Take A Picture Of Your WXGA+ Screen

My t61 14" screen is the lg wxga+ and while not fabulous, its not bad either. I have 4 other laptops of varying age and resolution and I can say with some confidence that the t61/t400 screen should not be grainy or frosty. The thing with the t61 is I must look directly straight on to see proper contrast, but it is always clear, even at angles. The screen is brighter than an older dell 6000 (samsung), screen, but not as bright, (or as clear) as an old apple tibook 15" which still sets the benchmark for me and laptop screens, even though its 6 years old. I have a feeling that the backlit option of the t400 is a useful and noticeable upgrade, but if my screen were grainy, I would be complaining.

good luck with that.

 

My older brother has a T61p with 15.4" WUXGA (1920x1200) w/ 175nit brightness and his display looks horrible to me. Now, I DO realize that the higher the resolution with a given size panel will make the pixels smaller, thus letting less net light through, which makes the panel get dimmer. So with this in mind, I just purchased a T61p of my own, but with only a 15.4" WSXGA+ panel (1680x1050) 200nit brightness, with the logic that it would be much, much better. However, I have read many reviews that give mixed messages and opinions about the quality of this panel (some say good and others say bad too - although most agree it is an improvement over the WUXGA panel), I must wait til next week for it to arrive here since I have not received it yet, and thus cannot form an opinion of my own at this time. I do have a feeling that I will think that it doesn't meet the mark, since I am used to very good quality displays such as the Dell Truelife (glossy) one in my XPS M140 laptop or the good 'ol 1400x1050 (matte) one in my old school A31 Thinkpad. I especially like the glossy screen in this XPS M140 one because it makes the colors much more vibrant and everything looks sharper with it. I found this description of the glossy screen technology here: http://www.screentekinc.com/pixelbright-lcds.shtml which tells how it works. It basically says that with the matte (traditional) screens, the surface is made to be non-glossy, so that ambient light from outside will be rejected from reflecting right at you, so that you can see the image from the screen better, but the rough surface of matte also diffuses more of the actual image that it is projecting at the viewer, and thus less of it makes it to the viewer's eyes, making it dimmer than it could be. I do notice my Dell panel is super bright (WXGA). If you read the pages on the link I just posted, you can get a much better idea of how it works.

So my current idea is that I will probably either have ScreenTek upgrade my panel to glossy, or just buy a 15.4" WSXGA+ glossy panel from one of these large LCD panel suppliers (which I've already found), and put it in mine, because I know that it will wind up being sharper and brighter than the original by far. I know they tend to reflect more and so in the outdoors can sometimes be bothersome, but I don't spend much time outdoors, and when I do, I usually always just try different angels with the panel door and simply move it to a position where I don't see the reflection of my face like a mirror shining at me, and that works fine in most cases unless in direct sunlight. So, if I buy a glossy panel I will likely sell my original panel once I determine that the glossy one is in fact, better. Or I may still just send my orig panel in to that ScreenTek place and have them do the mod to it. But the only reason I wouldn't want to do that is because, if I didn't like it, I couldn't switch back to stock so easily.

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Did you have a flexview screen on the T42p? That would make a big difference.

 

Well, I just bought this T61p about 2 weeks ago, and it did come with the LG LP154W02 screen which has a matte finish from the factory. I did not like it very much for HD playback since the screen (although I'm sure it was better than the Samsung panel likely), I did not like the light diffusion of the matte panel. When you would center your eyes near the middle of the screen the center would look all bright, and the edges or four corners would look all dim. This is unacceptable for me. Whenever you would tilt the screen. the hotspot would change, and everything around it was always dimmer. So I had a plan that I mentioned a few days ago in this string a couple posts up from here. I knew the glossy screen would perform much better for video and multimedia, so I did it. I bought an LG p/n # LP154WE2 glossy panel from smartmicrousa dot com (I just told him I needed it for a Thinkpad WSXGA+ and he found the right one (make sure you specify LG, T61, 15.4", WSXGA+ and glossy if you want to make this upgrade). I received an original LG glossy panel, and I believe this same p/n (LP154WE2) normally come in the Dell XPS 1530 15.4" laptops (yes, it is a bolt-in swap, no mods needed). And after doing this swap, I can now say that I am finally happy with this display even though it is not an IPS/Flexview panel. For TFT, it is fabulous! The colors are much deeper and more vibrant with better contrast, the image is even all around, when you tilt the screen there are no hotspots, and image maintains uniformity, and picture is much sharper and does not look washed out like with the matte screen. It also has a very wide viewing angle now. Every anti-glossy screen person I have ever talked to has likely never actually owned a glossy panel, or does not use their matte panel for multimedia, because every diehard matte user I've showed this upgrade to at work (15 guys) has thoroughly appreciated the difference since I've upgraded it. I work in a dev lab with 15 other developers. Now 2 other guys at work (the other 2 who have Thinkpads) want to do the upgrade on their Thinkpads! The rest of the guys all have company issued Dells with COE images so they are screwed and can't do it even if they wanted. But the 2 upper guys who use their own personal laptops at work, they also have T61p's and they both want to do the switch to glossy now on theirs, but they use WUXGA and I can't find a glossy direct-replacement for that size at this time, so if you have WUXGA you'll have to downsize to WSXGA in order to be able to do an OEM panel swap since that is the panel that comes in the XPS 1530, OR... if you send your existing matte panel to ScreenTek they can upgrade it to glossy in their clean-room for $100 bucks. Seems to be your only path if you have WUXGA and you are hell-bent on keeping it. I do not have any idea of how good those upgrades turn out. If it were me I'd just get the OEM panel that is manufactured as a glossy to begin with. I like the WSXGA+ resolution just fine anyway. Besides, it is 200nit brightness, as opposed to the 175nit of the WUXGA panel. I always go for brightest over real estate bar-none.

Anyway, I hope this post helps.


Here are the pics (I downsized them to 1024x768 for faster loading):











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To test a grainy lcd what I do is that I grab and hold a window of any program preferably with a white background and move a little to he sides slowly. If it's grainy you should have the impression that the monitor is dirty because you see the image move "below the dirt".

 

Well with the glossy panel on now, it is definitely not grainy anymore if it was at all. Grainy wasn't really a major problem though from before. It did have the sparkles a little bit though, and the irregular surface intensity and hot-spotting. Wasn't terrible though if you never saw what the glossy panel looked like in comparison. But once you saw the glossy panel, it put the matte one to shame in a very disgraceful way (obviously my personal opinion). Most people wouldn't think it is that bad, but I use my lappy a lot for HD-Def playback so I like a perfect picture, and like the colors to be vibrant as possible.

If anyone wants to buy my old WSXGA+ 1680x1050 15.4" MATTE screen that fits the T61p (and perhaps others), I would be happy to sell it. It only has about 4-5 hours of total use on it. It is pretty much brand new for all practical purposes. After I removed from the laptop, cleaned any fingerprints off of it, and taped the protective shipping film that shipped with the new glossy panel onto it, and put it into the anti-static bag and sealed it up. It will make someone a nice panel who isn't as picky as me. Make me an offer if you may be interested. I was thinking of trying to sell it for maybe $100 on eBay It is the LG p/n #LP154W02 (printed sticker on back of panel).

 

Hi ojosch. Congrats on your new screen. I read your posts with interest, It's nice to know that another unlucky person who received a bad screen has found a solution.

I have the same problem you had but with a T400 14'' WXGA LG screen. The colors are very washed out, not only that but the colors are way off even after calibrating it with the Spyder 3.

Since you successfully replaced the screen with one that originally comes in a Dell and that's what I want to do too (I'm a photographer and most photographers I see use either a Macbook or a Dell Inspiron/Studio/XPS to edit their photos on the road) I'd like your opinion about replacing my T400's screen with one made for a Dell (or other brands with good screens, like Fujitsu). I'm clueless about how to find one that would fit, do I just order an LG that comes in a Dell or a Fujitsu with the same size and install it? or is finding a compatible one more complicated?

Any helpful info you could share would be greatly appreciated.

 

Thanks for the compliment!

I got your PM too. The first step I would recommend is to install PC Wizard (Google for it, it's a free app), then run it, and in the result area it should tell you what the exact part number is of your display. Then I would call this place: smartmicrousa dot com (the phone number is on their website), or email them, and ask them if they have an LG / Philips glossy replacement that will interchange with your screen. If they DO NOT, then you can go here: screentekinc dot com and they charge $100 to take your existing screen and convert it to glossy (they have a special clean-room). When you get the part number from PC Wizard's result after scanning your hardware, then 'google' that part number to find out if you have an LG / Philips panel or a Samsung. Most people say the Samsung are not as good, but this may depend on batches, because some Samsung owners have said theirs are not so bad. I personally think most all screens would probably respond well to the glossy upgrade from Sceentek, but I'm not certain. I know from my experience that every glossy LG / Philips I have seen was very bright and colors were vibrant. I would just start first by doing the above, and post your findings here, and perhaps depending on what you discover, that somebody here (maybe even me?) can help you figure out where to go from there. We may want to start a new thread for this, since yours is a T400, I don't know. Anyway, let me know what you find from that guy at the first link, so we can know what in the OEM market is available to fit your model.

 

can you get matte screens with better color reproduction? for example take the new 17'mac book pro, it seems the only diff btw glossy and matte screens is only the lack of reflections. the difference is only 150$

 

In my experience, anything IS possible, but nowdays it's unlikely unless you have the IPS / Flexview matte display will your colors be super vibrant. Matte TFT displays typically just have too much polar light dissipation in most cases. Do a Google search for 'IPS display' or 'Flexview', or 'Flexview vs TFT' etc. IPS / Flexview are more expensive to manufacture, but the picture is superior to TFT. The new LCD TVs now mostly use this technology. I have an older A31 Thinkpad with Flexview and it has a very nice image and it's a matte, but in my experience, if it isn't using IPS / Flexview then the odds are slim that you'll get enough of the actual light image to clearly make it to your eyes with a TFT screen (too much dissipation), that glossy is about the only way to get the full undistorted image to your eyes. Trust me, glossy is NOT THAT BAD. Everyone makes it sound like glossy is terrible. If you see a little reflection, just tilt the screen down a little and the reflection goes away. Or, I also notice that since the image is bright and vibrant, that you typically do not even see the reflection most the time. If you really want to learn about this stuff, you should go find the above link in my previous post in this string where I lead you to ScreenTek's website, and they give a nice tutorial about the logic behind glossy, and matte screens. It explains the concept of why how matte screens dissipate light. I would take IPS / Flexview if they offered it for a T61p but since they DON'T, then glossy is the next best alternative, in my opinion.