Thinkpads Forum

I'm going to be in a unique situation sometime this coming week in that I'll have two ThinkPad T60p 8744-J2U machines at the same time with slightly different FRU's: The older machine has a samsung screen and Alps keyboard. The newer machine will have the LG screen and NMB keyboard (or at least a keyboard with the NMB FRU.) The old machine has a build date of 4-18-2007, and the newer one was shipped on 5-4-2007 (so they were both built within a month of each other.)

I'll be restoring a backup from the 'old' machine to the 'new' one and sending the old one back to RMA (video chip is bad, some keys on the keyboard only work some of the time, etc.)

This will give me a chance to compare side-by-side the most recent versions of these two screens and give a fresh perspective of any differences. I'm personally curious to see why people say the LG screens are better...

Specific things I plan to check:

dark areas in the corners (lower right on the samsung is dark)

light leakage with a black screen (samsung has quite a bit from the bottom, and minor leakage around the other 3 sides.)

color rendition (this will be subjective as I don't have a spyder or other equipment to properly calibrate a profile.)

brightness at max

For the benifit of the other forum members, I'll take side-by-side non-flash photos with my canon 20D (with something white or gray in the frame) and make the raw images available for others to play with. This will allow others with time on their hands to compare the images and point out all the differences.

Note from Moderator: There's a sticky for these discussions.

garyd9 wrote:dark areas in the corners (lower right on the samsung is dark)

I've never heard of brand-new LCDs with dark corners and have seen dark corners only on aging LCDs. Can someone confirm whether all 15.4" Samsung LCDs are like that?

garyd9 wrote:light leakage with a black screen (samsung has quite a bit from the bottom, and minor leakage around the other 3 sides.)

I think light leakage is caused by how the bezel around the screen is assembled -- there's leakage if the gap is too wide -- and not by the screen itself. So, it depends more on how carefully Lenovo builds their Thinkpads rather than on who manufactured the screen.

The most important thing to compare is whether the Samsung looks grainier than the LG.

pianowizard wrote:I've never heard of brand-new LCDs with dark corners and have seen dark corners only on aging LCDs. Can someone confirm whether all 15.4" Samsung LCDs are like that?

The dark spot (or 'shadow') appears on the lower right corner, and appears to be more of a shadow starting in the absolute corner and fading outward. Imagine your WinXP (or vista) taskbar - the shadow is completely faded just above the top of the taskbar. I had something similar on my old Sony SZ notebook, but it was lower left in that case.

pianowizard wrote:I think light leakage is caused by how the bezel around the screen is assembled...

No idea... it's just another of those things you hear when people talk about why one LCD is better than another...

pianowizard wrote:The most important thing to compare is whether the Samsung looks grainier than the LG.

Please explain this... When I hear that term, I think of photo's taken with high speed film (or in the case of digital grain, low light noise in photos.) My current Samsung LCD (on the TP) doesn't seem to have have digital noise, though it's not as "crisp" as my Samsung desktop LCD (26" WSXGA+ matte) or my Sony SZ (WSXGA glossy.) However, I attribute this not as "grain", but as a side effect of very high resolution on a relatively small matte screen... (Almost a soft effect - similar to what's seen on a CRT when compared to almost any quality LCD.)

Backlight leakage is typical sign of low-quality panels lacking contrast which is going to be worse with viewing angle. You don't have much choices since the IPS panels demise.

There are pictures of the LG panel showing the leakage in this review and there is another one using blue color background. It seems to be better than the horrible 14" SXGA+ screens where bottom half of screen is always rather white only.

I asked those who have 15" T60 widescreen to make pictures of the screen and put it here for reference but there are no replies.

garyd9 wrote:low light noise in photos.)

Yeah, that's exactly it. You'll see what I mean when you compare the two screens.