Macbook Faded Colors

Yes, I'm having somewhat of a similar problem with my display. I just traded in my MacBook for a replacement and it jus seems as though the screen isn't as bright a vivrant as the computer I traded in. Not so much washed out just soupy. So I expert calibrated and it seems much better now. But I wonder if Mac did something from week 25 makes, to week 26. This new one is a week 26, and the display is Soupy, the keyboard is louder, it went from a dull thud to click clacking. And the hard dirve is a different make. Strange.

What do you mean by bleedthrough? Mine just has that ting where if your not looking directly at it, i.e. line of site perpendicular to screen, it starts losing it's contrast. I know that this happens anyway with all screens, but I'm just wondering if it's losing it faster then it should be, or I'm just being paranoid. If your lookinf directly at it, after I expertly calibrated it, the colors are vibriant once again, and the contrast perfect. Then if you move the screen say one inch, measuing from the top, to you it loses a good portion of it's contrast, what do you guys think? But lik I said, head on and it's beautiful.

Run a black screen (screen saver or one of those dead pixel tests) and see if its evenly black or if there is light shining through parts of the screen. If light is shining through, its bleed through. Mine shines very definitely from the bottom, like there's a flashlight shining up from under the display.

Yes, but what kind of viewing angle are we talking about? I just ran that test ith all black and the screen is lighter at the bottom. But not horribley. I own two flat screen monitors at home and they both havesomthing sinilar, as do the ones a t work, and the other laptops I've tried it on. You can just notice it's a little lighter.

It may have worked for your MacBook, but, calibration does not work for mine. Unless there's a way to calibrate the bottom of the screen differently from the top, calibration will make NO difference if your LCD screen has backlighting unevenness. The reason it works on your MacBook is because your screen is obviously not defective like mine.

Shouldn't be lighter at all, it should be even lighting when viewed head on. I went to a local authorized dealer this morning and looked at one of theirs. It did it as well, but not quite as badly. I'm surprised that so few Mac people even heard of blacklight bleeding, its pretty common.

Not a huge deal (I suppose) but I won't be using it for photo editing (that that I would with a 13" screen.

I recieved one of the first macbooks in Perth Australia apart from the outer skin lifting on the key board suround I have a major issue with the "Color" setting I have to use 256, if I bump it up to 1000 or 1 million the screen just washes out to the point where it is difficult to read the text on the toll bars etc. I have tried every thing to resolve this issue, the funny thing is the color/resilution is fine on boot up but once the OS has fully loaded it defaults to 1000 and fades out. dose anyone else have any idea.

Brett

The viewing angle is not the problem, it's the backlight bleeding up from the bottom (same on my MacBook) which cannot be corrected by calibration or by viewing it at a different angle. No matter what angle you view the display, the top will always be darker than the bottom of the display in a very noticeable way. If calibration corrected your problem, then you had a different problem than the one being mentioned in this thread.

I'm experiencing the same issue with having to use strange viewing angles to achieve acceptable color saturation and resolution. First I noticed that text was very light compared to my iMac G5. It didn't bother me too much. But colors were strangely off as well. Pushing the display back as far as it will go generally helps. But that messes up the iSight view (only capturing the top of my head here.

Something is generally not right with this. In the Apple store I literaly squatted down to be parallel with the models on display but thought nothing of it since all the Books are on a table and customers are standing.

Any ideas/suggestions? Calibration does not seem to help much. In any case, the viewing angle is SO limited. Glad my external display is shipping soon. But I would still like to use the build in display.

MacBook 1.83; iMac G5 17; PB G4/400; iMac G4 700 Mac OS X (10.4.7)

trust me. it works. I actually created five different
display profiels. original LCD set is terrible. it's
too warm, fuzzy. with expert mode, you can try
several times until you will be satisfied. now, I
change display profiles, depends on situation. it
works great. you can also recalibrate second LCD
monitor which hooks up with your macbook. too.

Would you mind sharing some of the main settings for your calibration? I'm experiencing the faded look as well. Apple Care just had me reset the PRAM, which gives the factory default.

What worries me is the angle of view. I have to push the display back as far as possible to get a good angle, but that makes my iSight or use on a plane impossible. Even with the display all the way back, I still have to look at something straight on, i.e., 90 degrees. So the top of the display always shows things better than the bottom.

Rather disappointing. Will be making my second trip to the Apple Store now.

I originally posted this thread.. I have gone to the
Apple store and Fry's to compare screens. For the
most part each Macbook displays the problem; with
just slight variations between models. The best
thing to do is what others have suggested and set the
gamma to 2.2 television in the display calibration.
I have started to get use to the screen but it is
clearly noticeable when side-by-side with a good
lcd. I don't do extreme graphic work but it is an
annoyance when dealing with photos which appear
washed out. Looking at the Macbook Pro's screen,
it looks like Apple cut costs on the lower Macbooks
in order to keep costs down (though even my cheap
Dell 700m screen has far better performance). But
it is something I can live with for the time being
as everything else about the computer I love.

Thanks for the information. I did an "expert" calibration (misnomer for me) and it helped greatly. Colors are more saturated, which got rid of that faded look. Since this appears to be an issue for all MacBooks, as you noted, I may not bother going in to the Genius Bar after all. For the most part, I will be using a new Dell Ultrasharp monitor with the MB.

After fiddling around some more I realize that indeed the display must be viewed straight up, no chaser. Perpendicular. So slouch in that economy section of the cabin, because your laptop display probably won't go back that far. My main beef now is using iSight: to get the best display quality, only the top of my head will be captured by the iSight frame; getting in the picture means sacrificing some display quality because a different angle is required.

I just picked up a MacBook and I was wondering if the extra $500.00 for the Pro was worth the matte screen, now after 24hrs of owning the 13", I am thinking maybe.

It took me 2 weeks to pull the trigger on this laptop, for a glossy screen, it was the best of all the brands on the market, but once out of the store and the flour. lighting, the screen looks completely different.

My eyes have felt as strained as they used to on a CRT.

I too have tried multiple custom color profiles, using the Adv setting too and still a wash.

Compared to my new iMac 20" or my G4 12" Powerbook, this screen *****! Sure it's brighter, but it's so bright that everything is faded.

Has anyone else returned theirs because of the screen?
And what is up with the glossy screens? Matte should at least be an option.

I just got my C2D and am having this issue as well. Contrast and saturation in the bottom half of my screen is very poor. For example, when looking in the Apple discussions, I cannot see the white to light blue difference on alternating posts. I ran that Pixel Check program, and with an all black screen, I get a lot of extra light coming in through the lower part of the display. Seems odd. I am going to head to a retailer tomorrow and look at some other MB models to see if it is a universal issue.

So for an update, I went to a few stores and looked at other MBs to find that they all have the issue (at least ones I saw). Opening up iTunes, you can barely see the light blue/white color difference between songs, and the viewing angle is abysmal. Coming home to mine I found I was obsessing about the screen, as mine is so bad... in fact, the line on this page that has 'advanced search, downloads, manuals, etc.' in purple is actually a weird light blue on my MB. However, I've been messing with the advanced calibrating stuff, and I think I may have actually partially fixed it. I actually seemed to get the colors better, and fixed some of the poor viewing angle issues. I think now that the big flub on Apple is that the LCDs are not calibrated properly upon ship, and the advanced options are anything but user intuitive. Thoughts? It would be cool if you could share calibration profiles...