Thinkpads Forum

I've love everything about my T400 except for the lousy screen. I believe that I've got one of the later LED models (as it gets incredibly bright on the maximum brightness setting), but the screen is pretty disappointing--the old IBM R40 that this one replaced seems to have a more vivid picture than this does.

I've fiddled with the color settings in the Catalyst Control Center to make things less horrible, but I'm having a difficult time getting things to look exactly 'as they should'. At work, I run my T400 next to a large Samsung flatscreen, and the difference between them is pretty staggering. I've got switchable graphics, and for some reason the Intel chip doesn't look nearly as horrific. I've tried duplicating my settings for that in CCC, but the results are not the same.

So, for you T400 owners with the HD34XX, what settings have you used in CCC to get your screen looking less bad?

Try calibrating using Windows 7's built-in tool.

Which manufacturer (LG, Samsung) LCD panel do you have? You can find out using MonInfo/Everest/AIDA64.

The manufacturer for the monitor shows up in AIDA64/MonInfo/SIW as just "Lenovo," model LTN141AT12401.

I've tried the built-in calibration utility before, but it doesn't really help the slightly washed-out quality of the screen. I have to do some extra gamma correction on my own, and even after that I find grays and whites tend to blend together a bit more than I'd like, especially when viewing websites. I was just hoping someone had maybe stumbled upon some magic numbers that would make the display look a bit more respectable, as it definitely seems possible if one knows what they're doing in the display color settings.

Well, the LTN141AT12401 looks like a Samsung LED panel...

I had an okay color profile for my former Samsung LED panel in my T400, but I can't find it at the moment.

Where were you able to find the info on the make of the panel? I've been toying with the idea of trying to swap out the current LCD for a 1440x900 screen, but could never conclusively figure out if I really ought to be trying to hunt down an LED model, or if CCFL tubes had just gotten brighter and more uniform since my R40. And while I'm an old hand at desktop servicing, I've never really dug around inside a laptop (that I intended to use again) beyond adding memory or swapping the hard drive, so I wasn't too keen on disassembling the screen just to look for a model number.

Samsung panels start with LTN, LG with LP, AUO with B.

I found the Samsung LED backlighting to be more uniform than the LG LED one. Not sure about WXGA.

If you already have an LED one, it'd be way easier to swap in a new LED one.