LCD Color Accuracy
So far the LCD hasn't been very impressive, but let's take a look at how it performs in regards to color accuracy. Not everyone wants a glaringly bright display, after all. As mentioned, we will be looking at the uncalibrated performance as well is calibrated performance using both Monaco Optix XR Pro and ColorEyes Display Pro.
Without calibration, this is the worst LCD we've encountered so far. Only four out of 24 of the measured color values have a Delta E of less than 10 -- and remember that ideally Delta E should be less than one! Remember that when you're viewing movies, the display overlay mode will bypass any color profiles you may have selected, so basically you're going to get very poor color quality with this notebook. But what happens after calibration?
Using Monaco Optix XR, accuracy improves quite a lot and the LCD panel now basically matches the overall performance of the Dell XPS M1710 and the MSI S271. It's still not great, but it's not terrible either. We're not done yet, however, because we wanted to see if ColorEyes Display Pro managed to calibrate the colors any better.
Where Monaco Optix XR Pro has a tendency to have inaccuracy spikes on yellow/orange colors, ColorEyes Display Pro has a pretty major spike on something close to teal. Overall, though, the average Delta E is much lower using ColorEyes Display Pro on all of the laptops... except one. It turns out that the best laptop LCD we've used so far -- the ASUS G2P -- gets better results when calibrated using Monaco Optix XR Pro. Also worth mentioning is that the MSI S271 appears to have some compatibility problems with ColorEyes Display Pro, as the software would hang whenever we tried to begin profiling. Even the dv6500t manages to top the ColorEyes Delta E chart, we would still much rather use the ASUS G2P (or any other laptop with a similarly bright display).
We should also note that the default Delta E reported by ColorEyes appears to be extremely good, but the selection of test colors is extremely limited. We validated color accuracy using a Gretag Macbeth chart, which is what Monaco Optix XR Pro uses. The default validation for color eyes uses 15 color swatches instead of 24, and actually the 15 swatches consist of 12 shades of gray and three colors. While that may be fine for people that work in black and white, actual color accuracy means more to us, even if the display can no longer score a "perfect" Delta E of less than 1.0.
One final comment on the displays before we move on: since HP is a large OEM, it is very likely that they source their LCD panels from more than one manufacturer. While the dv6500t that we tested has a relatively poor display, it's entirely possible that other HP laptops within the same family might have a better display. The same goes for other laptop manufacturers, of course, but for better or for worse we are only able to evaluate the LCDs on the laptops we receive. Then again, we would rather get a sample LCD that may be worse than average and evaluate it as such than to get a great LCD and praise it, only to find out that most LCDs in the same family perform much worse.
So far the LCD hasn't been very impressive, but let's take a look at how it performs in regards to color accuracy. Not everyone wants a glaringly bright display, after all. As mentioned, we will be looking at the uncalibrated performance as well is calibrated performance using both Monaco Optix XR Pro and ColorEyes Display Pro.
Without calibration, this is the worst LCD we've encountered so far. Only four out of 24 of the measured color values have a Delta E of less than 10 -- and remember that ideally Delta E should be less than one! Remember that when you're viewing movies, the display overlay mode will bypass any color profiles you may have selected, so basically you're going to get very poor color quality with this notebook. But what happens after calibration?
Using Monaco Optix XR, accuracy improves quite a lot and the LCD panel now basically matches the overall performance of the Dell XPS M1710 and the MSI S271. It's still not great, but it's not terrible either. We're not done yet, however, because we wanted to see if ColorEyes Display Pro managed to calibrate the colors any better.
Where Monaco Optix XR Pro has a tendency to have inaccuracy spikes on yellow/orange colors, ColorEyes Display Pro has a pretty major spike on something close to teal. Overall, though, the average Delta E is much lower using ColorEyes Display Pro on all of the laptops... except one. It turns out that the best laptop LCD we've used so far -- the ASUS G2P -- gets better results when calibrated using Monaco Optix XR Pro. Also worth mentioning is that the MSI S271 appears to have some compatibility problems with ColorEyes Display Pro, as the software would hang whenever we tried to begin profiling. Even the dv6500t manages to top the ColorEyes Delta E chart, we would still much rather use the ASUS G2P (or any other laptop with a similarly bright display).
We should also note that the default Delta E reported by ColorEyes appears to be extremely good, but the selection of test colors is extremely limited. We validated color accuracy using a Gretag Macbeth chart, which is what Monaco Optix XR Pro uses. The default validation for color eyes uses 15 color swatches instead of 24, and actually the 15 swatches consist of 12 shades of gray and three colors. While that may be fine for people that work in black and white, actual color accuracy means more to us, even if the display can no longer score a "perfect" Delta E of less than 1.0.
One final comment on the displays before we move on: since HP is a large OEM, it is very likely that they source their LCD panels from more than one manufacturer. While the dv6500t that we tested has a relatively poor display, it's entirely possible that other HP laptops within the same family might have a better display. The same goes for other laptop manufacturers, of course, but for better or for worse we are only able to evaluate the LCDs on the laptops we receive. Then again, we would rather get a sample LCD that may be worse than average and evaluate it as such than to get a great LCD and praise it, only to find out that most LCDs in the same family perform much worse.
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JarredWalton - Tuesday, June 26, 2007 - link
Funny you should mention the E-155-C.... :DFant - Friday, June 22, 2007 - link
Seems HP shipped you a badly specced machine. They should have used a 5400rpm drive and the nvidia graphics chip as well as the extended 6-cell. All three would have improved your benchmarks. Out of curiousity, did you use a clean vista build or the out of the box vista build that hp supplies with loads of extras installed?JarredWalton - Saturday, June 23, 2007 - link
HP's install, minus a bunch of software that I didn't want running. Although, when I ran SYSmark 2007, I ahd to do a clean install first. (Now you know why the lack of GbE was annoying - image a HDD over 100 Mbit and I averaged 3 MB/s instead of 12 MB/s with GbE. Not sure why, but Acronis only manages to use about 25% of the Ethernet bandwidth.) Anyway, I like to make the testing close to "real world", and most people don't buy an HP, Dell, Gateway, etc. notebook only to install their own operating system. (Businesses are different story, but let's not go there.)I actually don't think that the configuration they sent was all that bad. It may not perform as well in benchmarks, but the fact of the matter is that a lot of people get way too hung up on benchmark results. Do you want a faster hard drive, or do you prefer having a bit more storage? There is no right answer, although personally I would generally go with one of the 120-160GB 7200 RPM laptop drives if possible. As for the battery, they did send me the 12-cell for testing, and the only thing I really would like to know is the capacity of the extended 6-cell. The basic 6-cell is a 47 WHr, so if they extended capacity is 65 WHr it would increase battery life by about 35-40%. I'm trying to get an answer from HP about the capacity of the other 6-cell offering.
Fant - Saturday, June 23, 2007 - link
I have a dv6500t with the extended 6-cell. I havent done any formal testing but I probably get just under 3 hours with the HP Recommended / Balanced Power Plan in Vista and a bit over 3 hours when using the Power Saver Plan. I did notice that the cpu seems to stay at the lower speed with the Power Saver Plan but seems to stay at the higher speeds with the HP Recommended / Balanced Power Plan even when I am not doing much cpu intensive tasks.JarredWalton - Saturday, June 23, 2007 - link
Can you check the battery and see what the rating is? Usually it will say something like "10.8V ~= xx WHr". I want to know the Watt-Hour rating. I'm not sure why, but the notebook I have almost never runs at minimum CPU speed. Weird.hubajube - Friday, June 22, 2007 - link
I was waiting to read on how this laptop performed when watching HD DVD's. I'm interested in buying this for my wife for her to use as a work laptop but at the same time I'd like to use it as a HTPC. Oh well guess I'll have to spend the money to find out. :(JarredWalton - Friday, June 22, 2007 - link
Yeah, they didn't send the HD-DVD version. I'm not sure if the 8400M GS is required for that or not - maybe X3100 can do enough to handle it (but I doubt it). Anyway, we've tested 8600 cards with HD-DVD, and I don't see why the 8400M wouldn't handle it fine. Problem is, the display is still pretty poor, especially when you consider that video overlay can have a color correction profile applied.shady3005 - Friday, June 22, 2007 - link
I was gonna consider this laptop but was turned off by the lack of gigabit ethernet. Dint know about the horrible display at that time. So i was waiting for an upgrade to this laptop but sadly none came.Then I set my eyes on the new Macbook pro. Just 500$ higher that top dv6500t config but worth every extra penny. Amazing display , much lighter , thinner , sexier and CPU (2.2Ghz) and Graphics (8600GT M) upgrade with much better battery life.
Please review the new MacBooks with Santa Rosa ..... I would like to hear how awesome they are ..
crimson117 - Friday, June 22, 2007 - link
I lol'd pretty good at this one :)
BPB - Friday, June 22, 2007 - link
Maybe I missed it, if so please excuse me, but I think you simply used the ABG wireless setup. I was wondering how well the N wireless works, and how well it talks to other N devices such as my Belkin N1. My wife's HP works quite well with the Belkin N PCMCIA and router, but for our next notebook I'd like to have the N built-in.