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Calibrate Screen & Change Colour Scheme?


Kitten

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Hello everyone!

I have a Dell XPS Gen 2 Notebook with a Geforce Go 6800 Ultra graphic card and Forceware 84.20 with your modded inf.

Ever since I bought the notebook i have tried to tinker with the brightness setting to get black to look black and white to not overshine nearby light colours (for example in Battlefield 2 with the HUD in the plane when flying high/through fog). Unfortunately I never managed to get it right. I have been using the default colour scheme at full brightness yet there does not seem to be a hardware side slider for screen contrast.

Now a friend who is doing professional photography told me about the Adobe 1998 colour scheme which appears to be tops in the line of professional colour schemes so i downloaded it and imported it as new colour scheme. As a result black looked really black... yet the lighter colours all started to become rather "milky" and my friend told me to calibrate the screen for the new colour scheme.

Well, with a seperate screen that would be easy to do hardware side... but the Dell XPS Gen 2 lacks any hardware side calibration software (except brightness). Thus i used the Nvdia tool that came with the driver, but it asks me to set the heat/frequency(translation?) for white and set the contrast to 100%. Which i cannot do due to the restrictions of my notebook.

Furthermore i was not able to turn the brightness down enough for the two grey stripes to seem identical (first calibration step) nor was i able to find a decent colour match for the RGB channel sliders (the colours changed heavily depending on the distance and perspective).

This is where I am at now... my friend said it was a problem with the contrast but since i cannot change that i am pretty much lost as to what to do.

Would either of you know a solution maybe? or a calibration programm that works for my notebook as well?

Thanks in advance,

Kitten

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Adobe thingy is good for pros in the pre-press business... PERIOD leave it to the pros that still used CRTs to do their color retouching.

Now your problem... LCD CAN'T DISPLAY BLACK that it is the reason why you see plasma TVs with contrast ratios in the 10k when their LCD sisters crawl their way to reach 1k.

Usually when you want to calibrate a screen you crank the contrast to the max and tone down the brightness so you don't blow the highlights.

If you want to do it the right way there is only one way... the less expensice will cost 100? it's the Spyder 2 Express from Colorvision... the near perfect way is in the 280? is the LaCie Blue Eye 2.

ps: the pseudo-calibration based on the human eye is only good for one thing... ruin your pictures prints.

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Adobe thingy is good for pros in the pre-press business... PERIOD leave it to the pros that still used CRTs to do their color retouching.

Now your problem... LCD CAN'T DISPLAY BLACK that it is the reason why you see plasma TVs with contrast ratios in the 10k when their LCD sisters crawl their way to reach 1k.

Usually when you want to calibrate a screen you crank the contrast to the max and tone down the brightness so you don't blow the highlights.

If you want to do it the right way there is only one way... the less expensice will cost 100? it's the Spyder 2 Express from Colorvision... the near perfect way is in the 280? is the LaCie Blue Eye 2.

ps: the pseudo-calibration based on the human eye is only good for one thing... ruin your pictures prints.

Thanks a lot for clearing things up... i guess i will stick to the default and see about reducing brightness a bit... may not be black but still okay...

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Actually there are visual calibration tools that are not half bad. Search for QuickGamma for example.

The problem is that notebook LCD screens have a really atrocious color space. While normal LCDs have gamma curves that match those of CRTs nowadays, the curves of notebook displays are usually uncorrected and behave quite badly. The result is that it's almost impossible to fix with gamma correction, since the response curves of the displays are not a gamma curve.

However if you do get the chance to use one of these calibration devices, they will calculate exact curves for your graphics cards lookup tables to achieve a desired color temperature and a desired gamma setting.

They can't make your black blacker or the white brighter, of course, but they can provide more natural response curves, avoiding blown out highlights and too dark areas present in some screens.

I've been calibrating my notebooks screens for a while, and whenever I drop back to the uncalibrated display for some reason, it really hurts my eyes :)

Edited by salzrat
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Honestly a lot of "calibration" software do a lot of damage... This article in french describe the calibration options below 100 $/?.

It will be translated soon in english and will be available at BeHardware.

In the end you have 2 options... leave things as is... especially if you have a Samsung LCD screen which by default are not that bad colorwise... or invest 300 $/? on a LaCie Blue Eye Pro.

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Do you mean Samsung in general? My Samsung UXGA has a minuscule gamut and really atrocious gamma curves, but calibrated with an iOne it's ok. A Samsung WUXGA isn't much better...

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The writer said that for about a year now the IPS LG-Philips screens are closer to real colors. Then comes the Samsung ones. The worst ones are the ones that use CMO or AU Optronics panels.

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