Hi. Is there a high-end wide-gammut notebook display for color-critical image editing ?
What notebook would you recommend if you HAD TO recommend one ?
thanks.

And any experience with one of these notebooks? :

<http://markzware.com/blogs/top-5-laptops-for-displaying-color-gamut/2008/10/14/>

I don't think there is such a thing as a "high-end wide-gamut notebook display for color-critical image editing". Not yet, at least.

High-end color-critical image editing should be done using a good-quality desktop display -- well calibrated and profiled, of course.

Calibrated and profiled laptop displays are better than nothing if you are on the road and have nothing else handy -- but at this time they are still very limited in their capabilities by very narrow viewing angles, lack of uniformity, and overall lower manufacturing quality standards, also due to compromises that allow for a lighter and more comfortably portable CPU.

yes, this is commonplace knowledge, which was applicable for a long time. But ... as of today?
Did you check the link? What about the Sony VAIO AW with 137% AdobeRGB coverage ?

The issue is not the gamut. It's the viewing angle plus the lack of uniformity. What do the reviews say on those?

Anyway, the gamut is impressive I think. It's a considerably improvement compared to the colors laptop monitors commonly were able to display.

Not much unfortunately. But the press releases boast considerably increased viewing angles. Could be mere marketing of course. But on the other hand, I can't really see who would buy an expensive 137% AdobeRGB gamut display if viewing angle issues etc. make it useless for serious image editing.

Quoted:
"The same is true of printers which can capture a wider gamut
than your screen can display. More recent laptop monitors are
LED backlit, and while at first this was only an incremental
improvement, in recent months laptops have come out that can
actually exceed 100% of the NTSC color gamut."

The article is marketing nonsense. Gamuts cannot be compared
by percentage. Nobody else would use NTSC as a reference.

Best regards --Gernot Hoffmann

Gernot, you can compare Gamuts by percentage, if you display the gamuts as triangles in the CIE 1931 xy chromaticity diagram and compare the triangles' area. Of course, it's not an unproblematic and objective measurement due to the diagram's distortion in the direction of the green point, but still it gives you an idea (for example, considerably smaller than Adobe RGB, same size, or a bit larger). So I'd take the percentages as "rough measurement" ...

In my opinion, it's not marketing nonsense, because the reviewing person didn't favour one brand over the other. I just think that he/she doesn't truly understand the subject. For once, I think he/she confuses NTSC with AdobeRGB (which was subsequently used for all comparisons). And secondly, I think this is entirely false:

HP didn’t give their display quality in terms of the percentage of the
gamut, but their press release did say the Elitebook’s DreamColor LCD
could display over 16 million colors. The Adobe RGB color gamut has approximately
16.7million colors in it, and after doing a little math we’re given a
96% gamut representation. Not bad at all.




Because in my opinion:

“The Adobe RGB color gamut has approximately 16.7million colors in it”.
-> This statement is false. Adobe RGB, sRGB (and all other RGB color spaces
for that matter) encompass an infinite amount of colors. The total amount
of colors used by a given hardware device or software application depends
on the bit depth it uses, from 1 bit (=2 colors, usually black and white)
to 24bit (=16,7 Mio colors) and more (48bit, 96bit, etc.). So the calculation
leading to “96% gamut representation” is wrong.

Mark,

concerning the interpretation of gamuts in the
chromaticity diagram you are partly right.
Partly, because this diagram is a perspective projection
of the 3D color space XYZ onto a 2D plane.

More important (for me) is the question, which relevant
colors are in-gamut or out-of-gamut in several color
spaces.
Relevant are IMO: all Pantone Spot colors, because these
are (when printed) the most vibrant real world colors;
then the printer inks, because these define the reproduction;
and finally the colors of photographic targets, because
these were considered as relevant for real world colors
by color scientists.

Pages 15-19 here are showing the results:
<http://www.fho-emden.de/~hoffmann/swatch16032005.pdf>

Stroked symbols for out-of gamut, filled for in-gamut.

It's perhaps disappointing that vivid orange or yellow
is out-of-gamut for aRGB, but eventually not for printing.

But here comes the solution: in aRGB and even in sRGB
one can boost colors in Lab. From there one can convert
directly into CMYK.
This aspect was always forgotten by 'calibrationist'.
A quite common opinion is, that a camera has to acquire a
scene correctly. That's wrong (except for reproduction).
The image can be converted by manipulations into something
more pleasing.

Best regards --Gernot Hoffmann