Hey everyone I own a Spyder Pro II at home and I'm going to try calibrate my screen tonight. Now each screen will vary a little PC to PC however I'll gladly post up the calibrated settings if all the x61s screens are the same so you all can use these settings to get closer to having a calibrated screen. (helps with clors and contrast)

I noticed the sceen is kinda grainly almsot like you can see the pixle grid when viewing at an angle. So if they are different which screen do I have? All I know is that it sucks, but it will get the job done. Hopefuly calibrating it will help some.

Colour calibrating a non-IPS (or equivalent) notebook LCD panel is an exercise in futility. The next time you sit at the display it'll look slighly different than before, due to it (or you) being at a slightly different angle and what not.

If all you're after is to get rid of some of that "washed out" look, an easy tweak is to go into the control panel for the Intel integrated graphics and play and make a subtle tweak to the gamma control.

No, I have a calibration tool to do this properly. I can post the calibration settings to help people without the tool to get closer to calibrated. The differnce it can make can be minute to significant depending on the display. I can't rely on my eyes alone, I'll let the device do the work for me.

what is the calibration tool?

http://www.amazon.com/ColorVision-S2P100-Spyder2PRO...

Didn't have time to install it last night...Spent hours trying to get my new laptop networked to my XP PC at home...

Finaly have up and just pluged it into the switch where both computers could see each other, not sure why they can't see each other through my wireless (works with XP to XP but neither machien could see each other with this new vista garbage)

Anyways sorry for the ran't I'll try to play with it tonight.


mod edit: long link shortened

Finished Calibrating my X61S, and just WOW what a difference that made! I'd say this monitor has improved the most out of all monitors I have calibrated to the point where I'm satisfied with the screen now. At the end of calibrating there is a sample photo and you can see the before and after, everything looks MUCH warmer now and not so washed out...I would say 100% color improvement here...

Download the file here!

To use the profile in Vista it should be used under
Control Panel -> Personalization -> Adjust Screen Resolution -> Color Management -> Add The file.
Generaly these are stored in "C:\Windows\System32\spool\drivers\color\X61S-ThinkPad Display 1024x768.icm"

Set the File as default!

Enjoy!

*note: You will need to disable Adobe Gama if your using it or have it installed as it will overide windows color profiles.

*note: To FULLY calibrate your monitor you would need one of these tools, but if all x61s displays are pretty much the same, then this profile should get you close. Colorvision recommends re-calibrating every month for profesional use, but I don't do it that often, the initial calibration makes the most difference!

If any of you try my calibrated profile, please post wether it made your screen better or worse, its not gauranteed to work, so I'm interested in the results. You can always go back to the old profile with a couple mouse clicks.

couldnt download

looks like one of there servers is down but if you change the checkbox to Download via Cogent it should work.

I stand corrected! Using your profile on my X, the screen does have a subtle improvement, when at a tilt angle where it doesn't start to wash out.

Pardon my ignorance: is this changing the Red Green Blue values? If so, mind posting those values for non-MS Windows users? Is your x61s an Ultralight or standard screen? Thanks!

Good point! my calibration is for the Ultralight, I would not recommend using it if that is not the screen you have, and even then the "real" way to do it is to buy the device (Spider2Express is the same thing with different software and goes on sale often), it is mostly going to correct the RGB values but also reads and corrects greys and blacks to some extent. To the poster above its not going to fix the viewing angle at all. The colors will look ALOT different if you do a before/after though! In my case it was 100% better.

I can post the values if someone can tell me how to find them in vista, but I dont know how that would help in a non MS OS?

i don't have an ultralight display, but i tried your color profile anyway and it did make a noticeable difference. thanks.

Thank you for this calibration download for the X61s screen. A bit convoluted but I managed to set the download as the default.
But how does one disable Adobe Gamma. Don't exactly see how to do this from the control panel
Thanks, RM, Queens, NY

On a windows XP machine you simply type "MSCONFIG" from the run command box under the start button. Looks like vistsa does not have the run option anymore, so you will need to open a command line prompt from under the Programs->Acessories Tab then type "MSCONFIG" from the command line prompt.
From there you would go to startup, and simply uncheck "adobe gamma loader." Load the profile and re-start.

Thanks, as well. Was able to do that in a startup cop type program from sysinternals. I'm eager to see if I notice any color differences.

The difference is night and day, however the human eye will kinda adjust itself somewhat making it harder to see the differences unless you can click back and fourth (like at the end of the software calibration program). You really would never know what your missing out on unless you calibrate the monitor.

I'd suggesting setting a colorfull background from http://www.interfacelift.com and staring it it, switching the color profile and restarting, and you should be able to tell a noticable difference.

Would it cause damage to the LCD if I were to use it on my regular X61 non-Ultralight?

Nah, it jsut calibrates the colors to look better, it may work or not, but I was thinking the x61 would have a different panel. You can give it a shot but it's not going to alibrate a reg x61, I suppose it can make some improvement though. It's reversable, so you can just chang back to factory color profile.

If it's just RGB values they can be adjusted in most any desktop/window manager. Worth a shot I think

Sorry no MS here. You can't see the RGB settings by right clicking on the desktop and looking in display properties or some such?

Thanks!

Thanks, it works great in Linux using xcalib. Colors look much more vibrant after loading your profile! Generally it seems slightly red/brown to me, but maybe that's because I've spent so long staring at the display uncalibrated.

Thanks for xcalib information and link!

Absolutely, glad to help. Also, here are some comparison shots I took with a digital camera. The difference is amazing.

Before:

After:


I followed the instructions here and set GDM to load the profile automatically:

Append to /etc/gdm/Init/Default

To restore the calibration data when resuming from suspend or hibernation, I appended the following file in Ubuntu (Gutsy):

/etc/acpi/resume.d/55-screen.sh

MOD EDIT: Picture warning added.

Justintoxicated, do you remember what you set your white point to when you calibrated your X61s. Did you set it to native white point or to some color temperature (perhaps 6500K)?

Also, before calibrating the screen, did you have the brightness setting all the way up? From what I understand, the X61s is quite bright at its highest setting but colors tend to wash out when its that high. I'm wondering how that would affect the calibration.

Thanks

Thanks a lot OP!

I really appreciate it. I will be ordering an X61s soon so this will be very helpful.

You don't happen to own a Dell 22" LCD (E228WFP) monitor do you? I would love to get the correct calibration on this monitor.

the file didnt do anything for XP. maybe.


also why is there only 50hz for refresh?

Yah - I didn't notice any difference using XP either - if someone could post the RGB settings, etc., that would be great - thanks!

6.5k for sure, I think I had the brightnes set to max since thats where I tend to use it. I'm not sure how much it would affect calibration. I do find blacks washed out but as we all know the Screen isn't the best on the x61s, it can only do so much. The black levels are terrible and so is the viewing angle. I can to other color temps upon request but please be patient as I don't check these boards daily.

As far as setting it in XP, I believe you will have to restart to see the effects. it's much harder to see the difference when resetting vs having pictures side by side or flipped at the change of a button. It would be nice is Microsoft could do something about this.

Should the color profile go in the same folder when using WinXP? How do I save my current color profile for backup? Does this profile-setting overrule color correction settings in the Intel X3100 driver?

Hi,
I'll be getting my new x61s soon. Will be getting it with an Ultralight screen and so I hope your calibrated colour profile will help improve the screen. I don't really know how good/or bad the Ultralight is personally, but I do have an x61 and it isn't all that great.
I'd appreciate a non-RapidShare link to the colour profile as my ISP blocks RapidShare downloads.
Thanks!

Thank you for posting your color calibration profile. I just tried it in Windows Vista. I was previously using the default Thinkpad LCD profile installed by Windows update. The new profile certainly made colors more vivid, but blues now appear much too purple. Please let us know if you ever recalibrate so we can see if there is a change. I wonder how much the age of the display matters.

By the way, if you are using Firefox 3 you can enable color management with this extension.