Official Sony VAIO F Series Owners lounge

Thank you, it's at least comparable or better as the one of the FW series ?

 

It's true, with it's default settings this screen looks washed out. The calibrated screen is a different story. As I've commented previously, the contrast is good, colors are rich and images have excellent depth and detail. I can't make any objective comparisons to other similarly priced notebooks because I don't have any in front of me. But I followed the link below posted here previously by Joe Bleau which leads to an excellent article on screen calibration at Imaging Review. There they walk through a series of tests to see if you're screen is showing what it should. My calibrated screen passed with flying colors--I could see the difference between all of the squares in the test, even at the extreme ends toward pure black and pure white. Quoting from the Imaging Review link below:"On a perfectly calibrated monitor, you'd be able to distinguish (if only just barely) the difference between the white central row and the block labeled 254" I could. Again from Imaging Review: "In a dimly-lit room, an excellent monitor would let you see the boundary between the central row and the "5" block. A good monitor may not go that far, but should let you see the difference between the "15" block and pure black. Many monitors may only show separation in the 30 block, and quite a few may show no blocks at all." I could clearly see the difference between the central black row and the "5" block. These objective results support my viewing experience. Being able to distinguish between very subtle shades of near-black and light, light grey mean that images will have rich tonality--the whites will be white, blacks will be black, and there will be details in the shadows.

You can also check out my earlier posts regarding my subjective opinion about the screen--I really enjoy it. And I'm pretty picky. One of my primary uses for this laptop will be for photography. Images on this screen match those on my desktop 21 inch CRT monitor quite closely, and I will be able to use the laptop to perform selects, do rough edits, and even fairly detailed edits with confidence.

Is it perfect? No. I'd say it's weakest point is the narrow vertical viewing angle. You really do have to be looking straight on to hit the "sweet spot" where everything looks it's best. But that's not a huge issue. The screen does have a wide tilt range (unlike the HP Envy 15, one of the few competitors for the Vaio) so it's easy to tilt back and forth to get the right angle. My other criticism is that even after calibration the illumination isn't perfectly uniform. My screen seems to be slightly brighter on the bottom 1/4 of the screen than the rest. Again, not a huge issue--your eye sort of adjusts for it and you stop noticing it. But viewing angle and screen uniformity are problems that plaque most laptops and overall, I think the quality of this screen is excellent. Ta

http://go.notebookreview.com/?id=52...maging-resource.com/ARTS/MONCAL/CALIBRATE.HTM

 

What screen did you see?

I'm guessing the 1600*900 screen. It's true it looks washed out. It improves when you lower the gamma.

Your brother will need to get any of the 1920*1080 screens, they have much higher contrast and better viewing angles.

Edit: I was assuming F uses similar quality screens as the FW but going by some comments in this thread maybe this is not the case.

That's good to hear. My reply was to someone in Europe though. Let's hope Europe does the same.

 

I was wondering if anyone had any lag in using the aero peek feature of windows 7. i know when you hover over an icon of a program running behind the open window it will show that one almost instantly. when i put my cursor over something in the task bar it takes nearly five seconds for the window to show.

does anyone else notice this? is it normal for this laptop or not? im just really concerned... any feedback would be greatly appreciated

 

@ slrosenfeld & other F 1080p owners: could you tell if the text is loosing sharpness (w Notepad, etc) when scaling the UI to 125% & 150% using this method described by Microsoft Win 7 help:
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-CA/windows7/Make-the-text-on-your-screen-larger-or-smaller

Tonight is my deadline to send a laptop to a friend visiting me soon and the 134 DPI 1080p is tempting for photo editing but I know that the UI will be to small for me @ 100%. Since I read a lot on screen, sharpness of text is much more important to to me than Blue Ray movies or games.

Hence the dilemma 900p with OS @ native or 1080p scaled up.

 

Do you have any proof of that or link to a user (or yourself) who compared them side-by-side? The F is just out, and there is very few reviews about it so far.

Maybe there is a 900p user out there with a calibrated screen who could go to the Imaging Resource Monitor Calibration: Who needs it? page & do the test like slrosenfeld did.

 

I am assuming the F uses the same screens as the FW. There aren't that many 16.4" CCFL screens being produced so it seems very likely.

The Premium semi matte screen is new though, at least the coating is.

 

Assuming & seems very likely... that looks like thin ice to me.

 

Assumptions always carry a risk in them of not being true.

But then again, the FW series has been selling for a couple of years with 16.4" CCFL screens and the quality has always been consistent.

It would be more risky to assume that anything has changed

Can anyone post the screen codes? this can be seen in Device manager or with Lavasys Everest.

 

New video demo'ing TransferJet where the Sony F(X) with Premium Black finish is shown very briefly at point 0:33:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-snumSyi4A

 

never mind. i found the reg edits for all the peek features... thanks.

 

thank's for all the precious info's about your experience with it...

Nothing with You, I already wanted to post on that matter and Your post just came to my eyes

I mean, it's now difficult to give a precise number since the tread is getting so long but I think that now almost 20/30, maybe even 50 or more laptops are in Your hands (in North America) and we are getting so few info about those.

That sound good 'cause not posting usually means no problems but still, seems that no one tried undervolting, overclocking, benchmarking... We are all relying in a small bunch of users that gave us precious info about screen setting and some interesting pic's of the hardware.


Ok, I admit it's me, I'm slowing (not so slow) getting mad waiting

Ahah, after a week You discovered that windows is.... ehm windows

kidding kidding


I still haven't tried 7 and can't help you there

 

Definitely not normal ... my 2.5 year old Asus Core 2 Duo could display those pretty much instantaneously. Does it happen within all apps? Are the preview windows displaying running videos or just still?

 

it was just a reg edit for how long i held the cursor over the thumbnail in order for it to show the window. i set it to zero and it instantly pops up now.

on all the windows machines ive used running seven the aero peek was instant. now i just wonder why the registry was changed on my new vaio..?

 

Why not spell out the solution you found so to help other users?

 

Dell XPS was not RGBLED, it was a standard one. Dell Studio 17(47) was with an excellent RGBLED. Both displays were very nice, bright with contrast, but glossy.
I didn't compare them side by side; there are some weeks between using them.
Not using lap for professional picture/movie processing/publishing I don't need to calibrate or do any measurements. It is my subjective felling - SONY F Premium display is as good as Dell when you sit in front of it. The matte finishing makes it better for me because with some angles you don't see your self or room lights.
Laptop is not a HiFi system. Sound of Dell laps was better, they had a subwoofer speaker underneath, but the Sony sound is over the laptop average. Except for keyboard backlight what I found comfortable I don’t miss anything from the Dells.

 

USA Sonystyle is back selling preconfigured F's

No CTO's yet though..

 

Our long awaited patch from Sony for the buzzing noise is here!

"This utility updates the Realtek High Definition Audio driver to version 6.0.1.5992 to resolve the following issues:
A high frequency noise may occur when connecting and disconnecting a USB flash drive
A noise may occur for two seconds after finishing playing video or music files"

This coincides with the F series being available again at sonystyle.com

 

You can see that they are still back order when moved to cart: Temporarily out of stock. We will email you when your product ships".

"Our long awaited patch from Sony for the buzzing noise is here!" hum... the firsts F's on the market were like what, 20 days ago?

Did you test it? If it works, good find!

Could you post a link to it?

 

I had both the FW and the F and I too would like to know if Sony used the same screen for both.

The FW out of box setting was amazing. Color and contrast were deep and vibrant. The screen showed everything evenly and it had a wide viewing angle. I could just easily walk up to that laptop and start using it without having to tilt the screen. The screen was bright.

The F out of box setting was not so great in subjective comparison. The screen looked washed out. Experimenting with the screen setting was the first thing I did and it was starting to look better but two main things still affected my overall experience.

The first and major one was that there was light bleeding onto the screen at bottom-center, near bottom-left and very slightly at middle-left. The bottom-center bleed was the most intense.

The second issue was that I needed to often reposition myself and adjust to hit the screen's narrow viewing angle especially since I walk back and forth from the laptop quite often to refer to drawings. I remember having to also view the screen just a bit further back than the FW.

 

@joe bleau

Ah well..so the wait continues

 

@ErikEngerd & @roweraay

I've finally followed Your advices, specially rower ones and jumped to the 'dark side'

 

I'm tired at pages 25 looking for whining issue

can you please let me know what the solution to this noisy freak!

Btw, if I open the volume option (lower right) and open the recording device and it shows the microphone icon, you can't hear anything and the freaking noise stop. If I close the box, back too noisy lappy.

Help please!

 

Thanks everybody for their answers.

I ordered my VPCF11V5E by telephone from www.sonystyle.nl
The warranty in The Netherlands is 2 years.
Ordering by phone gets you a 5% discount.
I ordered the Sony Vaio VPCF11V5E / i5-520M / 4GB / 320GB / Blu-ray BD-ROM Combo / 16,4"" Full HD (1920 x 1080) / GT 330M 1GB / Windows 7 Home Premium 64 Bit / Black.

And now the waiting game begins...

 

Hi im thinking of ordering this computer although its a little bit diffrent in europe.

I was just wondering about one thing, how does the fan noise work? Is it totaly quiet when you surf and do light office work? Does it go on and of all the time? Does it sound much when you look at 1080 HD movies? And so on.


Ps. I know that it have a noise issue that have been fixed so its not that i wonder about.

 

Really? I wonder if that goes for all Sonystyle Europe sites?

 

ok got some FANTASTIC news. Well, for me it is anyway

As we know, it states on the USA Sony site (and many other sony sites, under the warranty section, usually found within the specs) that by registering your F series laptop here: www.sony.com/IRSP it will net you a 1yr international warranty service.

In the terms and conditions of that service in the support section of sony's website, it states its only available for certain series. The list, at the time of me reading it, about a week after this laptop was released, most series/models were listed, apart from the NEWEST series, obvioulsy which hadnt been listed yet. Some people on this forum said that is NOT eligable for the international warranty.

How ever, ive just tried following the steps over at www.sony.com/IRSP , and guess what, it worked. It stated that my product WAS ELIGABLE for the service, again, 1 yr. So I completed the final steps, and it was successful. I now have the 1 yr international warranty which I thought id never have (going by what people here had said about it). Very relieved, conisdering im from Australia and I had it brought here from USA. The only thing is, maybe due to the way i initially set up Win 7 on my machine, when it asked for the area/country of purchase, USA was not an option. Australia was an option, as well as other Asian countries, so i just selected Australia. Again though, it was still successful.

Ive got the more expensive one from Best Buy. No screen issues, in terms of dead pixels and bleeding, washed out etc. No keyboard issues either. But yes, I do have the 'whining noises.

Some one mentioned a patch is available. Where can we find this new patch??

Cheers

ps. yes, a long post as you can see. Im just very happy ive got the warranty lol

 

I'm using windows7, where can I found "microphone properties" ....sorry for stups Q.

 

Only 1 way to find out

I complained about the price difference with the prebuild model VPC-F11M1E/H and they offered me a 5% discount.
Maybe if you are a better negotiator you can get even more discount.

 

Patch to fix the high frequency noise can be found here:
http://esupport.sony.com/US/perl/swu-download.pl?mdl=VPCF115FMB&upd_id=5448&os_id=45

 

You're right, I will try.

Did they say when they ship your laptop? The site says late january, that is now

 

great! thanks

 

The sales rep told me 2 to 3 weeks.
I will let you all know when it has arrived.

UPDATE Just got a mail from Sonystyle they will ship my order somewhere between 19 and 26 February.

 

Ok, then the site at sonystyle is wrong:

Pre-order, delivered end of January

 

thanks!

anybody use this patch? is this the final solution for whining problem?

thanks

 

Doesn't look like anyone has used the patch yet. Wish people would stop saying it works as they haven't tried it yet.

 

I'm going to apply the patch this morning as soon as I get the chance. I'll post the results asap.

UPDATE: the main link works fine, but I just tried to download the patch from both firefox and IE. It times out. I'll try again later.

 

It works for the U.K but you have to negotiate, give them a comparison to the ready-to-order models or competitor sites. At first they will deny the ability to discount new models.

It only works for C.T.O though.

 

Thanks for the link. Mine passed all the tests as well using the profile you sent out some pages back.

 

Worked for me when I downloaded it. I just don't have my laptop yet to try it on.

 

Here is a temporary download link for 10 downloads with the free account at Rapidshare for those that can't get it from Sony.

http://rapidshare.com/files/341888444/REDAUD-00217284-1040.EXE.html

 

Can any owner of the F series post the modelname of the screen?

this can be read with Lavasys Everest (free). Please include what resolution your screen is and whether you have the Premium option.

Thanks in advance.

 

I think so, and not only by phone, they gave it to me (5% and shipping) chatting with them

good question, and it will be really interesting to know the model that VIAk has (the one from Austria)

 

I downloaded the patch before I left for work this morning and it did not work for me

 

I was able to get it on another try. So I unmuted the mic to hear the "morse code" again, then I installed the patch, rebooted, and the issue is still there. I checked the driver in device manager and it read version 6.0.1.5992. So for now, I've reimplemented the workaround.

 

Time for ya to call Sony to tell them it didn't fix it!

 

I'm going to call them this morning and let them know. Though the 2 issues that this update fixes according to the website were:

1) A high frequency noise may occur when connecting and disconnecting a USB flash drive

2) A noise may occur for two seconds after finishing playing video or music files

...neither of which are the issue we're having with Morse code, so maybe it was us just being hopeful.

 

The site says:

This utility updates the Realtek High Definition Audio driver to version 6.0.1.5992 to resolve the following issues:

1. A high frequency noise may occur when connecting and disconnecting a USB flash drive.

2. A noise may occur for two seconds after finishing playing video or music files.

----------------

So it really doesn't mention the problem that people seem to be having trouble with on this thread - it seems to mentioning a completely different one.

 

Yeah I agree. I read that and was like...uh, no this isn't the issue.

 

What if you guys just go download the realtek drivers from realtek itself to the latest version and see what happens?