I’m quite disappointed with the FW12’s terrible color renditions.
The red is orange and that makes the purple washed out.
I don’t know if I will ever be able to do any good work with this laptop when if I need to have a judgement about colors.
I usually don’t pay too much attention about that, as long as it is in the ballpark. But here the reddest red is just orange, how could it be this bad ?
I saw people saying that it was a “cheap” laptop, but the amazon’s special cheap laptops aren’t that bad. I haven’t had a screen as far away from sRGB in at least 15 years.
And the FW12 is advertised for its tablet use too, so decent color rendition cannot be an afterthought.
The only maybe saving grace of the FW12 as a product is that it may have down the line a screen upgrade/fix/option.
But having a repairable laptop was supposed to be for fixing my mistakes like dropping it or breaking it, not the manufacturers’ supply chain blunders.
I thought folks might’ve been exaggerating a bit, especially with how things can get a bit wonky when taking a picture or video of a screen and posting that online, which I then have to view through whatever I was using at the time, but goodnes.
I don’t really do any work requiring color accuracy - mostly writing in documents, excel, email, etc - but even I’m noticing it still looks bad. It’s functional but noticeably detracts from the experience. There are drawbacks to the machine and that’s fine, but I really wish the screen wasn’t one of them.
based on what i can find, looking up part numbers, the display in the FW12 is the same as the Lenovo 500e Yoga Gen 4 Chromebook (2023). According to Lenovo’s detailed specs for this machine, the color gamut for this display is 50% NTSC with an 800:1 Contrast Ratio and brightness of 300 nits
I got a CHUWI Gemibook Pro J4125 paid 350€ 4 years ago. That thing was certainly built around its screen that’s for sure. More than enough pixel, good enough colors, plenty bright.
And I am guessing that most of the issue stems from getting a screen with a digitizer reducing the possibilities of panels with good colors while ironically making those colors important.
Well it feels better, indeed, but I don’t know if that will be sufficient to trick my brain as it’s a small laptop that won’t cover much of my field of view and the colors are really far off.
Well I sure hope there will be an upgrade path for the screen. The current one is on the parts shop for 170€, that leaves a lot of room for an acceptably prices upgrade or option.
The performances of the i5 motherboard is plenty good enough, and I think the i3 would be also quite reasonable given the form factor and thanks to the SO-DIMM RAM and NVMe drive, I’m sure anyone doing drawn digital art is probably covered for on the performance side.
So Framework can hunt for users of Surface tablets that are starting to feel the need for a new machine that is snappy and reparable (and maybe also want to avoid Arm CPU).
And let’s be honest here, given the stylus screen and color choices, it is clear it is a demographic they are going for.
The only thing needed for those people not to be disappointed once they receive their machine is a screen option that is actually good at being a screen.
It seems it was a successful product, so I too expect everything which doesn’t need a change of form size to be upgradable. Including the keyboard which is a bit difficult to see in low/no light contains.
Although I’m still testing my device (cheapest i3) and can’t decide if I’ll upgrade yet. Plenty of fast for internet and mostly simple tasks in laptop mode.
I’d actually be interested in an upgrade path to an FW12 ARM mainboard too, in some years. At least, if it would give the FW12 similar gains in power efficiency & reduced heat production as when Apple switched from Intel to ARM. These areas is where I most painfully notice a big difference with my 2021 Macbook Pro in day-to-day use, next to the screen.
If an update comes for the screen, I also hope it’s slightly larger and with smaller bezels.
I was careful not to make comparisons between this and my best monitors, but I failed to resist it. Here’s a red bird: File:Cardinal.jpg - Wikimedia Commons
A new screen would be wonderful! I got mine under batch 10 only about a week ago but both the color range for the screen and pen wobble make it a really really hard sell for art. Really hoping a new screen with more of a focus for the surface movers comes around soon o7 the laptop has been wonderful otherwise.
I draw on it excessively and the only thing that’s really lacking is the screen color accuracy.
The performance is more than enough for drawing and painting and the stylus tech is great in spite of what the apple snobs say. It’s too bad it’s held back by the screen so much.
You can really see how bad it is if you open up a square color picker like this in Krita:
If you look at it on a Framework 12 you can see that I’m in the cool red part of the color wheel (almost purple) and yet the cool red turns completely orange or very warm red. It’s because that deep cool red doesn’t exist on this screen, it can’t be shown. I have to literally just use faith as an artist that the red is there.
This makes it basically unusable for like half of all artists at least. I get away with it for my job but only because I’m not working to print and no one cares if my colors are a bit off.
It’s kinda like using a box of crayons and all the red is gone lol. You just get a salmon crayon instead.
I’m surprised to not see this mentioned like in any of the posts related to screens, but I’d love not only for the color accuracy to improve, but also to get an OLED (or OLED-like) variant of the display.
I’ve used one on my previous laptop, and it’s a really great thing to have IMO.
I guess it’s not as easy to get one, and even harder to make it sustainable (because of the potential degradation).
But if there’s one thing I’d like to have in a laptop, outside color accuracy, then it’s not having any visible light up from the screen in places where there should be black color/no light at all, and well, the contrast, (potential) peak brightness, etc.
There is definitely space for a variety of justifications for a new screen, even without a digitizer.
I love to use my Steam Deck OLED with KDE’s reading more turned all the way to only red and get a nigh vision friendly monochromatic screen.
And when it comes to the longevity of an OLED screen I think Frameworks are maybe the best case for them, as users could actually be confident that they would be able to get a reasonably priced new one and actually have a shot at replacing it or having it replaced.
$2000 or €2000 or more for better specifications in every dimension.
