Series 7 Screen - Dark Colors

I recently purchased the 14" Series 7. I love everything about it except for the screen, which is really bugging me.

When viewing normal websites, the screen looks great, and the colors are very sharp and vibrant. However, if I view anything that has any kind of black or dark colors, it just looks....bad. The blacks are so bright that they almost look grey. I've messed with every video setting I can find, and I loaded up the ICC profile that was provided in another thread for Series 7. Still, nothing I do has made it any better.

I've previously only used glossy screens, so I am wondering if this is just how dark colors look on matte screens? If not, does anyone know what I can do to make dark colors look better?

I remember when I bought my Samsung LED backlit monitor for my desktop, I had this EXACT same problem. However with that monitor, I just changed some black level setting on the monitor and it fixed it instantly. I'm wondering if there is some sort of equivalent for this somewhere.

 

Have you tried adjusting the gamma in the graphics driver properties?

John

 

Thanks for the reply John,

Yes, I've tried changing the Gamma setting, along with Contrast, and Brightness. Nothing I change seems to alter the effect. I wish I could describe the problem better, it's just anything that is dark color seems to be "glowing".

As I said, it may just be not being used to a matte display or something, but it looks really bad to me, I feel like it shouldn't be like this.

 

If you have tried all the tweaks then it's quite possible that you have encountered one of the limitations of the matte screens - the anti-glare coating does degrade the quality because it is an extra layer between pixels and eye.

However, for reasons that aren't clear (perhaps cost reduction) the current 14" 1600 x 900 displays seem to be less good than the previous 14.1" 1440 x 900 displays.

John

 

Just as an update - I stopped by my local bestbuy today to take a look at the model they had on display to make sure my screen wasn't just messed up, and sure enough, it looked the same as mine does.

It's crazy because when I'm using the laptop I can't stop thinking to myself "there has to be something wrong with this screen", but apparently that's just the way it's supposed to look. To each his own I suppose.

Thanks for the help John.