Pavillion dv6 - stay away

I have had the misfortune of buying a dv6 last September on the strength of its specs (Quad core i7, 6 GB RAM, Radeon 5650 1GB) and found it to have the absolute worst panel I've ever seen: my 7 years old Asus laptop has much richer colors, nowhere near as dismal viewing angles (even when I position my face to be on the normal to the center's screen the top and bottom fade to white) AND it can manage to pull grays off without dithering so much it looks like a poorly tuned analog TV set.
It is so bad I have given up on watching videos or playing games on it, two of the main reasons why I bought it in the first place.
I also know for a fact I didn't just happen to get a lemon, as I am on my second dv6 (had to return the first because of a non-functional DVD drive).
Then there's the matter of the hard drive: good sequential speeds but try to do more than one thing at once and the machine becomes unusable (was FTPing some movies to my XBOX over LAN and started to play some MP3s, transfer rate dropped from 5MB/s (how nice of them to include a 2.4Ghz, single stream only radio: my MBP could do 10MB/s in identical circumstances) to 800kB/s, picked up again after I closed the media player).
As far as I can tell, HP will skimp on anything it can get away with (read, everything that won't show up on the tech specs); as much as I've come to dislike Apple, I am now saving to buy another MBP as soon as they get refreshed with Sandy Bridge: while underspecced, they at least seem not to cut as many corners.

 

I hate to break it to you but every manufacturer uses terrible panels on their consumer notebooks nowadays. I have owned an Asus UL80 and U30 in the past year and both had screens just as bad or worse than my current dv6 and my previous dm4.

 

So, what are the options for those who want a notebook with a decent display?

 

Business class notebooks or expensive upgrades for notebooks like the XPS 15.

 

good screens on laptops seem pretty rare - the screen on my dv7 is ok, but then again I didn't expect much with how little I paid for it

I know xotic and mythologic offer better screens on the new sagers

 

I'm a little partial to the Envy 17 3D! Display kicks butt, and you will know it once you load a new bluray!

KJ

 

That has nothing to do with the hard drive but everything to do with Windows.

Both Vista and 7 have built-in QoS/throttling system and one purpose is to guarantee certain bandwidth to the audio (media) player. Problem is that in some occasions that just doesn't work and does the opposite: reserve small percentage to the file transfer instead of music player.

Does this look similar to your experiences? Playing music severely degrades network transfer performance in Vista | ZDNet

At least what you describe sounds similar to that zdnet blog.

 

I ordered my DV6TSE back in August with the same specs. I agree with you on the bad vertical viewing angle but I've gotten used to it. For the price I paid for it I really can't complain much though.

My only other complaint is how the heat vents off to the left and the entire left side (including palmrest) gets really hot. Obviously the i7 720QM is at fault here.

I can also vouch for the new Dell 15 XPS' having nice screens. my roommate just got one and the screen display is beautiful...much better than my HP.

 

that's true too. I meant partially at fault

 

Seriously. I thought I was going to hear something incendiary about the shoddy GPUs or the ghastly amount of fan noise normally present in their laptops. The slightly disappointing displays I can deal with.