FZ190 CTO green tint

I have a FZ190 with the Nvidia 8400 GT.

I've noticed that the color yellow has a definate green tint on the screen. No other colors exhibit being off balance and any adjustment I make in the nvidia control panel to either the red, green, or blue channels has much effect. It lessens it a bit but not before screwing up the other colors.

this can be easily seen by opening up Paint and filling the work area with pure yellow. Compare it to another laptop or monitor and you should immediately see this.

So does anyone else notice this with this video card?

I'm hoping it's just a driver issue and a future video driver fixes it.

 

hmmm, if you check out some of the Apple forums, you will see a lot ppl talking about how a lot of their new MBPs with the glossy screens have the yellow tint color on their screens and most of them went back and exchanged them

 

Without question, there is something wrong with how the FZ displays tints of yellow.

I had the opportunity today to compare side by side two new FZ models. One with the 8400m GT card with the Xbrite Hi-Color display and the other with the X3100 video and Xbrite Eco display. All I did was open up MS Paint and use the bucket tool to drop pure yellow onto the screen.

I also ran this same "test" on a few other laptop and desktop models in the store.

The FZ with the 8400 GT and Xbrite Hi-color has a weird greenish tint to the yellow and the yellow is much lighter than it should be. The FZ with the X3100 and Xbrite Eco did not have this tint and displayed yellow correctly. I assume this was correct because this pretty much matched how the other laptops and desktops (both with LCD and with CRT monitors) displayed yellow. The only odd one out was the Xbrite Hi-Color FZ.

At this point, I'm not sure if this is the result of the video card/driver or the Hi-Color LCD itself. I did boot into safe mode (bypassing the video driver) and the weird tint was still there.

In everyday use this probably won;t be noticed. I noticed it because I do graphics applications, but I have noticed this odd tint on certain portions of webpages that focus on yellow graphic elements.

I did try to dial it out with the nvidia control panel but with no luck. I cannot get a yellow test image to display the proper shade for one and even trying to get it close whacks out the other colors anyway.

I did not have the chance to try this test on a model with this Xbrite eco screen and without the nvidia card (like the vaio AR).

I feel this is probably flawed design in the Xbrite Eco screen. I'm still within the return period and am contemplating returning it but unfortunately, I used the box to ship my old laptop out when I sold it last week so I could be SOL.

 

well, this could be an isolated incident. maybe.

 

I am having the same problem with my new Sony FZ285U/B Xbrite HiColor (also with nVidia 8400 GT). This is NOT cool! Sony has touted this new technology but my old FS630 with ECO-Brite has much more natural color (I'm looking at them side by side right now). Have you contacted Sony about this? Is there any fix? I'm going to call them this week.

Brian

 

i have no such problem on my fz290. however reds are way over done. will prob have to adjust it in nvidia settings when i feel like doing an actual calibration.

perhaps viewing angle is the cause? for the green yellow?

 

Nah, it's not the viewing angle. In all my nature photos, green grass is unnaturally bright green. I watched a movie trailer and the faces were more yellow and orange. I don't know if Sony was trying to go overboard with the HICOLOR, but the strong colors are making photos look unnatural. How I wish I had bought one with ECO-brite!

 

No, I have not found a solution to this. I think it is inherent in the Hi-color LCD as I had hooked it up to an external monitor and not noticed the weird tint on yellows.

I think this hi-color screen is more of a gimmick than anything else. It certainly is not desinged to be a color accurate lcd but it does look great on a best buy shelf, which I guess is their aim.

It's unfortunate there is no PC equivalent of a macbook. Stylish, with a high quality color accurate screen, and include options that should be standard on ANY laptop made in 2008 (bluetooth, dvd burner, backlit keyboard, built in camera). Every PC laptop out there is either full of cheesy glowing proprietary buttons, looks like it was designed by a retired compaq engineer in 1995, or from a company I never heard of. And the majority of them suffer from poor resolution options. Like the max 1280x800 on the FZ.

I must confess the main reason I bought a vaio is the style of it. Options wise the Lenovo T61 had all I wanted. But I just couldn't buy something styled (or un-styled) like that. It would be like buying a chevy malibu because I can get all the options I want. And frankly, I spend more time with my laptop than with my car.

But alas, I need a PC because I do .NET development, and run Visual Studio and Softimage XSI.

But I do want to mention that proper calibration does greatly reduce the color exageration. to start, I set my LCD brightness down to 67% in the vista mobile settings. I think this is two clicks down in brightness using the fucntion keys. I then calibrated it with the nvidia control panel. This site here has http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/#gamma good test images for calibrating the screen. And I will say the screen is pretty good at resolving the brightness ranges from the dark to the light patterns. I can get it to see most of the light and the dark squares on the test pattern. Just ensure the save the nvidia profile so it gets loaded when you reboot.

 

at the first time when i saw the FZ screen in some shops, i noticed the difference between this FZ screen and any other laptops. I can see the colour difference in the windows vista logon screen when the aurora background is displayed.

IMO, the colour is more lively in the FZ screen, but in white background, it doesn't really display the real white.

 

Ya know, we should all make sure we complain to SONY about this, because they won't do anything about it unless a lot of people complain. When I did, the techie told me it was a "weak" issue, meaning they had not received that many complaints. This is a very fixable problem with software though, and Sony should be pressured to fix it. In the meantime, I will look to buy a monitor calibration device. Also, many thanks for the link to the online calibrator; I will try that, but I am skeptical because when messing with the nVIdia controls in the past, it has been hard to not screw up the other colors when correcting for one. Besides, the big problem is the saturation levels. I got some "good"results (good in that some colors were better, though green was still "flourescent") using the free Monitor Calibration Wizard 1.0, but it was not good enough, so I'm looking into getting a Huey Pro or a GretagMacbeth One-Eye.

 

P.S. I agree, there is no equivalent to the MacBook Pro when it comes to style. Sony is the closest, but Sony's 17" is so much bigger than the thin and compact MBPro 17". Why doesn't some PC company fill that void?!