I wouldn’t expect it to have much affect on color, unless it had a slight warm or cool cast to it. Primarily, I’d think it could potentially cause a slight reduction in sharpness and/or contrast due to slight scattering from the matte finish. But we’ll see. The Viascreens protector is what I have too. I’ll finally get around to applying it tomorrow.
I did get my hands on a Microsoft Slim Pen 2 (borrowed), so I’ll be testing that out soon too.
I’m just starting to use the machine a bit more, after getting help on the CachyOS forum to figure out why my installation on an expansion card was crashing - short story, incompatible version, resolved by adjusting the settings in pacman.conf and using a built-in tool to reinstall all packages. I’ve also been spending time working with Support regarding the unrecognized fan that thankfully can be run with fw-fanctrl.
If anyone has reference sites that I can take a look at, I will be happy to do so. It seems ok to me, but I’m not using it for anything that would be impacted by colors that were slightly off.
I have a MacBook Pro from 2013 with glossy screen (it was a retina display), and it has a great picture quality. I also was concerned about this but it was no issue.
The last years I also had a GPD pocket 2 with a glossy screen, and you could not use it in sunlight.
The main issue is the antireflection of the display, not the type of glossyness, I would say
There are many levels of AR, Anti-Reflection, with the better ones getting insanely expensive unless you can negotiate good deals. The most basic is just a single layer of AR. That might not be expensive, but it won’t be a great for direct sunlight. Sunlight just has so much power that even cutting it by 50% will leave a lot left. A company like Apple can use their massive size to negotiate a better deal per-unit for AR with many more layers.
Well, with this in mind: can someone test the display in sunlight?
@BigT got my FW12 today and just finished setting up Ubuntu. All works great. Red-ish colors do seem a bit off, but TBH it’s not that noticable to me. In direct comparison with my more expensive desktop monitors, yes, but by itself I barely notice it.
I had a GPD WIN Max 2 (2022 - or 2023… can’t remember) which had serious off greens. That was much more noticable to me and really annoying. FW12 screen is fine for me.
Tried the color profiles and there are fine differences, but default profile seems OK too. To be fair… I’m only browsing and watching videos. No artist and no serious color work. Developer by trade, so even if I have to do work it’s mostly using pre-designed assets.
My (personal) verdict: perfect machine for on-the-go. Arrived just in time for a multi week vacation. Saving serious weight, as I now can leave my tablet and work emergency notebook at home.
Tested the color profiles more in-depth and I prefer your profiles to the default one. White shifting towards red is more pleasant to my eye.
Playing around with various settings I must say that minimum brightness still seems a bit high.
Not to have anyone waiting for their FW12 worrying… all my comments are really overly critical. All in all one of the best laptops I ever had. Still prefer it - with all my tiny criticisms - over my OLED 13 inch Intel Ultra CPU notebook. The form factor, 2-in-1, chassis material… just really nice.
Also… blacks are much better than expected. I remember cheap displays that only ever produced gray-ish blacks.
Yeah, the slight color oddities aside, the display gets bright, has good blacks, and has good contrast. It looks good, and as you say, for general use, I think most folks will be pleased. I wish the colors were more accurate, but I also wish it was twice as powerful while using 1/10th the power. I can wish for all kinds of things, lol.
Does the screen turn off when you go all the way to the minimum brightness? This happens on some laptops (like a Chuwi laptop I own) and you can get a little bit lower minimum brightness on laptops like that. In the power manager on XFCE (and hopefully other desktop environments too), there is a brightness step count setting that can be increased to get you closer to off (so lower minimum brightness). Or another option is to manipulate the brightness file directly, I had a minimum brightness script for ease of use. Sadly I’m batch 4 and can’t test this for awhile.
No, screen does not turn off on lowest brightness setting.
Just checked and xrandr --brightness does work. So there are easy ways to get lower brightness.
For what it’s worth, for an average user, it’s fine. If nobody told me that the colour coverage was poor, I likely wouldn’t notice much difference between it and my much better monitors on other machines.
I did up until hurricane Helene, when it was submerged in the flood waters and the battery expanded.
But yes, i did remember how purples didn’t look as bright with the color profile… but the extremely difficult 5 second install of Decky and a color preset fixed that right away.
My OLED one has a better color accuracy OOTB.
For those looking for color accuracy for drawing, a display color profile may be necessary for your art.