color on thinkpad lcds -- any designers here?

Hello; I just received my thinkpad z61m, which I ordered after a fairly ridiculous amount of research and back-and-forth. I think it's an amazing machine, with an incredible build, etc...however, my only issue is the color reproduction. I'm a designer--who uses a pc--and I'm rather picky about display quality.

Like my old R32, the display has a very bluish tint overall. I've played with the gamma settings in the ATI control panel, and gotten a decent result, but I'm wondering if anyone out there has any other suggestions for calibration. I'll likely play with the Adobe gamma tool once I install photoshop, and see if I can get a better result.

Is this issue perhaps related to ATI cards in general? Or Thinkpad displays? A Dell laptop--that I used briefly and returned for other reasons--had an nVidia card, and I think the color reproduction was better on that machine...

Any suggestions/thoughts/etc are greatly appreciated.

 

It's just the default calibration of the LCD, try getting your hands on a spectrophotometer or colorimeter (Gretag Macbeth, Monaco) to make yourself an icc profile. You can get a pretty good monitor calibration package for $250 from Gretag, but avoid anything less as they just don't do a good job at all. Look at the Eye-One Display 2 from Gretag and the Optix XR Pro from Monaco/Xrite (who now actually owns Gretag as well.)

I think the Gretag part tends towards blues, the Xrite is more neutral. I might be getting that backwards though, I've only been talking to salesmen so far. One advantage of the Gretag part is that it also is capable of calibrating printers, though you need a software upgrade. Xrite pushes a seperate spectrophotometer to do their printer calibration in the ColorElite Pulse bundle.

 

hmm... i do not have any screen problems with mine, but would like some improvements

i haven't updated my ATI drivers... should i? would it affect battery life?

 

thanks for the helpful info Ethyriel!

 

If it uses the same screen piece as the older z60m, its red output was pretty weak, and deep reds had more of a pinkish color to them. I don't believe it is the video card, as no amount of tweaking got the deep reds back. This was the only problem I saw with it, as it was decently brought with a good viewing angle.

 

right, your point about the weak reds seems consistent with my observations--ie. too much blue, and poor saturation. I've tried increasing the red and decreasing blue, primarily to offset this "cyan-heavy" balance and add more YELLOW, which is greatly lacking...