Official Sony VAIO F Series i5/i7 owners thread *Part 3*

Wow. This looks like what I see on Walmart VIZIO or such brand LCDs. Is this common for laptop displays? I'm surprised nobody seems to have mentioned this with all the people who already have the F12 and in 1080P. Seems like they would use this to watch movies.

I plan on watching alot of movies on my F12 and this type of light bleeding would be unacceptable. Can somebody please chime in on if their F12 has this same issue? Would like to know if this is regular for this model or an anomaly.

Thanks.


new vaio F,

do you mind taking some pics of it if you can, where the bottom is pitch black such as a solid black wallpaper or a very dark DVD/Blu-ray movie scene capture? What are the sources for both pics btw? The quality suggest you're streaming video expanded to full screen. It practically looks like VHS or standard definition TV.

 

When a person gets a bad screen, they should be replaced. Generally, I would say that there are some poor F11 sreens, there are many average screens that are usable, but not up to the standards set by the best screens, then there are some very good screens.

When someone complains about a poor screen, that is fine. It happens. There are defects.

On the other hand, there are acceptable screens out there by the tens (or even hundreds) of thousands. Someone said that the BIOS update recently issued by Sony for F11s affected over 500,000 units. I would bet that most of them have acceptably good screens.

Just so that readers here do not get the idea that all screens are bad, I will again post a picture of my F11 screen. This screen is the 1080x1920 F11 screen. The first time I posted a picture (many weeks ago) there was a discussion about the fact that I should really display a black screen, because the screen I showed was of the black Windows 7 desktop. I was told that I HAD to get rid of the taskbar, because that would cover up the light bleed on the bottom.

Well, I looked on youtube and yup, I was able to find a video of a totally black scene. It was a movie where the room was dark and all you could hear was the sound...some kind of spoof.

Anyways, you can see the dark bars on each side of the screen. The screen is slightly lighter, and the bottom of the youtube screen does not reach the bottom of the F11, so you see a small strip of dark below the youtube window. This shows how well my screen does with light bleed. It is a late April F11 (delivered in early May). The picture was taken with a longer exposure in a very dark room, so the screen is actually a touch lighter than real life. I had to capture it this way or I would have had a completely black picture and you would have seen nothing but the light in the room behind the computer.



I hope this helps show that not all screens are horrendous.

EDITED for a smaller picture insertion

 

3 time?Shame on me if i do that lol..I think I'll give envy 14 with i5 + ATI Graphics a chance, and getting a 23"-24" inch LCD or maybe Y series, haven't decide yet.

this is not common on any laptop display, sources is 480P hulu stream. The same thing happen, light bleed is very noticeable using a dark background. I would say the 900P screen they use now is better. I'm not sure if this is the reason why BB wont sell any 1080P F series.

 

I believe you when you say the screen is not to your likings & suffers from light bleed but could you try this: right-click desktop > Personalize > choose solid black desktop. Then right-click taskbar > Properties > select Auto-hide the taskbar.

Could you also try to take a better photo w/o those caveats:



Also tell us if the photo is representative of what you see in the real world.

Thanks.

 

DVI is obsolete. HDMI is what ALL multimedia displays now utilize, though a new standard is to be introduced soon.

At work we threw away almost a dozen VGA->Y/C boxes reccently. The picture degradation makes them not worthwile, and all new displays take RGB and HDMI.

How come I can't put a Canadian flag in the header anymore?

 

That lightbleed isn't so bad, I wish my display looked like that! It's shading and INVERSION, with no proper viewing angle, that was the problem with earlier F11s. I can't comment on the morse code noise however.

 

Why doesn't Sony at least include HDMI 1.3 or 1.4 then?

 

Yeah, I envy the calm temperament those guys must have, to be able to put up with so many ongoing problems with their HPs and still be able to write calmly about them.

....
Studio XPS 1640 Problems: Throttling, bad speakers, overheating.
...
Replacement: Studio XPS 1647 - Factory New! - Problems: Flickering screen, touchpad semi working, capslock key tabs over, eject button does not function, screen flickers when dimmed/idle.
...
Status: COMPLETE AND UTTER .... FECES!
....
Replacement: Studio XPS 1647

Specs are still pending confirmation but if everything goes well...

.........
and the F11's have, erm, squeaky spacebar, erm...noise at some fan speeds. erm.... er..., hm, lightbleed if you look hard...?? F12's have dropped the squeaky spacebar, it seems. No overheating, no flicker, no touchpad problems, no speaker problems, though they ARE tinny, erm, fellers, have I forgotten a MAJOR ongoing problem with the F-series...?

..

 

maybe new vaio's is bad cuz it's from BB?
i mean hey it could be true, it is BB afterall i wouldnt be surprised. Anyone else with a F12 have these problems? Warranty covers it so it's not like everything isn't fixable.

 

I know you were not talking to me Joe, but I tried the Windows 7 black desktop without the taskbar, as suggested. I always use the black desktop, but had never hid the taskbar. I am not sure if this is normal, but when I hid the taskbar, I still had a thin white line at the very bottom of the screen, as you can see.

Pitch black in the room...I had to compose on a cluster of white icons, then recompose on the center of the screen and UNDEREXPOSE by 3 full stops to get the icons to turn out correctly! F/2.8 @ 1/30 second and somewhere around 50mm, hand held so it is crooked...best you get from me tonight!



I hope this helps!

 

do you know any problem about envy 14?I was thinking getting that instead, tried to look for any infor about the issues...but couldnt find any. I think with core i5 and ATI 5650 (DX11) it wont overheat.

 

lol you guys are insane... 156 pages on the third thread?? This laptop isn't even a year old... Anyhow, I have a lot more games to show:

Since my last gaming post is locked (because you clowns posted so much ) I have to start anew and link to that one from here:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/5986590-post449.html

For the latest updates, you can also just visit my youtube channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/MrChowderClam

Just FYI I have a US VAIO F11 with the i7-720QM, 4GB ram, Home Premium (no fresh install or reinstall), 320GB 5400rpm HDD (640gb 5400rpm drive connected via esata to record the FRAPS videos) and the 1080p screen with the gt 330m and 257.16 beta drivers. I test the games out without any overclock, then I OC to 730/915/1515 Core/Mem/Shader and record the games with FRAPS. Because I'm using an alternate shell for Windows 7, I actually only use about 800-900 mb of memory when I go in to playing games (usually with A/V software, launchy, GDIPP and other applications running in the background), so keep that in mind.

Please also note that FRAPS, which is the screen capture program I use to record the gameplay clips is capped at 30fps (meaning it will not record a higher framerate than 30fps. Ok, well it will, but I'm running out of space on my 640gb harddrive and 60fps videos are ostensibly twice as large and with 2 minutes of video of video coming out to ~4gb of data I'm trying to save as much as I can). FRAPS also takes away a considerable amount of fps (anywhere between 5-30+ fps. This is why I note an fps value for both with/without FRAPS).

A general rule-of-thumb for playability. 30fps is usually the minimum to play games smoothly (although if you play a game like Crysis, which has fancy object-based motion blur, you can get away with 24fps). For competitive online/lan play you usually want to see about 60fps to get rid of any mouse/input lag and to give you that extra edge, but most of the time 30fps is the baseline. Anything above that is good, anything less is questionable.

I don't guarantee that your results will mirror mine - my posts are mainly to give people an idea of how the game runs with certain settings

Please understand that the graphics card has a larger impact on gaming performance than the CPU does with this laptop. That said, I try to point out what I think are the hardware bottlenecks are for a certain game (that is, what part you would see the most benefit from upgrading or overclocking).

IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER:

AGE OF EMPIRES 3 - Somewhat older RTS game. More demanding on the CPU than the GPU. Still bottlenecked by the GPU though.
All settings at highest (incl antialiasing). 1280x720.
Average of 35 fps at 1920x1080 with all settings highest (including AA). 60+ fps at 1280x720. Recorded with fraps: 30 fps at 1280x720 with highest antialiasing for size and recording issues.

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6

SECTION 8 - Newer (Late 2009) shooter game. Focused heavily on multiplayer, features bots in-game, built on UE3 (like Mass Effect 1/2, Bioshock, or Unreal Tournament 3). Definitely a GPU bottleneck, although if you are simultaneously hosting and playing a server with many (16+ bots)
All settings at their highest (5). No AA, 1280x720.
The game runs at ~40-50 FPS without FRAPS recording. Pretty much a stable 30 FPS with FRAPS recording (except when there are a lot of particles being drawn. Then the FPS goes down to ~18 FPS for brief moments of time).

Part 1/2
Part 2/2

NEED FOR SPEED UNDERCOVER - Somewhat newer racing game. Action-based with a corny plotline. Lots of good graphical effects (I especially like the soft particles). The gameplay... not as good. GPU is most certainly the bottleneck here, but the game runs smoothly enough so whatever...
All settings cranked up to tha max! 1280x720
Without FRAPS recording with all settings maxed (4xAA, 1280x720) gives ~40-50 FPS. With FRAPS (no AA) 30 FPS consistently. I turned the AA of for FRAPSing because like drinking and driving, AA and FRAPS don't mix

Part 1/1

ANIMAL CROSSING, CITY FOLK (VIA DOLPHIN EMULATOR) - Emulated Nintendo Wii game. Much more demanding on the CPU. Only runs on 2 cores.
Resolution was 1280x720 and was rendered using the d3d9 plugin. For whatever reason, FRAPS slows down the framerate considerably (which is strange, because the dolphin only uses 2 cores, leaving the other 2 available for FRAPS to use...).
Because of this, parts of the video seem to be in slow-motion (FRAPS is getting about 45-50 fps). Without FRAPS recording, it plays fine, and with the latest (SVN 5817 build with direct3d 11 and OpenCL) it runs at 1920x1080 at a consistent 60fps with 4xAA enabled.

Part 1/1

SUPER MARIO GALAXY 2 (VIA DOLPHIN EMULATOR) - Emulated Nintendo Wii game. Much more demanding on the CPU. Only runs on 2 cores.
FRAPS slows down frames considerably (for some reason, I'm sure its a configuration setting I have wrong). Recorded at 1280x720 with the SVN 5817 build with OpenGL (I couldn't get direct3D 11 to work, and I couldn't figure out how to enable the direct3D 9 plugin).
Without FRAPS the game runs fine at 40-60 FPS. The game video seems slo-mo at times because it is running below 60 FPS.

Part 1/3
Part 2/3
Part 3/3

FINAL FANTASY XIV BENCHMARK - Benchmark utility for unreleased Final Fantasy online JRPG game (due to be out in the Fall). As a benchmark, demanding on both the CPU and GPU, although I am sure the GPU is the bottleneck here (that wet/rain shader just KILLS performance).

Played at 1280x720.
Score with FRAPS is 1056, without FRAPS is 1382. Average framerate (without FRAPS) is ~25 fps with periods at 40+ fps and below 18 fps (during the scene on the ship - the wet shader just kills the GPU).

Part 1/1

-----

Test for a new intro for my gaming vids. Made in After Effects CS4. Render time was ~3 minutes at 1280x720. CPU is definitely the bottleneck here, as the GPU probably isn't under load during the render . RAM was also probably a bottleneck, AE was showing 59% usage during the render. 16GB of OC'd DDR3 2133 would've been preferred, but I thought the F11 held its own .

Part 1/1

That's all. I've recovered my copy of GTA IV so I will have that up soon. I also got the BIOS off of my PS2 so expect some videos for Final Fantasy XII on the PCSX2 emulator soon (that is IF I actually manage to get it working...).

 

just wondering if anybody here had an issue with the new bios update. cause it. seems like for me my lower half of my laptop or the resting pad area got a lot hotter. its a really noticeable compared to the top half which is cold.

 

Nope, you would be the first one.

Go back 15 pages & read. All the stress tests we ran & posted screen capture of after updating the BIOS on our_F11's show excellent low temperatures compared to other brands with i7's.

 

Don't worry, that white line is the top edge of the taskbar itself. Just grab the taskbar & drag it to one of the sides to move it & will now see the line on said side. Or right-click taskbar > Properties > taskbar location on screen & select left or right. Thats a trick to gain vertical headroom when needed BTW.

Now that's a technically good photo & a good LCD btw. Thanks for taking the time to make & post.

 

This message is for Joe. Hey man, I read your writeup on the replacement for the VPCF115FM. I gotta say it was really well done and made replacement a snap. I have the same laptop, screen got smashed in a motorcycle accident. amazingly, rest of the laptop was perfectly intact.

Anyhow, I followed your instructions and ran into a problem. The original screen (LQ164M1LD4C) only had 1 terminated wire pair going to the inverter (pink & white). I noticed the inverter was a different model than the one in your pic, although the screen model was the same. Inverter # ANKB1.

When I ordered the replacement screen (didn't think I needed a new inverter), I got the one from east coast LCD's, which was one of 2 vendors that come up on your link.

Everything was legit, except the new monitor has two pairs of terminated inverter cables, (pink & brown and blue and black). I plugged in the pink and brown first, and the screen lit blue, then started getting black patches, so i turned it off. then i tried the other pair, same result.

Anyhow, could you give me some advice as to what could be the issue? do you have to replace the inverter? did I get the wrong screen? Why the extra set of inverter cables? Thanks for any info!

jay

 

My F12 1080p screen looked very similar to yours. How did you find the build date, is it on a label somewhere?

 

your build date is on a sticker label underneath your laptop.

Mfd: xx/xx

 

This was also covered. You need to order the two-lamp invertor.

 

I decided to join the family

 

That would be defective from my perspective. This thing is going back for sure, I'm replacing it with Envy 14 or envy 17 with core i5 and ATI 58XX series card. Same price, paid almost $1500 for this F. I wonder how come HP can give better screen with aluminium body and Sony still give us messed up screen with the same price?

 

So I'm beginning to think Sony's service will be a pain to deal with in future if I have any issues that need to be dealt with. Not a very comforting thought.

1) My request for written confirmation for my credit sent via email to the supervisor I was dealing with was ignored. It was CCed to customersupport and feedback. I guess if there is an issue I will have the good luck to deal with billing inquiries since I won't know beforehand to decide if I need to cancel my order before shipment.

2) My complaints regarding the lying staff and supervisor to customersupport and feedback were ignored.

3) I just called to find out if my estimated shipping date has been moved up since people ordering a week after me are getting theirs shipped out two weeks before me. I was told all the ones to be shipped July 27 are done and everything else is Aug 10. I repeated. I was told if i ordered after it will be shipped later. I repeated. I was told maybe mine will ship out earlier but if shipping date is changed it would not show up on their systems (?). So now I don't know when my estimated date is. If it is still Aug 10 while others after me are July 27 then that will truly cement Sony's great customer service system as being worse than Dell. Right now they're neck in neck.

4) There appears to be no information regarding the credit I'm supposed to get in my order or account info. I hope this isn't going to come down to the word of an already proven liar.

5) I asked about more information regarding the exchange policy and was told they don't exchange. Despite it saying this on Sony's site regarding customized computers: "We offer exchange or repair on defective CTO models."

The rep said they only do repairs. And during the whole 1 yr warranty period (obviously!). Can anybody who knows the Canadian Sony exchange policy please tell me since Sony reps seem not only to not know the timeframe they apply to but also the fact that exchanges are offered in the first place! This is the same rep who told me before that I couldn't cancel my order 24 hours after it was made despite it saying this on the Sony site: "Please note that order changes and cancellations can be made prior to order shipment."

6) When I asked the part number for the large capacity battery I was told he didn't know. And that a new battery is coming out within the month and maybe I'd get that one. Or maybe not. Should I even ask if this is true???

I feel scared.

 

SONY is going cheap in their operation...I supposed that would include wages for their employee, once they feel they are underpaid and get a lot of pressure from the top dog, they will be ignorant or just give you excuses.

 

BluRay burner option has gone up to $160 (was about $107 before).
1920x1080p option is now $100 (I think it was about $35 before).

As already mentioned by others, i7 740 option went from free to $84 about 9 days ago.

There may have been other minor increases.

My savings (taxes in) so far by ordering on June 26th are $233, I can live with that!

 

before:

Blu-ray writer $101.37
FHD $29.97


where I live, I paid 13% prior to hst anyways when I ordered June 30th.

 

I just bought F12 S (VPCF12S1E) and after 30 mins of fooling around with Win7 settings - touchpad settings, keyboard etc Ive ended with 7 bad pixels:

1x white
1x blue
5x green

F** sony.

 

I have visited my local Sony store again today to try and purchase an F12 S (VPCF12S1E), I have on two previous occasions tried the F11 S. I have a good relationship with my local store and they always let me test kit before I buy.

On each visit I have come away from the store very disappointed with the quality or rather lack of quality of the screen. Each of the units I have tested has displayed an unacceptable degree of light bleed.

It seems to me that Sony's quality control with these screens needs to be looked at. I really don't think I should be paying £1300 for something with this sort of fault.

I know there are people on this forum with good screens but I have to say I am begining to lose faith. I am not really sure if I want to waste any more time looking at the Sony F.

Maybe I will give it one more try, not really sure

 

WOW!
So my laptop was suppose to be shipped on the 13th, but i just checked today and they already shipped it. Should be here on monday!!!

Btw..i would rather have a laptop with minor problems like light bleed than have a laptop from HP that has dozens and is a pain to use cuz the thing over heats like crazy or has a loose screen or just plain breaks in 2 years. I've had HP laptops and the heat annoys me like no other.

 

Just make sure you check the screen and Morse code. I cant live starring such screen for the next 5 year. The space bar squeak is no longer an issue.

The HP have low quality product I agreed, but they do have some high quality product as well, depends what you purchased. I purchased HP mini 311 (the highest end netbook they have) and have no issue. The envy supposed to be the highest end laptop they have, I think envy have better quality then others laptop they had.

 

+1, for me...2 times is enough. I no longer have faith on current F series. I would save time and energy getting something else.

 

Envy is one of the most complained about laptops right now...loose screens over heat, etc.

 

That would be envy generation 1, I haven't found anyone complaining about the envy 14 (gen 2), the 17 (gen 2) seems to be running hotter then expected. That's why I was thinking go with the 14 and have 20+ inch monitor to make it a dual screen.

 

No laptop is perfect; at its price versus performance point the F-series is the least imperfect. Get a new screen after a couple of years, when you upgrade the CPU. That's what I plan to do anyway..

 

The email I sent July 6 got replied to just now. This is what it says:

July 18 is a Sun so it could be the week prior or the following week. Seems likely it's the latter though but this isn't very accurate considering estimations seem to be on specific days. Regardless, it's earlier than even July 27 so that's great news...considering I'm running out of time with my current HP laptop repeatedly shutting down on me during use. Second one in a row to do this.

Email did not reply about the credit though but at least I got some useful information finally out of somebody from Sony.

 

Since a few hours ago i am a proud owner of one F12Z1E
Now its time to clean-up, customize etc ...

Anyone knows how to change the amount of "system shared memory" assign to the graphics network ?
(it comes with 4GB, i want 2GB)

Thanks

 

I finally got to see the F12's in person. Same screen as the F11. I could not account for any of the other issues like the morse code noise or fan whining since it was so noisy at the store. The lower budget E series screen seems to have a slightly wider vertical viewing angle but I was completely put off by the build quality of the casing. SO, this means I am now going ahead with my FW screen switch and ordering F11's instead of F12's for a cheaper price.

I also took a good long look at Sony's 46" 3d tv (which was my first reason to go to the store. The F12 sealed my indecisiveness). OH WOW!! I'm going to order one this weekend since they're having a deal right now that includes two pairs of 3d glass, transmitter and a 3d blu ray player. Too bad there's not a lot of content to make use of this feature yet.

 

a lot of 3d stuff should come out this fall/winter.

Hey Joe about the Recovery discs, is there an option to make a recovery file on a external HDD instead or does it have to be on DVDs

 

Well the backup is on my dad's 5400 RPM toshiba prebuilt external...so i have no choice...and I wanna keep my bluray burner.

umm this is getting to be f*ckin ridiculous! I restored the backup and it wouldn't boot because there was no boot info or a system reserved partition...

i'm using macrium reflect...so what I decided to do...was reformat, therefore recreating the system reserved partition, and reinstall windows 7 because I have a disc.

Now I'm re-recovering the Windows partition and hopefully this boots now, if not I can now overwrite that newly created system reserved partition. This is not enjoyable at all! Macrium reflect wouldn't let me do an exact copy, only partition by partition so it f*cked up!

Any suggestions? Haha, I'm just praying this works.

Here goes another 8 hours...

Also, is it normal for me to feel the warmth of the momentus XT on the palm rest? It feels much warmer than my old lappy. (maybe because it's been writing to it for a while?)

 

can anybody here help me out?
i want to check my computer temperatures to see if its running normal at idle and under load because it seems to me that after the new bio update my palm rest area is getting really hot just surfing the web...so something has to be going wrong.

so anybody know any good programs i can just install real quick and post it up the results on here so people can confirm my temps or normal or not.

thanks

 

I'd sure like to know how you get the optical drive button to reference the folders list!!:wink:

 

It's a discrete graphics unit which doesn't share system memory. It has its own 500 or 1000 Meg.

 

You may be right but I find it very hard to accept a bad screen when I know they are not all like that. The store have a Sony F12 Z which is £300 more but I may go and have a look today, unsure.

 

Yes it has is own 1GB, but then has another 3GB that area shared from RAM
By the behavior till now i will say that the the 3GB shared memory is used in a dynamic way (was needed) i don't really see a way to configure only 1GB of discrete memory and 1GB of shared memory ...

Thanks for the effort

 

Hi I ordered one on July 2nd, so I'm hoping it gets here soon
Anyways, does anyone know how the Webcam is on the F12?

 

It's not amazing or anything.. just average. 2 megapixel at 640x480 resolution, but I guess that would suffice for Skype/Messenger webcam calls, YouTube uploads, etc.

 

http://forum.notebookreview.com/sony/258656-crappy-sony-motion-eye-cam.html


this one's a sore point for me. seems like every other brand is putting out 2.0 MP webcams and Sony doesn't upgrade theirs but puts in a crappy 1.3 MP webcam in the VAIOs. the whole point of an integrated webcam in a laptop is for convenience, to be there if you need it easily accessible. now, if this cam bites (which it seems to), I'll have to plug in an external cam and perch it on the display. pretty inconvenient and unnecessary.

 

The GPU has 1GB of dedicated discrete memory. The shared memory is not assigned to the GPU. The term 'shared' means that the video system has the ability to use available main memory as needed, if requrements exceed its dedicated memory capacity. With 1GB of dedicated memory the chances of that happening are remote. You don't need or want to limit the amount shared with the GPU. It's safest to let the OS manage memory allocations.

 

So I went to try out the F12 Z which clocks in at £1600. The screen was pretty awful and not just light leakage, there was something else going on as well. It was like the screen was patchy in places which showed up on darker material, not really sure what it was.

This is just shocking QC, this screen was much worse than the 4 year old Acer I have which cost less than half the price.

I am not really sure what to do now, I have spent a fair bit of time trying to get a reasonable screen and I do not really want to keep messing about but I really am not sure what other models to look at

 

Joe,

I noticed you roam over on the Envy 17 owners board. Now, you're certainly free to post as you please but I just find it a little strange. Almost as if you were out there to gather fault data.

At any rate, to those receiving shoddy screens, I'm sorry you guys are being disappointed after all the waiting and hoopla over F12. I sent my F12 back after two days for a full refund w/o restocking at TigerDirect.

When I get my E17, I'll post an honest review or at the very least some screen shots for those considering alternatives.

Further, to the one poster considering a build, the i5 option has been deleted from HP's site, so you have to go quad core if you buy. I purchased one of the last i5's before option deletion. Hopefully it will run cooler than the quads.

Anyhow, let me go now, this is not an E17 board. Best of luck to all!

 

**** this *** i really want to buy this laptop but damn all these problems