New T61p - Inferior DVD Quality

I just rec'd my new T61p this week. The machine is better than I expected except for one issue. When playing a DVD the movie quality is somewhat dim and the colors are not very vivid or bright. DVD's look better on my old Compaq Presario. Is there anything I can do (through adjustments, settings or downloads) that can improve this?

 

Install all codecs, hmm there is suffin you can adjust of the screen...search for LCD calibration on google, there is a software or suffin you can use to adjust the colours on the thinkpad. Also search for the howto written on this forum, i remember someone wrote a howto on how you can adjust your LCD on your thinkpad specifically.

 

Or... get an entertainment machine. That's not what a thinkpad is for.

 

Renee,

Did you have a bad Xmas or something? The T61p is more than sufficient for viewing video....and with good quality.

Alacrity

 

I know Alacrity, but you know, I keep hearing I can't use my thinkpad to listen to music or to watch movies. A thinkpad is defintely a work of art, but not that kind of art. When a computers resources are tied up for things like hifi audio and whizzy-zommie graphics, it isn't going to be a really professional computing engine and actually that's what thinkpads and it's why I bought a thinkpad because it's the best engineered best performing computing engine that you can get in a notebook. I am really glad that the design center of the thinkpad is performance and not the things that distinguishes it fom a Dell.

There is an irony in all of this for me because I competed with IBM for many years. It was clear that IBM made good harware and that they just had no concept of how to write user friendly software. So here I am typing on hardware originally designed by IBM... but I'm typing on someone else's software.

 

If you have an nVidia video card, you can go into its control panel and adjust video settings.

 

Rather than giving a rude answer, it's better to ignore the thread. The OP is a new member here and it's not his fault that he didn't realise that some members pretty much live in this forum and can't refrain from posting in every single thread.

 

word

dope.

 

Renee's point is valid, maybe just a little off the cuff. I had a Toshiba laptop a few machines ago that had Altec Lansing (I think) speakers, a subwoofer, and a gorgeous 1600x1200 4:3 screen, plus a SD reader and some other goodies. This was a great machine for movies and multimedia. It was, however, thick and heavy and had an awful chicklet keyboard. I bought the machine for development with the 1600x1200 screen and loved it. The T series Thinkpad is getting more of the bells and whistles but it's not what it has excelled at over the year. I think her point was that if movies was the OP's main use (or one of their main uses) of the machine, then the T series was probably not the best choice. If, however, it's a secondary function, remember that life is full of compromises. A brighter, glossy screen and a BluRay player is what I would be looking for if I was planning to watch a lot of movies on my T but alas, neither is available.

 

Well, I guess I'm the OP - and the comments here were not really helpful - and they were made without really understanding (or caring) what I was trying to do. First and foremost, I am not a computer geek and came to the forum looking for help. Before I purchased the Thinkpad I asked questions on this forum and got very good and insightful suggestions.

For me this is primarily a work/business computer. I speced it out that way. However, I do watch an occassional movie on a plane or while traveling and was a little surprised by the DVD quality. My post was not intented to gripe about it, but rather seek any suggestions on how I might be able to improve it through different settings - like maybe with the graphics card. When your not truly experienced with the details of these things it can get a bit confusing. For example, trying to set up a new color profile is probably outside the scope of what I can really do. But adusting setting on the graphics card - yes, that can be accomplished. If there are other things I can do great, if not so be it.....its not why I purchased the laptop in the first place.

So, lighten up a little bit.......

 

Hi I've had a similar problem as you with watching DVDs. I went to the Nvida control panel and played with the gamma settings until I was happy with the quality. I just had a movie playing in a window and tweaked as it ran. That was enough to resolve it for me. My LCD might be different that yours as I've always had to turn down the brightness cuz my display was too bright for my taste.

 

To get better picture quality adjust the video settings

 

My T61 (returned now) also had poor image quality playing DVDs (but it was also much too loud playing them and luckily it sounds like you don't have that problem as well). I wrote off the poor image quality to the inferior lcd I received. Playing movies is not what the Thinkpad was designed to do, but if Leonovo could put a nicer lcd on there I think everyone would be happier.

 

Having bad video quality might be a video player issue. I use SMPlayer, which can do a lot of post-processing. The default T61P color profile is quite blue. Some color calibration might be in order for both the default desktop, and the video overlay.

I don't buy the comment about Thinkpads being "business machines" and therefor not good for video rendering. As far as video playback, the T61P is very close to a Macbook Pro in almost every aspect, but bettering it because the screen is higher resolution (both of the wide screens) and the video chip has faster memory. Computers are not that specialized; you have a dual core processor, nearly a Geforce 8600m, but better, some memory...ect.

I know an engineer who uses a 17inch Dell XPS M1710 "gaming" machine for doing design work. "Business machine, game machine, blah machine" are marketing terms. Right now, there are game machines such as the Playstation 3 doing folding@home.

I also played a lot of video content, Anime, "Baraka," and free high-def downloaded videos such as "Elephant's Dream," and the 720 Animusic clips. I frequently use my T61P for gaming, graphic design, and my financial spreadsheets. Besides turning on the 3D GPU section, do you think it cares? Are the marking people coming for me? : )

 

Chetoverton, perhaps you could share what setting you used in the nivida control panel - that would be helpful.

Also, I did notice a difference in how the DVD reacts vs what player it was played in - the PC Friendly was very loud while the Intervideo was much less noisy. Does that make any sense?

What are the best players anyway?

Thanks.

 

I've tried a bunch incl. Intervideo WinDVD but my player of choice is Cyberlink Powerdvd.

Back on topic: I too had similar experience intially playing videos...felt it looked a bit dull/flat. Going to nvidia control panel's video settings did help a bit but what eventually improved plaback quality the most for me is running a custom color profile for my monitor. Not only did it improve video, it improved the overall viewing quality in everyday use.

So I'd highly recommend doing a custom ICC profile. Search for a thread in this forum for "ICC profile". And if you want I have Adobe Gamma that you can use to make one for yourself.

 

As for ICC profiles being out of the OP's scope - well you won't know till you try it. True some pro-level profiling software/hardware can get beyond the scope of what you're trying to accomplish but non professional software solutions aka Adobe Gamma are actually easy to use. If you can fiddle with Nvidia Control panel settings you can use Adobe Gamma.