Sony Z series LCD specs

I'm very happy with the LCD on my new Z555 and thought I would share the details after profiling the display. I was looking for this information myself and couldn't find much so here is what I've figured out:

The temperature of the display on it's own is about 6300K but deficient in green (too magenta). The color is consistent with either graphics adapter.

I have no way to measure the color gamut but it does appear to be at least as wide as my Electron Blue CRT and with more color contrast. As I found in another thread Sony is calling it the full range of the NTSC which is slightly larger than adobe RGB, though it's never stated clearly.

Since neither adapter's driver allows setting the brightness independent of the color I could only set the white point using the drivers and had to rely on the rather coarse range of the FN keys brightness with contrast at default. I tried to get more contrast out of the display by playing with the driver contrast adjustments but in the end it just complicated the color adjustments for no apparent gain.

The best black point I could get was .24 cd/m and the highest white point was almost 325 cd/m -- both excellent values for a laptop.

In the end the 6500K profiles I settled on had a black point of .37 cd/m and a usable brightness of 197 cd/m. This is over 500:1 contrast ratio (if I'm figuring this right) and is excellent for a laptop.

With a profile associated with each adapter (intel & nividia) Vista seems to correctly load the proper profile if the speed/stamina switch is changed though I need to verify that this is actually working. I'm sure Vista loads the correct profile from power on.

The display is sharp and crisp with a beautifully matte finish. There is some banding in large gradients, as I feared, but I'm sure it's typical for all 6 bit displays.

Loading the profiling software was no fun as there appears to be something wrong with the installshield Vista installation from sony but eventually I got it working. Next step is a clean install on a new disk but I think I'm going back to XP for that.

Take care.....

 

Do you have a different profile for the Nvidia and the Intel GMA? I never tested to see if they were different at all when I created my profile

 

I did one profile for each graphics card.

Under the color management settings in Vista at least you can associate a profile with a specific device and designate a default for each. I haven't loaded any color-aware apps yet (waiting for new harddrive) so I'm not positive it's working properly with the speed-stamina switch but it appears to be.

Since I had to use the separate graphics drivers to calibrate a color temp of 6500K I figured separate profiles would be the most accurate. As a hint both drivers set the brightness to maximum and setting "all" just sets RGB all the same so the method of boosting green is to cut both red and blue. Boosting any color above the default levels just blows out the highlights and actually decreases the contrast.

Had I just profiled the display without calibrating the white balance I probably could have just done one profile and associated it through the windows with both graphics cards. The two cards have quite different drivers though and I wasn't sure if I was getting the same color response from both. I don't have an easy method of comparing the profiles.

If I have some extra time I might measure the illumination levels around the edges of the screen similar to notebookcheck who doesn't have a review of the Z. More out of curiosity as it looks to be pretty even.

Doug