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Alu Macbook: What screen do you have and how do you rate it? Poll

What screen does your Alu MB have and how do you rate it?

  • 9C89 and it's good.

    Votes: 96 39.0%

  • 9C89 and it's so so.

    Votes: 42 17.1%

  • 9C89 and it's bad.

    Votes: 28 11.4%

  • 9C5E and it's good.

    Votes: 2 0.8%

  • 9C5E and it's so so.

    Votes: 1 0.4%

  • 9C5E and it's bad.

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • 9C8C and it's good.

    Votes: 49 19.9%

  • 9C8C and it's so so.

    Votes: 19 7.7%

  • 9C8C and it's bad.

    Votes: 9 3.7%
  • Total voters
    246
Mine is an 9C8C.

The vertical viewing angles are pretty bad, but the colour and contrast is good when you're at the right angle. Blacks aren't great, when you've got the right angle for colours it tends to lose black detail on the top part of the screen and wash out a little on the bottom part.

Overall I'd rate the screen good for general use, poor for viewing angles and poor for black levels.
 
Greystorm said:
Mine is an 9C8C.

The vertical viewing angles are pretty bad, but the colour and contrast is good when you're at the right angle. Blacks aren't great, when you've got the right angle for colours it tends to lose black detail on the top part of the screen and wash out a little on the bottom part.

Overall I'd rate the screen good for general use, poor for viewing angles and poor for black levels.
Click to expand...

A so so? That's where I rated mine with similar deficiencies.
 
Another 9C8C here, and I think it's going back. I'm very disappointed. It just looks terrible compared to my Macbook Air.
 
DannyBres said:
im really strugling to find a way to check what model i have?! how do you do it?
Click to expand...

Go to system prefs, display, color, open the calibrated display profile and the go to number 13, press info.

mom'smac said:
Another 9C8C here, and I think it's going back. I'm very disappointed. It just looks terrible compared to my Macbook Air.
Click to expand...

Totally agree with you. By the way, the measurements by Noteboookcheck.net and Notebookjournal.de support your claim.

The Macbook has a contrast of about 1:160. The MBA has over 1:500.
 
Without it being scientific, the poll seems to indicate there isn't much difference between the way people perceive 9C8C and 9C89.
 
Edit: I lied, I have a 9C89 panel - was confused by the color profile I was using which reflected the panel the color profile it was made on.. making me think I had something else.. anyways, 9C89 and anything I said below is still accurate on my ideas on the 9C89 panel. The refresh does kind of suck at 25ms.. I do notice some smearing when I slowly scroll a webpage.. still using the David profile and it looks 100% better than the factory native profile.



Apparently I'm in the rare group of 9C5E owners.. I voted that mine was "so so". It's about identical to the SantaRosa MacBook I had previously before. Horizontal angles are pretty nice.. vertical angles are a complete joke (useless).

Vertical angles are so bad you can see a large visual difference in brightness at the top of the screen versus bottom when you're directly in front of it. But my SR MacBook was just as bad.

Colors are decent.. whites are pretty clean and blacks too.. contrast is "average" for a notebook.

I'm not going to complain much because this IS a notebook.. I'm not going to be editing photos/movies on it... It's a business tool for me, and it suits me perfectly. I can "deal" with the screen "issues".. I didn't expect a MBA quality display for the money... would have been nice - but didn't happen.

What's the LCD model number of the MBA anyways? Wouldn't it be nice to see some Aluminum MacBook's with it? The resale value on that would be ridiculous.

Edit: I just wanted to point out that I'm now using David's color profile on my 9C5E without any tweaks to the profile itself and my blacks improved a lot.. text is far more enjoyable to read. Everything is less washed out looking and richer. I switched back to the "stock" color profile after an hour and was astonished how horrible/washed out looking it was.
 
Anyway we can find some real hardware info on our panels? As in who makes it, the specs of the screen, etc..?

I'm guessing the only real way is to disassemble the LCD and look for the labels?
 
Diversion said:
Anyway we can find some real hardware info on our panels? As in who makes it, the specs of the screen, etc..?
Click to expand...

You can install Windows XP or Vista and run PC Wizard 2008 (free download).

The C89 panel is a LG/Philips panel (LP133WX2-TLC1). The 9C8C panel is AU Optronics.
 
9C89 and I think it looks good.

When I sit with it on my lap I think the screen looks good. Here is a picture of the screen. I think the blacks look good.
 

Attachments

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Whenever my coworker gets around to buying his Macbook, maybe he'll have a different panel than I do and I can take a picture of two Macbooks at full brightness with the stock color profile.. Very curious to know the difference between the 8C and 89.

Jay
 
Diversion said:
Whenever my coworker gets around to buying his Macbook, maybe he'll have a different panel than I do and I can take a picture of two Macbooks at full brightness with the stock color profile.. Very curious to know the difference between the 8C and 89.
Click to expand...

Me too, I'm very curious.

I've already checked 6 Macbooks in stores but all of them have C89. (netherlands)
 
StingerT125 said:
9C89 and I think it looks good.

When I sit with it on my lap I think the screen looks good. Here is a picture of the screen. I think the blacks look good.
Click to expand...

Because there is not much black at the bottom it masks the problem, but I swear the dock icons look a little faint and washed out, whilst the text on the top bar looks much darker.
 
I finally saw the 9C8C today. In my opinion it is slightly better than the C89 panel. Especially the whites looked a bit better at 50% brightness. Differences are small though.
 
9C89 and it's my first ever Apple product.
Very disappointed with the screen - no dead pixels (fortunately) but the grey bar at the bottom on a dark page totally ruins it for me, and the menu bar needs loads more saturation, it looks dreadful to me.

I think I'm going to have to return and reluctantly upgrade to the MBP purely for this reason, which is disappointing as I love everything else about it and I don't need firewire, extra gfx card etc.
 
9c89- The screen is fine, but Mac OS X's font rendering kills it for me.

I'm going to use Ubuntu as the primary OS on this system.
 
mcdj said:
How does anti aliasing make the screen feel smaller?
Click to expand...
I use my laptop mainly for reading letters on the internet. Apple aa makes the letters appear slightly blurry, thus decreasing readability.

A 13" screen in OS X is about as readable to me as a 12" screen in Vista, when viewed from equal distance.

This picture shows the difference. Above Apple, MS below:
 

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