nicer screen colors

[dcouzin]

My T42 has an SXGA+ monitor (IBM254D). The video card chip is an ATI Mobility Radeon 9600/9700 Series AGB. These are standard for the 2378FVU.
I have always found my 600X screen to produce nicer color than my T42 screen. I can't describe the difference properly: the 600X color is richer, without being more saturated. Some of this is a color temperature difference. I went into the Radeon's color tab and made gamma = 0.75, contrast = 75 for all colors; brightness = 10 for red and green, 0 for blue, in a vain effort to simulate the 600X. I don't think more fiddling there will do it.
Today I discovered that under the color management tab, the default monitor profile was <None>. Radeon provides a collection of 28 different color profiles to "associate with this device". I tried setting various ones as default, but didn't see the color change when pressing 'Apply', nor upon restarting the computer.
Thus two questions.
1. How does one choose a color profile with the Radeon menu? It shouldn't be hard to see differences.
2. Which color profile is recommended for my system? Since I have a clean XP install rather than the factory "optimized" XP install, I might have missed IBM's profile setting (or IBM might even add a profile to Radeon's set).
Thanks.

[RealBlackStuff]

Windows ignores .icm profiles. These will only apply in profile-aware programs, such as Photoshop.

[Johan]

You might find some useful information in the thread Questions regarding colorvision spyder usage with thinkpads. By the way, the SXGA+ LCD you say you have, is that 14.1" (non-FlexView) or 15" (FlexView)?

Johan

[dcouzin]

Thanks RealBlackStuff and Johan.
My screen is 14.1".
I've now installed Microsoft's Color Control Panel Applet for Windows XP. In Color Settings, the Devices tab seems to let me associate a default color profile with the device <ThinkPad Display>, but this association again doesn't change the colors in the display. Indeed the association can be in conflict with the association made in the Radeon Color Management tab.

Seeming to disagree with RealBlackStuff's statement is this one from Microsoft:

Many common Windows components and software applications (such as Windows Explorer, Windows Picture and Fax Viewer, and Microsoft Office 2003) use ICM 2.0 to ensure correct display of images with embedded color profiles. In addition, advanced graphics programs such as Adobe Photoshop enable users to embed color profiles in images and to transform images from one color space to another.

How can there be all those profiles installed to do nothing?