Sony SE Owners' Thread

[jeremyshaw]

Nope. Did the other S series have a cloth notebook bag?

Hehe... there was no pressure... it has some good bass and I liked Karate Kid. Plus you don't normally see that in unboxing videos.

Yeah, my SC and SA both got the white notebook cloth pouch. I wonder if the black S series get a black pouch...

[zombiefan]

Okay... finally did my unboxing thing:

BigNerdBlog: Unboxing the Sony VAIO SE 15.5" for notebookreview.com forums

Please take it easy on me... I'm a YouTube noob.

(if posting my blog link is against the rules, I can change it to the YouTube link)

Thank you very much for posting that!

[Aleksandras]

@BigNerd

Man, nice review, pls upload wallpapers! At least the one that is on in the review!

Thanks a lot,

Alex

[darxide_sorcerer]

Yeah, my SC and SA both got the white notebook cloth pouch. I wonder if the black S series get a black pouch...

my black SA didn't have a cloth pouch in the box, only a piece of microfiber cloth to wipe the LCD screen.

[Sadiki]

Okay... finally did my unboxing thing:

BigNerdBlog: Unboxing the Sony VAIO SE 15.5" for notebookreview.com forums

Please take it easy on me... I'm a YouTube noob.

(if posting my blog link is against the rules, I can change it to the YouTube link)

Thanks a lot for the video. I enjoyed the speaker comparison the most haha

[TheGovernator]

Thanks for the vid, BigNerd! The speaker comparison was a useful and nice touch. I don't think I've ever seen any video review do that :P

[BigNerd]

I'm not sure the video captured the sound difference that much as I didn't leave the MBA playing that long but you can definitely hear the difference, especially if I placed the MBA on the desk.

The MBA was louder, deeper and richer... unfortunately the SE was very tinny... like it needed a sub. I was looking for the Dolby settings I think another user mentioned but I couldn't find them.

I've always been surprised how good the sound is from the MBA... darn those Apple engineers.

@Alex: Should I just upload the wallpapers here? I thought you were talking about on the Sony SE... heh.

[moralar]

The following are my comments on the Vaio SE's display. I may do another post commenting on performance and thermal issues later. In this post I cover viewing angles, backlight bleeding, white level, black level, contrast ratio, color gamut width, color accuracy, and external display connectivity. I wanted to measure display lag, but I don't have good software for doing so. Based on inaccurate tests with a CRT, any possible display lag didn't seem too objectionable.


Viewing angles

Viewing angles are pretty good, although not quite on par with desktop IPS monitors. There is never color inversion as with TN panels, but contrast drops somewhat off-axis, with a bit of a purple glow being introduced at larger angles (similar to the "white glow" in H-IPS panels, and perhaps the purple glow in older S-IPS panels). The purple glow is a bit more evident in person than in photos.

The following photos illustrate what type of viewing angles you can expect from the display. Some are deliberately shot slightly out of focus in order to keep nasty moire patterns from showing up in the photographs. The camera was kept on fixed white balance, aperture, shutter speed, and ISO for all these shots, so they are representative of real-world performance.

P.S. Ignore the sickly-looking quality of the ambient illumination; the white balance was set with respect to the display.
















Backlight bleeding

This shot shows that there is some backlight bleeding. I don't mind the bleeding along the bottom so much, but the vertical stripe 1/3 of the way in from the left is a bit disturbing. Admittedly, I can't perceive this unless the screen is mostly black and there is little ambient light. Under normal usage, it's imperceptible.




Contrast ratio, gamut width, color accuracy

I ran ColorHFCR's grayscale, primaries, and secondaries tests using an i1 Display 2 colorimeter (same unit that notebookcheck uses). I set the brightness to maximum for this initial measurement and left the display uncalibrated. I only measured in the center of the screen, rather than in 9 sectors like notebookcheck does. (They're the professionals; I'm not.) The measured white level was 305.735 cd/m^2, versus a black level of 0.459 cd/m^2. This makes for a contrast ratio of 666:1.

In the CIE chromaticity diagram below, the gray dots show the chromaticity of the measured grayscale values (0% - 100% grayscale in 10% increments). Ideally they should all be on top of each other. Historically the D65 illuminant dot should be where they all stack up, but in modern LED-backlit displays, the native white point may differ. The gamut width is shown as a white triangle, compared to sRGB, a dark triangle. The width of the gamut is about 82.6% of sRGB, or 59.5% NTSC.



Calibration brings the grayscale under control, but can't do anything about the gamut width, which is significantly narrower than sRGB. The poor red reproduction was the most noticeable to my eye. The display is incapable of producing a really bright, vivid red; what you get instead has a tinge of orange in it.

Also, there is some kind of bug in the switchable display drivers which causes Windows to sometimes "lose" your ICC profile, if you've loaded one. Any kind of resolution change, speed/stamina switch, UAC prompt, or other events I may not have noticed causes the profile to be forgotten. Therefore, color management at the OS level may be more of a hassle than it's worth. Presumably if you use color-managed applications such as Firefox, Photoshop, etc., they will not be subject to this problem.


Video output

The integrated HDMI output is only capable of doing 1920x1200 at 60 Hz. This is frustrating because, at least according to spec sheets, the Intel HD 3000 should be capable of doing 2560x1600 over DisplayPort (*), while the Radeon 6630M can do 2560x1600 over DisplayPort (if configured with a DisplayPort output).

Subjective remarks/Conclusion

The Vaio SE's display subjectively looks really good. The combination of reasonable viewing angles, small dot pitch, high resolution, and high contrast make it quite pleasant to work with. The weak point seems to be color reproduction -- the gamut is both smaller than sRGB and noticeably shifted in chromaticity. The limitation to 1920x1200 video output also means that it's not possible to connect to the largest desktop monitors for doing color-accurate work. (Well, it's possible, just at a low resolution.)

The Vaio SE is at an interesting position in the notebook market, as I'm not aware of any other systems featuring high-quality, non-TN panels near this price point. (If you are, please let me know!) The Dell XPS 15's 95% gamut panel is an obvious rival, but it is TN, and each display has some strengths relative to the other. I think given the choice of the two, I would probably stick with the SE, but your requirements might make you choose differently.

Please rep if you find this helpful!


(*) Thanks to jeremyshaw for correcting my mixup about the Intel HD Graphics 3000's HDMI output.

[moralar]

@BigNerd

Man, nice review, pls upload wallpapers! At least the one that is on in the review!

Thanks a lot,

Alex

You can find the wallpapers here:

A favor from anyone who just bought a VAIO

[jeremyshaw]

Sickly awesome viewing angles

Same with the measured contrast ratio