Toshiba Satellite X205-S9359 Take Two: Displays and Drivers
by Jarred Walton on September 6, 2007 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Laptops
LCD Color Accuracy
Poor viewing angles are usually a bigger problem with LCDs on laptops than color accuracy, especially since the color accuracy results we've recorded so far have at best been decent but certainly not up to the level of desktop LCDs. The LCD panel on the X205 doesn't break any new ground here either.
Uncalibrated Delta E ranks towards the bottom of our charts, although subjectively we would rate it a little higher. It's not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but we were generally okay with viewing movies or playing games on the laptop. That might be because frame rates have a lot more of an impact on games, but the dark blacks in movies were definitely pleasing.
Calibration helps out quite a bit, moving the Toshiba X205 into a solid third place when using Monaco Optix XR.
ColorEyes Display Pro improves on the numerical results, and although in terms of absolute ranking the X205 drops one position to fourth place it's basically still tied for third.
As a final look at the X205 LCD panel, here's a chart showing calibrated versus uncalibrated Delta E with both Monaco Optix XR Pro and ColorEyes Display Pro. ColorEyes also reports a lower Delta E prior to calibration (6.9 vs. 11.4). As always, calibration can help out a lot if you need more accurate colors, but even the best laptops are unable to match the majority of the desktop LCDs we've looked at when it comes to color accuracy. We're still waiting to get any IPS based laptops in for testing, unfortunately. Very likely, however, users will have to make other compromises in terms of overall configurations in order to get one of those laptops.
Poor viewing angles are usually a bigger problem with LCDs on laptops than color accuracy, especially since the color accuracy results we've recorded so far have at best been decent but certainly not up to the level of desktop LCDs. The LCD panel on the X205 doesn't break any new ground here either.
Uncalibrated Delta E ranks towards the bottom of our charts, although subjectively we would rate it a little higher. It's not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but we were generally okay with viewing movies or playing games on the laptop. That might be because frame rates have a lot more of an impact on games, but the dark blacks in movies were definitely pleasing.
Calibration helps out quite a bit, moving the Toshiba X205 into a solid third place when using Monaco Optix XR.
ColorEyes Display Pro improves on the numerical results, and although in terms of absolute ranking the X205 drops one position to fourth place it's basically still tied for third.
As a final look at the X205 LCD panel, here's a chart showing calibrated versus uncalibrated Delta E with both Monaco Optix XR Pro and ColorEyes Display Pro. ColorEyes also reports a lower Delta E prior to calibration (6.9 vs. 11.4). As always, calibration can help out a lot if you need more accurate colors, but even the best laptops are unable to match the majority of the desktop LCDs we've looked at when it comes to color accuracy. We're still waiting to get any IPS based laptops in for testing, unfortunately. Very likely, however, users will have to make other compromises in terms of overall configurations in order to get one of those laptops.
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johnscott - Thursday, November 29, 2007 - link
this fixes the screen from not coming back after idle and lets youDL from nvidiahttp://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&...">http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?Vi...amp;ssPa...
Inkjammer - Saturday, September 8, 2007 - link
I remember Anandtech running an article on the 2GB issues people were running into on Vista. While the X205 comes with 2GB of memory, 256MB of that memory are taken by the graphics card by default. Between Vista's overhead and the Turbomemory, the system runs with a memory hit, which may affect games like Oblivion.I ultimately broke down and bought 4GB of memory for the laptop to make up for this "gap", as you hit memory limits faster. It's something to take into consideration on systems shipping with Turbomemory enabled gaming cards.
Inkjammer - Saturday, September 8, 2007 - link
While I had previously recommended the 164.33 drivers in the first review, I did discover something interesting: the HD-DVD drive would refuse to play video when using them. THe only way to re-instate the HD-DVD video was to revert back to the OEM drivers Toshiba ships with, which was... dissapointing.So, I guess there are pros and cons to the drivers that I hadn't noticed after all, and it went back to what you said about incompatibilities. But the HD-DVD playback was NOT a compatibility problem I'd have thought of. I've been running the 163.44 so far and have had no game problems. The HD video is the only issue thus far.
customcoms - Thursday, September 6, 2007 - link
http://anandtech.com/mobile/showdoc.aspx?i=3085&am...">http://anandtech.com/mobile/showdoc.aspx?i=3085&am...,I believe you are speaking about the Toshiba X205 in this sentence, as it has the lowest black level and achieves a contrast ratio of 874:1.
JarredWalton - Thursday, September 6, 2007 - link
I mean that I want the option for the brighter whites, like the ASUS G2P. I'll edit for clarity. :)SpaceRanger - Thursday, September 6, 2007 - link
Oblivion 18.19 18.01 -4.04%How is that a -4.04% reduction???
JarredWalton - Thursday, September 6, 2007 - link
It is an average of all three tested resolutions (1280x800, 1440x900, and 1680x1050). I left out the lower resolutions in the table, but they are present in the scaling charts. Here are the specifics for Oblivion:Oblivion,v101.68,v163.44,%Change
1280x800,26,24.4,-6.19%
1440x900,21.1,20.1,-4.92%
1680x1050,18.2,18,-1.01%
,,,-4.04%
(Sorry - no good way to do a table in our comments, so cut and paste that into a CSV file for proper viewing of the columns if you need to.) Basically, there was a sizable performance drop at 1280x800, which counterbalances the small drop at 1680x1050.
Take care,
Jarred