pavilion uses a different color space or a limited color space - by design? Or it just does a poor job of reproducing the full gamut? If that's the case, you can probably say that about any lcd display. Is it really that bad? I guess I'll find out when I receive it. I'll try to calibrate it and see what happens. In the meantime, any links that talk about this?

Thanks!
-melbeach

 

yes I was refering to the Envy 1080p. Envy does have a standard display option that, from the service manuals, is not clear to me if it is better than the Dv7 display or not. The only difference I can see is that the Envy standard display consumes 6 watts and the Dv7 display only 2 watts. other than that, the specs I see look the same (i.e. brightness, contrast).

my read is that I can't see a compelling difference between the "HD+ Brightview" display on the Dv7 and the "HD+ LED AntiGlare" display on the Envy -- other than that it appears to consume 3 times the power and has the word "antiglare" in the discription.

 

Well it should only concern you if the full sRGB color space is important to you in a display. The Pavilion, and the standard Envy display, use a narrower color gamut, which means basically if you are trying to edit photos in Photoshop or Lightroom, for example, and you are adjusting colors, they won't correlate as well to a printed photo. But it will still display 16.8 million or whatever colors and movies and photos will look just fine -- its only an issue if you are a pixel peeping photographer like me

the narrow gamut displays will still calibrate. it just means that when it renders a particular color, (like 255 0 0), it will render that red pixel according to the limits of the display itself. its like fitting 255 shades of red into a smaller space, thats all.

Most laptop displays fall short of the full 72% color gamut specified by sRGB. for movies and the like, you won't notice anything so yes in that sense you are correct to question if that is bad. As a photographer, sRGB color space is important to me, so my requirements are pretty specific, and the 1080p display in the Envy is the only one that will deliver.

 

When you say that the Pavilion "uses" a narrower color gamut, it sounds like it's intentionally programmed by HP to use a color space that is less than sRGB. Is that what you mean? If I were to ask HP, would they say it uses a "modified" sRGB color space? Or would they say just "sRGB"? I mean, it's trying to display the full sRGB spectrum, right? It's just not good at it? Sorry to fuss over words. But it's an important distinction. If it's intentionally programmed to display something less than full sRGB, that's definitely an issue.

Dang I'm kind of torn on this. sRGB is definitely important to me. I run a website I designed and I'm into photography and graphics. I also enjoy profiling my monitors and camera, though it's not important money-wise. At this point, money and wait time might be taking precedent. I really need the laptop now so I can go on the road and process orders and do light web maintenance. I guess I have to ask myself if I anticipate doing any real Photoshopping on the laptop. As long as I can calibrate it - and it displays somewhat accurately the work I've already done on my desktop, that is probably all I need.

Do you recall where in the spectrum the Pavilions fall short? Usually it's the dark regions. Maybe some banding issues? I'd be really surprised if it wasn't bright enough out of the box. Usually, you have to turn the contrast way down on a new monitor.

What would you compare the Envy display to in terms of doing photo editing? Is it comparable to a decent $200-$300 desktop LCD screen? Or even a crt? Or are there still limitations with it being a laptop screen? Do you use the Envy for editing photos or just viewing?

 

No I don't mean that. I mean simply that this is a display limitation common to most laptop LCD displays, including the one I have right now (a 4.5 year old dv8000t)

imho if you were to ask HP Sales team they probably would have no idea what this means. but yes it is trying to display the full sRGB gamut if that is the color space you work in (most do, including me). I seriously doubt that the laptop itself is intentionally programmed to display something less than sRGB -- this is just a limitation inherent to the LCD panel and so the graphics subsystem just needs to accomodate it.

I concurr with that. Moreover, you can add a full sRGB (72% gamut) external monitor at a later time if it is that important. most people using laptops on the web will have similar LCD gamut. I just think thats the nature of the mid-range laptops. Your colors will very likely be accurate enough if you calibrate your display. whatever application you use will need to respect the ICC profile that the calibration system creates, thats all. and, unless I've mis-understood the most important components of your work, I personally doubt that the present display limitations would create any problem. if it looks good to you then it will look good to others on the web. in fact, I don't even think that Internet Explorer itself is calibration-aware.

Yes the display brightness is plenty -- 200 nit in particular is too bright in many situations, and the present 1080 Envy display is a blinding 300-nit. but overall brightness isn't the issue, I believe it is the tonal range -- narrower than sRGB just compresses the 16 million colors or however many there are into a narrower space. Thus, yea you could have a higher black clipping level inhernent to the display, so if you have photos of penguins or people in black suits, some displays will show more details in the blacks than others, for example. But if you calibrate, the colors themselves will be close, yes and I doubt it would even matter for the purposes of your work.

the cheepest .72 color gamut display right now on hp.com is this one:

HP S2331 23" Diagonal Full HD Widescreen LCD Monitor | HP® Official Store

This one is closest to the Envy 1080p display. However, to your point, I've edited a great many photos (published to a hardcopy magazine and sold two outright) on my old dv8000t -- and this display isnt exactly a .72 gamut display. It is an upgraded "WSXGA+ Brightview" display that appears roughly equivalent to the standard displays on today's pavilions. It's 200 nit brightness, 4w display (and unspecified color gamut so I'm certain it is below .72) is a bit too bright in its own right, and I have to watch out or my prints (and other web displays) turn out too dark. I've been flying blind in that regard, and since I'm not in a hurry I can afford to wait for the new Envy 17 which I will calibrate.

On that note, the serious photo editing programs will show a histogram, which gives you tonal range information that the display won't. So, again, the current standard Dv displays will work well, and should you really encounter that corner case where it does matter, you can always adjust and re-publish your photo.

one of my primary goals for the Envy 17 (which I have not purchased yet) is to take my editing to the next level of precision, so I'm prepared to wait for the Envy 17 Sandy Bridge refresh and take advantage of that wonderful 1080 .72 gamut 300-nit display, not to mention the editing power of those four cores, all the while avoiding the high powered GP without needing DX11 implimented in hardware.

 

Dude thanks for the detailed response! I think I feel better now about my pre-shipping buyers remorse.

No, IE isn't color aware. I think only Adobe products are. I know Acrobat is. Firefox has a plugin that's supposed to use your color profile. I forgot whether or not it really works. When I create site elements, like buttons and backgrounds, I always do that in Photoshop so I can be sure of the colors. Sometimes, I'll print-screen the entire page I'm working on, then tweak the color for each element on its own layer. I do that on my old 15" Compaq CRT that I originally bought to hold the Photoshop tools, while my main monitor was a nice Sony 19" CRT. The Sony took a dive and I had to replace it with a 22" LG LCD. I use that to hold my Photoshop tools now, because even the cheapo $100 15" CRT is far more accurate and easier to calibrate. When I first got that LG, it was eye opening trying to calibrate it. The white balance was so far off, it almost couldn't be calibrated.

Yeah, it's definitely a different strategy calibrating a monitor for websites vs photography. Everything I read about the subject was geared towards photography, recommending calibrating to a white point of 85 to 95 cd/m^2 for viewing prints. Do that for web design, and everything ends up way too bright. So I had to take a "reality" approach and try to match my setup to the rest of the world. Realize that the average computer user doesn't know to turn down the contrast from the factory setting. That was too bright to handle, so I decided on 115 cd/m^2 and stuck with it.

For some reason, I'm picturing having the laptop tethered to my camera, using the laptop as the viewer. I did this once or twice with my desktop and the RemoteCapture software that came with my DRebel. I guess I never pursued this because I was chained to a desktop. But with a laptop, it sounds pretty fun. That would make it real nice to have the 1080p screen. But maybe not critical because I would still have the histogram with RemoteCapture.

Oh okay, so the dv7t goes overboard with the onboard graphics, eating up battery? That's what I read on the main product page reviews. Somebody rips them for adding a graphics card that's not much better than the onboard graphics. I wasn't sure how accurate his comments were.

 

dlleno, I'm very impressed with your knowledge about displays...what else are you brilliant at? Glad to have you on NBR.

KJ

 

A lot of it is the limitation of the panels. Unless you want to spring for an IPS or wide-gamut TN panel (10 bit and 8-bit, respectively), your TN panel will be 6-bit, and they simulate the 2 missing bits with dithering and other tricks (2 adjacent pixels being 2 different shades to "mix" to the appropriate color). DPReview has a pretty nice article on it here, although that's oriented more towards photography than web development. You usually won't find wide-gamut panels (TN or IPS) other than in workstations, though, and those can be a bit expensive (looks over at his 8740w).

 

good to be here, KJ, thanks. lol I just have needs and interests that happen to converge on the SB Envy 17!

 

Well, These two comments remind me of the guy who tried to have two girlfriends; he learned that you can't have your Kate and Edith too High performance GPs eat power and make heat. Yet, even though the 6570 GP supports DX11 in hardware, it is probably going to disapoint the heavy gamer becasue it isn't the fastest GP on the shelf. Similarly, it will probably dissapoint the customer who won't use the power it has and still wants long battery life. I suppose if one buys the dv7t-quad to surf the web and do email, then yes the GP is a little overboard...

 

I didn't know this about the TN's. So I guess they're not "trying" to display full sRGB afterall. I wonder if there's a way to tell which ones are 6bit vs psuedo 8bit?

I wasn't aware of the workstations either. No wonder, they're on a completely different section of the website. Not like I could afford one. I'd love to have an excuse to need one though! Configuring it here: HP's Small & Medium Business Online Store. It comes stock with 2GB of memory. If you want 4GB, add $150. If you want 8GB, add $350. Okay, sounds reasonable. If you want 32GB, add...... Wait for it...... add $8,675!!! I guess if you're Shaquillle O'neal and you're ordering a laptop, why not!

 

Well, you can't get 8 GB SODIMMs apart from manufacturers right now, and that's how you'd get to 32 GB (Elitebooks have 4 RAM slots). More importantly, what you're really looking for in an Elitebook, for your purposes, is a Dreamcolor IPS screen. When I configured mine, it came out to around $3200 list price, but I called in and got 25% off, so it "only" cost me $2400-ish. These things are incredible, though. Aikimox made a thread here complete with pictures of the screen compared to the RGB TN panel of an Alienware M17x (considered one of the best TN consumer panels available). Take a look, it's well worth seeing, even if your eyes will soon become bigger than your wallet... The same IPS screen is also available in the 15" HP 8540w (called a Dreamcolor 2 there).

As an aside, the only screens that I can recall hearing as being 8-bit (pseudo or not) are the M6500 and W701/W701ds in the 17" range. The Alienware M17x might be 8-bit as well (I'm not sure about this). Don't forget that TN/IPS is only part of the issue; the backlight is the other half. A big part of what makes a screen a wide-gamut screen is the quality of the backlighting (as mentioned in the second half the DP Review article); every wide-gamut LED screen I've ever heard of (and listed above) is RGB. Still, for your purposes, a wide-gamut screen like I've been talking about may be overkill. Perhaps you should be looking into the re-release of the Radiance screens for the Envy; I know those were very popular, although I don't know their technical specs.

 

I guess the issue the reviewer has is that the two GP are so similar. The separate is barely more powerful than the onboard. Or so he says.

I'm sure I'll be okay with the dv7t display. I'm already accustomed to my LG LCD screen that, now that I look, reports 16.2 million colors. I guess it's a pseudo 8bit. The dv7t is probably an actual 6bit with a whopping 262,000 colors. That may take some extra getting used to. I will definitely find out. It's scheduled to build 01/20. I'd love to wait for the Envy SB. But that's still a ways off. At least the dv7t is cheap. The bang for buck is great, especially with the coupon.