calibrating T420 display

I'm in the middle of setting up my new T420 and was curious how people are calibrating their AUO displays and whether it's even worth bothering with a colorimeter-based calibration or not on such a low-gamut panel.

All I've done so far is lower the gamma slightly, but the display is still pretty rubbish... no better or worse really then my T400 display, just rubbish in different ways (washed out colors, for example, that tweaking saturation doesn't seem to fix). Anyone got anything vaguely resembling a decent result from calibration on an AUO panel?

Other than the display (which I was not expecting to be very good) I am happy with most everything else. Build quality seems to be on par or slightly higher than my T400, keyboard is better (though I did replace my T400 floppy KB with a T61 stiffy), and the system is dead silent now I have an mSATA SSD in it... EXCEPT when the bloody Seagate 7200.4 drive is spinning. Boy is that thing loud -- so loud that I'm gonna swap it with a 500GB WD Scorpio Black I currently use for backup. The textured touchpad is a little odd, but I might get used to it

A few oddities to note... I stress tested the CPU and the core temps were 51C and 58C, which seems kinda far apart. And whatever settings I use in Power Manager I cannot get the "fan sound level" below 5/7, which seems a bit odd. Not that the fan is bothering me at all, but it's something I just happened to notice. Oh, and the final odd thing is my system is identified in the parts lookup as a "T420i", despite being a Core i5. I always assumed the T420i units were only Core i3, but I guess I'm wrong!

 

no-one have any feedback?

 

Don't bother with calibrating that screen.
Get rid of your Seagate drives. They are rubbish, too.
What is your Power Manager System Performance and fan settings?

 

From my experiences, WD drives are louder than anything else in a computer, including the fans at full tilt, while Seagate drives are much quieter. I have a Seagate 7200.4 in my W520, and I barely remember that I have a HDD in there until I do something disk intensive, then I'm forced to remember.

I would say that it is probably not worth calibrating the screen. I was concerned about the core temperature differences, when stress testing, but after Googling, apparently is is normal in Sandy Bridge for core 0 to report cooler temperatures by like 7 ~ 10C than the hottest core. They get much closer when you are at like 98C. What are you using to stress the CPU? Because those temperatures are quite low.

 

Well, I calibrated the crappy display that Lenovo put in my x201 and I think it resulted in a noticeable improvement. Sure, the gamut did not improve, but at least I removed the strong blue tint it had, and the overly bright dark shades were brought under control.

 

Yeah, I figured calibrating ain't gonna do much, but I might dig our my colorimeter just to play with it out of interest.

I've had Seagate drives before in laptops that have been silent, but this one has a spin hum louder than any drive I've had in the past. I'll see if the WD is quieter, and just pick the best option.

power manager is generally set to balance parameters for most things on AC power, with cooling set to active. The weird thing was that playing with just about every setting, short of cranking down performance to silly battery-saver levels, did not change a damn thing with the estimated fan noise.

 

I see blue tint over my corporate T420 with HD+ 1600x900 display also. I recently downloaded and set up Windows to use a ICC profile posted in a NotebookCheck.net review which they said they built using Datacolor Spyder3 Elite, but unfortunately I don't think it made any difference. It is quite noticeable as I can tell the difference right away with a calibrated Dell 24 inch monitor right next to my laptop. When I have an image displayed on both screens, the one on T420 screen is just BLUE. A bit of researching suggests that there may be a few panels from 2 or 3 different manufacturers that are being used in T420. It would be nice if someone with a coloriometer posts his/her monitor color profile so that I can try it out. Perhaps I should invest in one of those in the near future if I happen to start using this laptop to do any post-processing of my raw images on the go.