Librem 15v4: Does the new screen have a wider color gamut?

I currently own a Librem 15v3. I have tested the screen with a colorimeter and it has about 70% coverage of the sRGB colorspace. That’s pretty typical for most FHD laptop displays on the market.

Some 4K displays offer 85% or higher sRGB coverage. Some even offer 100% aRGB coverage.

Does the 4K screen on the new 15v4 improve upon the color reproduction of the older FHD screen?

As I have begun doing more photo and video editing on my Librem, the need for accurate color reproduction is starting to become more of a sticking point for me. It may be worth it for me to upgrade for the screen alone, if it’s 100% sRGB or better.

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Excellent question. I would also be interested in the characteristics of the new 4K UHD screen. Years ago I used someone else’s ColorMunki on my old MacBook Pro, and it was already quite well calibrated out of the box. Apple has a reputation for getting that sort of thing right. I can’t remember what the coverage % was, but the software was proprietary and required a secret code.

I also have a Librem 15v3, but I haven’t tested the screen with a colorimeter. Which colorimeter did you use, and did you use the built-in Linux calibration tools or some other software, possibly something that came with the colorimeter?

I used the DisplayCal software for Linux, which seems to support a very wide range of commercially available colorimeters. I happened to catch a good sale on the Spyder 5 Pro colorimeter.

I know that there’s an open source hardware colorimeter available. For me it was just a matter of price and availability. At the time that I learned about the ColorHug their website said that they were sold out.

@Sitwon thanks, I’ve not used DisplayCal but it’s open source and is a graphical frontend to Argyll CMS, which is in Debian. Will have to check out ColorHug. It looks like they’re still in business but just out of stock. I also would like to support open source hardware as well as software.

100% rgb is fine only if you are not printing but if you are then you have to start looking for 10 bit panels and those are not cheap.
i find it insuficient to rely on a laptop screen for any real kind of work.
check this out > https://www.pcper.com/news/Displays/Samsung-Begins-Mass-Production-156-inch-UHD-OLED-Panel-February

Yeah. Most of the time I’m not printing. I just want something that is good enough for the web/social media while I’m traveling.

I’m not going to expect or ask for Purism to put an unrealistically premium screen in their laptops, but given the prevalence of above average screens in their reasonably-priced competitors (eg, the 100% aRGB 4K screen of the XPS 15), I don’t think it’s unreasonable for Purism to use a similar panel.

But even if I was printing, I probably wouldn’t waste my money on a 10-bit P3 panel unless I was getting paid commensurately for my prints. Honestly, people have been editing and printing with 70% sRGB screens for decades and getting acceptable quality prints. I doubt anyone interested in hiring me would want to pay me what it costs to get an exact Pantone matched print. That’s something less than 1% of professional photographers ever need to care about.

i see. i thought you were one of those 1% who REALLY need that.
i can tell you that if i knew half of the things i know now about color theory and calibration back when i took my bachelors i would have had much higher quality prints.
anyway i doubt them librems got what apple laptop screens do.

FYI: Apple’s Retina displays are only 100% sRGB, which is a subset of the 100% aRGB that Razer, Dell, and Lenovo offer at the same price point.

Razer, Dell and Lenovo are giants so no comment there.

what i have mostly been looking forward to is where this technology used by Asus here >> http://www.tftcentral.co.uk/blog/asus-proart-pa32ucx-with-32-4k-panel-and-1000-zone-mini-led-backlight/ will take laptop panel development in the future. oled is nice for power consumption and supreme contrast in video but for prolonged static content it simply just isn’t viable yet as it creates the phenomenon that is refered to as BURN IN.

in a laptop having a FALD panel display would be much heavier and bulky i imagine but it would be a beast if we could have a 21-24 inch 1080p FALD similar to the one above. http://dpi.lv/#21″

just drop the 4k hdr mania and give us 1080p hdr. much easier to process.

I’m currently running a dell xps 15 4k.
It looks amazing when it’s not frozen forcing a cold boot (3-4 times a day).
I’ll never by another Dell. I don’t have time to do their QA.

Just ordered the new Librem 15 to start the move off Windoze.
Once my wife graduates I’ll be putting linux everywhere.

I wish they didn’t table the tablet.
I only use the touch screen on the xps15.
Not excited about switching to a track pad.

The tablet will return after the Librem 5

No laptop from any manufacturer will be 100% perfect every time. Indeed, with Purism being such a small operation they undoubtedly have less QA than a major brand like Dell.

I had a battery issue with my Librem 15v3 within the first month. The resolved it for me, but it took about a week.

I have had another issue with Purism over some cheap replacement parts that has been open since last June and still not resolved.

In comparison to dealing with Dell, Purism’s support can be frustratingly slow. They’re a much smaller company with fewer resources and they don’t always have replacement parts on hand.

Dell, the longest you’ll wait is on the phone to talk to someone. If I had the same battery issue with a Dell, they would have overnighted me a box to ship it back to them, it would have been pre-labeled to overnight back to them, been repaired, and be back on my door step in less time than it took for Purism to just ship me a replacement battery that I had to install myself. (Librems are not for anyone who is shy about opening up their machine and replacing components themselves.)

Long story short, if you’re switching to Purism because you don’t want to deal with calling their tech support and getting your problem fixed, then I hope you’re unbelievably lucky and get a perfect Librem that never has any issues, because dealing with Purism support is not going to be any better than dealing with Dell Support.

Honestly, you should probably just put Linux on your XPS and then send it back to Dell if the freezing and crashing persists. The issues might not be a hardware problem, in which case changing the software will fix your issues.

that’s why i say puri.sm shot themselves in the foot by not making the battery on their devices hot-swapable. i mean i understand where “gravity” pulls us but that doesn’t mean we should willingly and blindly jump in the “black-hole” that is the proprietary ecosistem trend. heck even if blackberry q10 is a non-freedom respecting device it still got right AT LEAST this aspect.

On the one hand, I do like the idea of hot-swappable batteries, or even some standardized modules to make it easier to source replacements.

However, I think that pragmatically the integrated battery lends itself to a better overall design. Because the battery can be customized to fit the chasis we can achieve better battery life while also having sleeker/slimmer ergonomics (i.e., portability). And the fragile plastic latches on hot-swappable batteries were a frustrating source of failures back in the 90s-00s.

I bought a Librem because I wanted a laptop that I could open up. But my experience with the battery is also why I can’t recommend a Librem to most other people, even if the idea of a privacy-friendly device appeals to them. The reality is that most consumers expect that any repair requiring the device to be opened up and the mainboard exposed would be performed by a qualified professional.

I just so happens that a lot of Purism’s customers are probably qualified professionals. But it further restricts the niche they place themselves in.

Really, my hope is that by supporting Purism the rest of the industry will take note that there is a market for privacy-friendly design and adopt some of the low-hanging fruit (like we’re starting to see physical webcam covers built-in on some devices).

yes NOW they do that when there are really way bigger skeletons in their closets. i am not saying that A,G and M should dissapear or be destroyed just “lift their skirts up” . like the skeleton Brook from the anime says - may i see your pantsu’ ?

Excellent points.

I’ve built my own hardware for decades so I’m not concerned about support or having a working machine. I have 4 Dells, and an HP graphics workstation running in my house now.

The Librem will sit next to the XPS15 and hopefully completely replace it over time. My goal is to get windows-free before Microsoft cuts me off due to some bogus TOS violation.

I’ll take your great suggestion about trying a new OS on the Dell.
Are there any linux OSs that support touch screens?

I have Fedora 29 running on a Dell XPS 15. I disabled the touchscreen in the BIOS settings because it annoyed me, but it did work by default in Fedora.

by default gnome 3 desktop in any linux distribution should in theory support touch screens. by the way you don’t have to feel forced to buy a laptop or a smartphone or a tablet just to have acces to touch screen technology. have you known about this little thing ? >>

the H at the end of the name suggests that there is another non hdmi variant of the same monitor. it just has VGA connector and a separate usb port to connect to the pc (for touch screen feature). Or you can use it simply as is with no touch screen. it works perfectly well and is super efficient. Power On Mode : <5.78W***

*** with a good hardware color calibration device you can reduce it to about 4w or less (depending on what settings you use)

see https://displaycal.net/ for linux gui manager for cc

you can use a spyder / xrite color calibration device for your quick calibration.

Thanks for the info.
I’ve used a GeChic hdmi remote touchscreen display on a Nvidia shield to create the screaming fast stock android tablet device in the past.

I’ve only used headless Solaris/Centos/Suse on servers with a putty terminal.
I’m a newbe to Linux with a GUI.

I’ve got an dell xps15 already that is a touchscreen laptop.
I was going to load PureOs if that can support a touch screen on the xps15.

the only thing that i don’t like about the asus vt168 monitor is that it doesn’t even reach 50 % RGB coverage. this is from the calibration report not any official figures. the ideal situation would be 100% rec709 or 100% RGB on a real 8bit panel not 6bit + FRC. anything more is the domain of proffesional gear and probably highly expensive in terms of total cost of ownership.