screen image quality on Sony Vaio Z

The Sony Vaio Z series is one of my main choices to get. One of the biggest reasons I was getting this laptop was the quality of the image but now I read a thread about the leakage of their screens.

So the question is: is the quality of the Sony Vaio screen quality image great or not?

Is there a difference on the problems of the 1366x768 and 1600x900?

Thank you so much for your help and input

 

i'm pretty sure both are the same

although the colors may not be as accurate as other laptops, the vaio z has the most vibrant screen by far (i read that they even incorporated technology from their Bravia line into the LCD panel.. the perks of being the leading lcd hdtv company!)

however, you can always calibrate the colors with a spyder

the light leakage.. definitely not a problem for me.. don't notice it unless the entire screen is white, and even then, the vibrance of the colors completely overshadows the light leakage

the uncalibrated Z screen is not a good screen for accurate color reproduction, so.. not good for professionals that edit movies..etc... who shouldnt even be using laptop screens to begin with

there's basically no laptop out there right now (asides from other vaios) that have better screens, any vaio z owner will tell you that when you first turn on the laptop, you will be shocked by the colors. i've had my z for a while now and i'm still amazed by the colors whenever i turn it on.. it's hard to explain, the colors are almost unreal.. i'd say that the screen is the best part of this laptop

 

Just ignore that thread.

The screens are easily better than the rest of the competition. You should be more than fine with both resolution screens. Good luck.

 

As a new owner of a Z690 ... I'd say, don't scrutinize it. I got my notebook and instantly loved the screen. I've ignored the stuff about light bleeding or whatever ... I don't happen to notice anything wrong with my screen, so ... great! LOL. It's crisp, bright, clear ... small fonts, sure, but I adjusted the standard size in FireFox and installed NoSquint add-on, and I just choose the comfortable zoom level in Word, etc. ... I'm not having any problems with it.

 

Oh? Asus G2P and Dell Studio XPS 16 spring to mind...

Shocked is the correct word. The contrast and colours are exaggerated more than a little -- it's like having a stereo with bass and treble cranked all the way up to 11. It may be what many people want, but it sure doesn't have anything to do with fidelity.

Also, the Z has a 6-bit display, with quite visible dithering for some colours which it can't display, and a worst-in-class vertical field-of-view. Tilt the screen a fraction of an inch back or forth, and the image changes quite substantially.

In my opinion, it's an excellent display for powerpoint presentations, 2D games and movies where a vibrant image and effects are more important than accuracy. But it's just horrible for things like Adobe Lightroom or anything else requiring colour accuracy. Even after calibration (which severely limits the large gamut).

What it has, which is nice, is a high DPI. That makes it an excellent laptop for DTP and proofing work where colour accuracy isn't a factor.

But it isn't in the same class as the two above mentioned laptops, colour-wise.

 

Why not adjust the DPI settings instead, and have all (well, most) programs display fonts scaled for your display without further changes?

I run my Z590 at 140 DPI, and get the fonts the correct size. A 10 pt font is the same physical size on the screen as on my (lower DPI) desktop, and the same size it will be after printing it out on a (much higher DPI) printer. If I were to use the default DPI setting, a 10 pt font would display as flyspeck, and print out much bigger than it appears on-screen.

 

will i have problems with photoshop then?

 

It depends on what you use Photoshop for. If it's to manipulate images or make images for the web, probably not. If you want to retouch pictures for print, or do extremely fine corrections where the recipients may have better monitors, the Z isn't a good choice.

My best advice is "try it out". Personally, I gave up on Photoshop Lightroom on the Z. Even calibrated, it was rather crappy for that use. But for things like creating a logo that doesn't use colours outside the Z's gamut (like e.g. Pantone "Yellow", which the Z is incapable of displaying), Photoshop work is fine.

That said, it's probably better than average for laptop displays, but far away from the display quality of, say, the above mentioned Dell.

 

Ageed somewhat but the Vaio Z screen is way better than the MacBook screen in terms of vertical viewing angles IMO.

 

True -- those should come with a head harness to prevent you from moving your head during use...
But the Z is still below par -- worse than my work Dell E630, or even my 6 year old Presario 2175.

This page is a good test of the vertical viewing angle for LCD displays, by the way. On a really good desktop LCD, you should only see a grey screen. On a good laptop with a 2.2 gamma correction, you'll see grey in the middle, and the words "Lagom" in faint red and green above and below the middle. (If it's not grey in the middle, your viewing angle or gamma is off). The worse the laptop, the more pronouced the letters. And if tilting the screen (or your head) just a smidgeon makes a big change to the image, your display has a truly bad maximum viewing angle.

 

I haven't had the time to play much, haven't tried out different DPI. I wonder if it'll let me without a Vista CD? I don't have one (anywhere, haven't otherwise changed anything to Vista, LOL).

It doesn't bother me all that much. And the adjustments I made were non-invasive, quick, easy fixes to me. I think it might be more of a bother to make things real large and have 'off' pictures if too many things don't agree with the adjustment.

 

Thank you for the input I am getting a better picture.

Arth1, you seem to analyse the screen image quality very precisely. I see that you are critical to the VAIO Z screen to some degree. I would like to hear your opinion about the "regular" screen of the competition on 13" screens for movie watching, otherwise I do not have a good reference. Is Vaio Screen better or worse and in which aspects.

When I saw it on the store the image seemed much better than the one from Dell Studio 13 and HP dv3, but this was a glance appreciation.

Also, for movie watching does the higher resolution screen have a big impact on viewing experience?

 

After that I was looking for actual data, and found this in notebookcheck and notebookjournal:

VAIO Z1:
Max brightness: 285 cd/m²
Average: 276 cd/m²
Black level: 0.7 cd/m²
Contrast ratio: 400:1
Gamut: 100% NTSC

VAIO SZ7:
Max brightness: 275 cd/m²
Average: 262 cd/m²
Black level: 0.47 cd/m²
Contrast ratio: 580:1
Gamut: Unknown

VAIO SR1:
Max brightness: 253 cd/m²
Average: 248 cd/m²
Black level: 0.5 cd/m²
Contrast ratio: 500:1
Gamut: Unknown

VAIO SR2:
Max brightness: 217 cd/m²
Average: 205 cd/m²
Black level: 0.44 cd/m²
Contrast ratio: 488:1
Gamut: Unknown

VAIO TT1:
Max brightness: 230 cd/m²
Average: 223 cd/m²
Black level: 0.35 cd/m²
Contrast ratio: 640:1
Gamut: 100% NTSC

Macbook Air (2nd Gen):
Max brightness: 350 cd/m²
Average: 328 cd/m²
Black level: 0.47 cd/m²
Contrast ratio: 730:1
Gamut: Unknown

Macbook Unibody:
Max brightness: 298 cd/m²
Average: 246 cd/m²
Black level: 1.92 cd/m²
Contrast ratio: 155:1
Gamut: Unknown

Macbook Pro 15" Unibody:
Max brightness: 331 cd/m²
Average: 294 cd/m²
Black level: 0.35 cd/m²
Contrast ratio: 945:1
Gamut: Unknown

Lenovo X300:
Max brightness: 243 cd/m²
Average: 226 cd/m²
Black level: 1.85 cd/m²
Contrast ratio: 130:1
Gamut: Unknown

VAIO Z has an average black level and contrast, far worse than the TT or the MBP, but much better than normal MB and X300. Even the SR* and the older SZ screen have darker black levels and higher contrasts.
As a side note, the reason why Pioneer Kuro TVs are so much praised is because of their black levels (0.003 cd/m²) and the subsequent high contrast, despite having a low brightness compared to other TVs.

So the "only" attractive of the Z screen besides resolution is the color gamut, but as arth1 said it's a gimmick... for graphic designers and photographers at least, because the panel is only 6-bit and it ships uncalibrated.

*: Yes, there are differences between screens of the same series (SR1 vs SR2): the latest is worse, maybe to cut costs as you pointed in the other thread.

 

you're looking at the wrong Z buddy , that is a ~7 year old Z

i dont know the actual values for the Z's screen, but i'm sure the black levels and contrast are pretty much as good as they get, after all, it is the flagship model of the company that produces the LCD HDTVs with the deepest black levels

 

No, it's the new one.
The test is from a german website, and here we have revisions named as Z1x, Z2x and Z3x, instead of the US Z5xx, Z6xx, etc.
And they have pics and specs of the notebook. I seriously doubt that the old Z had a Core 2 Duo P9500 and a 16:9 1600x900 screen

 

<=O i take what i said back

could these numbers be because the Z has a matte screen?

 

There are some pros to the Z screen and there are more pros than cons. One of the cons is that the display is a touch over saturated and i mentioned it in this thread.
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=327507

Still, i think apart from the MBA (that is what the general opinion seems to be) and compared to the competition it has one of the best displays in its class.

Someone also posted some pictures of the Z beside the SR also.
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=303042

Forum member phoebusvh compared the Z and SZ display in this post here. The SZ was generally thought of having the best 13.3 display until the Z came along.
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showpost.php?p=3959130&postcount=2

 

Endeavour, even though you say that the Z1 in Europe will be like the z540 in the states, for me it makes me uneasy to use those numbers because there is a model Vaio Z1 here which has a completely different (old) screen. So who knows if they are not taking the numbers for the model Z1 that was sold here in 2005.

rachuk, thank you for those threads. One of them where it compares to the Toshiba screen is a bit surreal. Because everyone except one says that the Sony image is better (and almost say that the person stating that the Toshiba is better is out of her mind) but viewing from my Dell desktop screen it is clear that the Toshiba screen is WAYYY better colorwise. Am I missing something? Maybe these people saw that thread with a Sony display and that made it impossible to appreciate the Toshiba more truthful color.

Hmmm! I need to go to a store again and check this.

 

No, it's the new one:

 

The Z screen is very vivid, which many people prefer for video viewing. Accuracy isn't as important for video viewing -- it can even be distracting, when you see very dark green boxes on an almost-black background due to MPEG-compression. So I'd say the Vaio Z is well above average for video viewing.

No, the resolution does not have a big impact on the experience when watching movies. People watch 640x480 on 36" TVs without complaining, and when they get a heavily compressed 720p feed from their cable provider, they ooh and aah over the quality. Only if you are watching native 1080p content will it matter -- then a 1920x1080 laptop will look sharper.
For regular DVDs, it doesn't matter much whether you go with the 1366x768 or the 1600x900 display either. The pixels in the video are far bigger and blurrier than what the display can show, and the interpolation difference will be hardly noticeable. Perhaps almost-diagonal lines will show a little less staircasing, and menu text be a tiny bit less blurry, but not enough that you'd notice without comparing head-to-head.

As for how displays appear in the store, that's a psychological effect. Much like for sound systems, where people intuitively think that louder sounds better, they think the same about saturated colours. So the AV salesmen will often pump up the volume and adjust the colour saturation on the models they want to sell more of, relative to others.
In this case, Sony does it from the factory -- appearing more saturated than the displays around them will sell a few more Zs, and that's more important to them than whether the more critical owners are satisfied with the colour correctness.

As for terms like "100% NTSC gamut", that's a meaningless term. Unless you mean that it can display colour as well as a 1950's TV, that is.
The gamut has nothing to do with number of shades, but how far towards the extreme colours a display can go. No LCD today can display an electric blue, for example. They will have to display a mix of blue with a little red and green mixed in that is as close as it can get on the display, but it will be far from the real colour.
Cramming more colour nuances within the same confined space doesn't increase the gamut, despite what marketing tries to tell you. In the case of the Z, it doesn't really have a much larger gamuts than most TN-based LCD screens. It just oversaturates the colours, making more of them be closer to the extreme of what it can display.

 

so how is the z in comparison with the lg p310? which is my other choice. i'm buying either within the next week.

 

These are a forum members thoughts that owned a LG P300 and a Z5. May be the P310 screen is much the same as it was in the previous version.

 

I agree with Arth.

Personally I choose screens based on 3 things:
- Black levels
- Light uniformity/leakage
- Color reproduction.

A few years ago I changed my SZ premium (LED) for a standard one (CCFL) because all the three points were better on the CCFL model.

SZ1 LED:

Calibrated colors of SZ1 LED:

The yellows were a *big* problem back then.


The Z has improved a lot, but it is still not good enough for me.

Z LED:

Looks like they haven't fixed that completely either...

 

No idea -- I've never seen or even read about the LG P310.

If I were to buy a new laptop based on the screen quality, it would probably be a Dell Studio XPS 16 1080p model, but that's because I use Adobe Lightroom a lot, and I expect it to be able to match printout colours better than the Vaio Z can.

 

http://www.notebookcheck.net/Review-LG-P310-Camini-Notebook.15859.0.html
http://www.notebookjournal.de/tests/lg-p310-tarsia-p9500-672/5 (german)

 

To be fair, no TN-based LCD display is capable of displaying a Pantone Yellow, as of yet. The closest colour you can get has too much blue in it, even with blue at zero -- the red dots in current LCD displays have too much high frequency (i.e. blue) noise, in addition to TN displays having a slight bleed to adjacent non-lit subpixels.

It's not just Pantone Yellow, though -- the same is true for a bunch of other common print colours, which current laptop displays just can't do. Good desktop displays are better, but use more power too.