Sony SE Owners' Thread

Thanks, that would be great! I was about to order mine now and just realized the stated expected delivery time has increased from 2-3 weeks to 4-5 weeks.. Seems so long to wait from ordering to receiving it!

 

Congrats to those that have gotten theirs, mind posting some vids/pics?

 

can someone please comment on the cooling during idle and load

 

It's quite quiet at idle. By contrast, when Windows Update was applying some of those monstrous .NET update patches and the CPU load was a sustained 50%+, it sounded like a jet engine. However, there are some thermal control settings that I haven't played with yet. Doing a proper evaluation will take time.

Note: I have the i7 and the 6630 and was running in Speed mode.

 

^^ gonna be the HD6630's fault.

 

much appreciated

 

I finished my 1st ever unboxing video. It's pretty bad but whatever. My problem is it's huge (although only 5 min), can anyone recommend a good free video shrinking program?

Edit: Never mind. Found a solution.

 

Did you turn off the Bluetooth radio and the optical drive when doing your test? I did that and I don't know how much it helps, but I'm at 71% charge after being on battery for 90 minutes at ~40% brightness. That works out to about 5:10 on the internal battery, although admittedly my network usage has been light thus far.

 

Thanks for the intel. Mine is still "being built", as it were, and there are no estimates until shipping\delivery to be found on the order page. There is no detailed progress status either. I checked the site out myself and it does say 4-5 weeks. I would have spent my money elsewhere if I knew it would take that long. I'm going to fire off an email at their customer service and see what kind of response I get. I'll post back with the results - although I suspect that I might have to wait until Monday for a reply.

To the other users that ordered\received their CTOs - Did you get any estimates for delivery\completion of order during the wait? Also, which Sony site did you order from? I'm assuming the US site, but any info I can get can potentially help my case with the Sony reps Thanks!

 

When I placed the order on the US site, it gave me an estimated shipment date of October 17. After a few days I got a message saying my system was "being built", but without any updated estimates either by mail or on the site. The next message was that my system had shipped. According to Fedex tracking, it was scheduled to arrive on the 17th, but they got it here early.

 

This is the e-mail (roughly translated from Norwegian) that I'm trying to send to customer support:

Oddly enough, I'm getting a timeout on their SMTP server... I'm going to give it a couple of attemps. If the web mail client refuses to budge I'll see if I can find an alternate way to nag on them. I'll post back as soon as I know anything

edit: It appears the official Sony forums are down for maintenance. I only hope that this is what's causing the mail system malfunction. I'm leaving it for tonight - I'll bug them tomorrow morning instead.

 

I replaced my HDD with a SSD couple days ago and now I'm discovering a slight high pitched buzzing noise coming approximately from where SSD is located. I remember this noise from a very old desktop that I used to have, but not at all in laptops. It's present almost constantly when the computer is awake and goes away during sleep. Should I mess around with the SSD installation again? Everything is working fine, except for this high pitched buzz. Or is it possible that something else is causing the noise?

 

Just ordered at CTO Vaio SE with the 6630M.

On checkout there's a $40 coupon on sonystyle.ca (SONYVIP) and here in Canada it's also a bit cheaper, so just around $930 after tax

Sony Style Canada Coupons and Promo Codes

Can't wait to see the 1080p wide viewing angle screen!

Y'all should post a youtube vid

 

Anyone know where I can get an i7 version of the SE (other that Sony direct)?

 

It might be the so-called "CPU whine" that's been endemic to Intel systems since the Core 2 Duo. You can Google around for more information. Do you find that the noise is correlated to the processor being either loaded or unloaded?

 

So I've been typing with the SE quite a bit. The off-center orientation (because of the numpad) is a bit disorienting. I tend to try to put my hands 1 or 2 keys over instead of on the home keys.

But it has good feedback. Yesterday when I was complaining about the lighted keys hiding the letters on the silver keys, it's not bad when the lighted keyboard is working properly. In bright light, they are unlighted so they show up as dark on the silver, in lower light, they show up better as white on the silver.

I feel some heat under the right palm rest where I assume the HDD is.

It's a bit sluggish but I haven't removed all the bloatware yet. I like that you can turn off the optical drive as a tray option. I'll do some battery testing this weekend.

The display is really good... actually better than the 15z, in my opinion.

 

It's actually pretty constant even when there are no applications running. I did find that when I switched to speed mode that the sound became duller.

 

This might have been posted already but its the only user review I have found. Also its in German I think.

Sony Vaio SE HandsOn german @ IFA 2011 - YouTube

 

I was looking for a laptop with a good display and I wanted to see if it was any good. Display quality is the most important to me and it seems that this laptop has an FHD slapped right on the description and I was wondering if anyone here owns this laptop and if this display has really good quality. I also cant tell if its a glossy or matte.

Here is the exact model from FRYS.

FRYS.com|Sony

If it is an FHD screen, is it good as the Dell or Lenovo T520 ones that I keep hearing about?

 

jjahshik32,

The Sony SE screen is FHD and is semi-glossy/semi-matte. In other words, you can see reflections, but a coating has been applied so that the reflections are kind of diffuse and you can readily see the screen image behind them.

I haven't seen the XPS 15 screen (also in Lenovo T520 and others, advertised as a 95% FHD panel) personally, but based on the descriptions I've read, which screen is better boils down to exactly what you want.

Viewing angles: Sony is better hands down. The Dell panel seems to have pretty good viewing angles for TN, but it is TN.
Contrast ratio: Sony is somewhat better at about 670:1 (source: personal measurement) versus 570:1 for the Dell (source: notebookcheck.net).
Max brightness: Sony is a bit brighter at 305 cd/m^2 versus 265 for the Dell. However, both max brightness numbers are in the range I would consider eye-stabbing. Unless you're working outdoors, both screens should be plenty bright.
Color gamut: The Dell has a wide gamut whereas the Sony looks like it has about a 70% gamut (haven't done the exact calculation yet). If you work with color-managed applications a lot, the Dell would be better. If you don't, and dislike oversaturated colors in non-color-managed applications, then the narrower gamut would be better.
Color accuracy: The Sony screen doesn't seem as accurate as my desktop monitor, but to explain this fully will take a separate writeup.

 

Personal measurement does not account for anything without either Colormeter or Spectrometer as the measure device.

 

Um, how do you imagine I measure luminance of 305 cd/m^2 with the naked eye? Of course I have an instrument to measure it with, a colorimeter in this case.

 

I did a clean install and I can't seem to find the driver for the Ethernet Controller. Anybody know where I can find it?

 

Moralar: Thanks for your assessment, I guess I'm going to have to go down to FRYS myself and check it out in person!

 

Okay... finally did my unboxing thing:

BigNerdBlog: Unboxing the Sony VAIO SE 15.5" for notebookreview.com forums

Please take it easy on me... I'm a YouTube noob.

(if posting my blog link is against the rules, I can change it to the YouTube link)

 

"This Video is Private"


awwwww......

 

See... I am a YouNoob.

Fixed (I think).

 

Works


Also, in the manual pouch, is there a screen wiping cloth? I know some SA/B/C/D models include one


And seriously... did you really bow into the pressure to do Justin Bieber!?

j/k Have fun!

 

Hi, can you provide more data of your measurement or the resulted color profile?

Thank you, Walter

 

Nope. Did the other S series have a cloth notebook bag?

Hehe... there was no pressure... it has some good bass and I liked Karate Kid. Plus you don't normally see that in unboxing videos.

 

Yeah, my SC and SA both got the white notebook cloth pouch. I wonder if the black S series get a black pouch...

 

Thank you very much for posting that!

 

@BigNerd

Man, nice review, pls upload wallpapers! At least the one that is on in the review!

Thanks a lot,

Alex

 

my black SA didn't have a cloth pouch in the box, only a piece of microfiber cloth to wipe the LCD screen.

 

Thanks a lot for the video. I enjoyed the speaker comparison the most haha

 

Thanks for the vid, BigNerd! The speaker comparison was a useful and nice touch. I don't think I've ever seen any video review do that

 

I'm not sure the video captured the sound difference that much as I didn't leave the MBA playing that long but you can definitely hear the difference, especially if I placed the MBA on the desk.

The MBA was louder, deeper and richer... unfortunately the SE was very tinny... like it needed a sub. I was looking for the Dolby settings I think another user mentioned but I couldn't find them.

I've always been surprised how good the sound is from the MBA... darn those Apple engineers.

@Alex: Should I just upload the wallpapers here? I thought you were talking about on the Sony SE... heh.

 

The following are my comments on the Vaio SE's display. I may do another post commenting on performance and thermal issues later. In this post I cover viewing angles, backlight bleeding, white level, black level, contrast ratio, color gamut width, color accuracy, and external display connectivity. I wanted to measure display lag, but I don't have good software for doing so. Based on inaccurate tests with a CRT, any possible display lag didn't seem too objectionable.


Viewing angles

Viewing angles are pretty good, although not quite on par with desktop IPS monitors. There is never color inversion as with TN panels, but contrast drops somewhat off-axis, with a bit of a purple glow being introduced at larger angles (similar to the "white glow" in H-IPS panels, and perhaps the purple glow in older S-IPS panels). The purple glow is a bit more evident in person than in photos.

The following photos illustrate what type of viewing angles you can expect from the display. Some are deliberately shot slightly out of focus in order to keep nasty moire patterns from showing up in the photographs. The camera was kept on fixed white balance, aperture, shutter speed, and ISO for all these shots, so they are representative of real-world performance.

P.S. Ignore the sickly-looking quality of the ambient illumination; the white balance was set with respect to the display.
















Backlight bleeding

This shot shows that there is some backlight bleeding. I don't mind the bleeding along the bottom so much, but the vertical stripe 1/3 of the way in from the left is a bit disturbing. Admittedly, I can't perceive this unless the screen is mostly black and there is little ambient light. Under normal usage, it's imperceptible.




Contrast ratio, gamut width, color accuracy

I ran ColorHFCR's grayscale, primaries, and secondaries tests using an i1 Display 2 colorimeter (same unit that notebookcheck uses). I set the brightness to maximum for this initial measurement and left the display uncalibrated. I only measured in the center of the screen, rather than in 9 sectors like notebookcheck does. (They're the professionals; I'm not.) The measured white level was 305.735 cd/m^2, versus a black level of 0.459 cd/m^2. This makes for a contrast ratio of 666:1.

In the CIE chromaticity diagram below, the gray dots show the chromaticity of the measured grayscale values (0% - 100% grayscale in 10% increments). Ideally they should all be on top of each other. Historically the D65 illuminant dot should be where they all stack up, but in modern LED-backlit displays, the native white point may differ. The gamut width is shown as a white triangle, compared to sRGB, a dark triangle. The width of the gamut is about 82.6% of sRGB, or 59.5% NTSC.



Calibration brings the grayscale under control, but can't do anything about the gamut width, which is significantly narrower than sRGB. The poor red reproduction was the most noticeable to my eye. The display is incapable of producing a really bright, vivid red; what you get instead has a tinge of orange in it.

Also, there is some kind of bug in the switchable display drivers which causes Windows to sometimes "lose" your ICC profile, if you've loaded one. Any kind of resolution change, speed/stamina switch, UAC prompt, or other events I may not have noticed causes the profile to be forgotten. Therefore, color management at the OS level may be more of a hassle than it's worth. Presumably if you use color-managed applications such as Firefox, Photoshop, etc., they will not be subject to this problem.


Video output

The integrated HDMI output is only capable of doing 1920x1200 at 60 Hz. This is frustrating because, at least according to spec sheets, the Intel HD 3000 should be capable of doing 2560x1600 over DisplayPort (*), while the Radeon 6630M can do 2560x1600 over DisplayPort (if configured with a DisplayPort output).

Subjective remarks/Conclusion

The Vaio SE's display subjectively looks really good. The combination of reasonable viewing angles, small dot pitch, high resolution, and high contrast make it quite pleasant to work with. The weak point seems to be color reproduction -- the gamut is both smaller than sRGB and noticeably shifted in chromaticity. The limitation to 1920x1200 video output also means that it's not possible to connect to the largest desktop monitors for doing color-accurate work. (Well, it's possible, just at a low resolution.)

The Vaio SE is at an interesting position in the notebook market, as I'm not aware of any other systems featuring high-quality, non-TN panels near this price point. (If you are, please let me know!) The Dell XPS 15's 95% gamut panel is an obvious rival, but it is TN, and each display has some strengths relative to the other. I think given the choice of the two, I would probably stick with the SE, but your requirements might make you choose differently.

Please rep if you find this helpful!


(*) Thanks to jeremyshaw for correcting my mixup about the Intel HD Graphics 3000's HDMI output.

 

You can find the wallpapers here:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/sony/615828-favor-anyone-who-just-bought-vaio.html

 

Sickly awesome viewing angles

Same with the measured contrast ratio

 

run msconfig.exe and uncheck the following two items in the Startup tab: igfxtray.exe and igfxpers.exe (both referred to as "Intel(R) Common User Interface"). they have higher priority than the OS when it comes to choosing a color profile (i read it on Intel's website when searching about this issue) and revert your choices back to Intel's default.
i hope this fixes it for you...

 

I found a link to a german review. You have to use google to translate

Sony VAIO VPC-SE1Z9E/B: Tests, Technische Daten, Erfahrungsberichte / VPCSE1Z9E/B.G4

Also I watched this review again.....is it me or does this look bulky? It doesnt look like its less than an inch.

Would this laptop be decent for gaming. Compared to the xps 15?

 

Good Morning!

Thank you very much!!! So this pretty Sony Vaio SE is not my perfect laptop for traveling regarding color accuracy...

Have provided for comparison 3 gamuts:

sRGB
Sony Vaio SE
good FHD screen in Dell Latitude/Precision M4600

Best, Walter

 

^
You just can't expect it to be considering its price. Its a 1000$ laptop and expecting it to have a screen as good as 2500$ + laptops is just not practical.

 

of course i could expect that... A Dell U2311 for 200€ has nearly perfect sRGB colors...

So regarding weight and battery time there are now only 2 options. Dell E6520 or Mac Book Pro 15 with HR screen (no FHD)...

The Sony Z models have wide gamut (and only 6 Bit I assume) which I can not control during standard use? HP Dreamcolor has own display driver to preselect sRGB and other gamuts...

Walter

 

^
Yes true. Why don't you buy the HP Elitebook then ??

 

weight! the power adapter itself has nearly 1kg... because of highend gpu inside. And IPS RGB-Led needs more power from battery... and there was a strong shimering from the matte display. I couls test it 10 days long...

 

Hmm. I guess that only leaves you with the F 3D. You can save various profiles and use whatever you want depending on the work you're doing since you have the tools. Still I would say first see it yourself and only then order. Maybe plan a trip to Vienna Sony store ????

 

I've read all the posts here , but i don't think anyone has ever mentioned anything about Custom Engraving, offered on the sony.com store .
What do you guys think about it, any suggestions/oppinions ?

Also, i'm about to order 1 X Vaio SE 15.5" platinum silver, with the following specifications :
-i5 (don't need more than that, for browsing mostly)
-Radeon 6630M
-hard drive... i selected 500GB with 7400RPM, i don't care about the size(in GB), i selected 7400RPM because it is supposed to run the sistem smoother (a little faster) than a 5400RPM but i also heard that it's louder..does anyone have any feedback about this ?
-4GB RAM (MUCH more cheaper to upgrade it when it comes home)
-normal DVD player (i don't understand the need for Bly-Ray, all my movies i download from torrent, 720p and 1080p..so why pay for CD's ? )
-laptop battery sheet (MUST HAVE for when traveling)

That's about it... For everybody who's received one home, what do you guys think of the packing ? Do you think it's well-enough done to resist traveling overseas, to Europe ?
Also, the store says for orders more than 500$ , a signature is required when it arrives. Do they call you in advance ?

Thanks !

 

@moralar

Thank you very much!

Alex