Is it possible to calibrate Vaio Laptop Screen to make the colors richer and more vibrant?

I recently got a Sony Vaio FW laptop and it's a beautiful piece of machinery. I love every aspect of it, except for the screen.

My model unfortunately came with the eco screen rather than the much richer RGB screen, as I didn't have the option to go with the latter option.

The colors look dull and washed out, even when watching blu rays. Is it possible to calibrate the screen to make the colors richer and more vibrant?

If so how? Is there a free piece of software out there to help calibrate the screen?

If not, would you guys recommend doing something crazy like trying to buy an aftermarket RGB screen for the Vaio and swapping the screens. Can be that done for around a $150? Any tips or guides to doing so?

Thank you so much in advance.

 

Have you considered buying a screen calibrator like the Spyder 3 model or the Pantone Huey PRO, or other similar brands.

If you have an nvidia, have you tried turning up the digital vibrance in nvidia control panel/adjust desktop colour settings.

EDIT : also you could get a color profile from a member that has calibrates there Sony Vaio FW and use it on yours.

 

You could try setting the Catalyst Control Center color profiles to somewhere along the lines of:
Gamma: 0.85
Brightness: -12
Contrast: 112

Looks better for me. You could adjust that to suit your preferences more.

 

with nvidia, digital vibrance made my xps m1210's black and white screen into a colored screen

 

I have an ATI 8650 GPU.

Thank you very much. I will try those settings.

Has anyone here done a monitor swap, switching out the FW's 1600x900 eco screen for a 1920x1080 RGB screen? Would that mess anything up?

 

Well you will not have a digital vibrance setting if you have an ATI , and i dont think ATI has an equivalent.

 

That's a shame.

Would one of the third party programs people mentioned above have a vibrance setting?

 

buying a calibrator won't help you at all. just turn the settings up in the video card panel if there's any.

 

why not, I bought a calibrator and it works great, a world of difference, to properly calibration by hand is very difficult.

 

Unless you're doing design work it's pointless. Why do you need accurate colors to browse the web or play games properly? OP was asking for richer and more vibrant colors, not accurate ones.

I'm a graphic designer and have used many calibrators and none of them do those things. They just make colors more accurate and honestly it's almost not perceptible to the naked eye. It's very important if you do print work though.

 

Some displays are very washed out, with very little colour, your telling my a calibrator will not correct this issue or make it look a lot better.

Getting a calibrated profile off somebody who has the same notebook seems like the easiest option.

 

Is this what you mean by getting calibrated profile off of somebody?

Or did you mean downloading an actual profile of some sort.

Thanks again.

 

what you need is an calibrated .icc color profile, it will replace the standard one in your notebook color management.

 

Correct, it won't. When calibrating, you start by setting a specific color temperature (which for an emissive display corresponds to the white balance), and full power. The calibration then reduces the saturation until the best possible approximation of certain colours has been met. It then interpolates to create a smooth gamma correction curve for each colour. The end result is that you reduce the vibrancy, but get more accurate colours.

It's also pretty worthless, not only because the user wanted more vibrant colours, but also because differences between displays means that each individual display will need different profiles to get the same result.

 

ICC profiles are outdated. With Vista, Microsoft started supporting a new WCS model. ICC profiles are still supported, but superseded.
But anyhow, no, having a colour profile does absolutely nothing in Windows. Windows doesn't load it. Only programs that specifically request it will use it, like paint programs.
If you want an ICC or WCS colour profile applied at all times, you need to run a 3rd party utility that applies it to your desktop, but is smart enough to not apply it for programs that use it themselves.

 

Some of the older ATI Catalyst control panels have the Saturation setting which might help you. One of them I use right now is version 2009.0520.1631.27815. Even has the Color Temp settings.