Disclaimer: We are a replacement LCD supplier. We sell, ship and support LCD panels that our customers buy to replace their cracked/damaged screens and get their computer back to working order. We deal with LCDs a lot more than we deal with individual computers themselves. Everything written below is written from a perspective of an LCD supplier. We are not experts on Lenovo practices and have no internal knowledge about their processes. Screenshots used in this article are kindly provided by our customers.
X-Rite Color Assistant
Recently we’ve been fielding questions from Lenovo users who had purchased replacement LCDs from us about the Lenovo / X-Rite ICC pop-ups that advises users to restore their customized profiles specific to their display. The error message that pops up is quite vague about what this is and how important the purported concern is.
So what is this about?
It appears that Lenovo is color calibrating their high color accuracy panels that go in their higher end laptops, using a hardware color calibrator and then stores the resultant profile on their cloud. Following a Windows re-installation, or a change of a display hardware, Lenovo offers to re-download a color profile for your display.
Furthermore, Lenovo will even provide ICC profiles for parts that come from their own parts department, if a matching display serial number is provided. Entering a serial number from a 3rd party supplier like us will likely not result in a successful ICC profile download. Only the panels that Lenovo has had the pleasure of calibrating will have a corresponding ICC profile in their cloud available for download. It is a value added service, but how necessary is it?
What is color calibration?
It is a process that connects the virtual to reality by letting the computer know that the colors it is sending are appearing correctly in the real world. This is done by literally sticking a camera onto the display, and by flashing a series of colors into said camera the computer can build a color correction profile for its actual display. The color profile ensures that when computer is sending a particular color the monitor is actually outputting it to the user. And if the display is off-color in reality, a virtual correction is applied in a measured fashion to bring the real output color as close as possible to the intended color. The list of such corrections is what constitutes an ICC Profile.
Who needs color calibration?
The thing about computer color is that it’s almost never accurate to reality as measured by machines. But regular users of e-mail and web-browsing may not care that the color they see is or isn’t the intended color. In-fact a properly hardware calibrated display will appear bleak, colorless and flat to regular users who are used to “bright*”, “vivid*”, “rich*” (*marketing terms) colors of consumer displays. Despite that, several real world professions have a crucial and even life-critical dependence on proper color output by the computer.
– Medical Imagining, Scientific Inquest
First of such professions is the medical imagining field. X-ray, MRI and ultra-sound technicians and doctors all depend on the accuracy of information displayed to them by their computers. A slight color mismatch due to improper display calibration may lead to an improper diagnosis or an unfortunate omission that could have catastrophic consequences on somebody’s life. Likewise a scientific researcher may wholly depend on their computer display to show accurate colors from their fancy electronic microscopes. That is why such medical and scientific imaging machines are regularly serviced by specialized highly paid technicians with thick manuals, mandatory check-lists and discrete hardware calibrators. While some of our displays may be used in medical setting, color accuracy cannot be guaranteed out of the box, and that is why we recommend users in these fields to use a regular proper color calibration procedure using a discrete hardware calibrator machine.
– Cinematography, desktop publishing, printing houses
Any professions that use a computer to author, edit and produce content that will be ultimately transferred to the real world media critically depend on accuracy of color. That is because real world media like paper, film and especially t-shirts/clothes cost material and resources and therefore money, and having to throw away such media due to color mismatch after manufacture affects their bottom line. That is why professionals in these fields also use a regular proper color calibration procedure using a discrete hardware calibrator machine.
– Photographers, videographers, graphics artists and web publishing
Publishers of web content often rely on high gamut (breadth of distinct colors) and high color accuracy displays to master their works. “Mastering” and “master” in this context means the highest quality and fidelity work that exists that is then being distributed to consumers. But the thing about virtual content being distributed to end-users is that most of such users don’t actually have properly calibrated displays, quite the opposite – most consumer displays as mentioned earlier provide colors that are exaggerated, turned up and beautified – not accurate to the machine vision/definition, but pleasant to our eyes and sensibilities. It is only important for the publisher to have proper color calibration for a reason that they don’t over-correct their work tailored to their own display, resulting in further departure from the intended color when consumer views it on their regular screen. It is typical for such professionals to own a discrete hardware color calibrator and to perform their own calibration regularly.
So what is the proper hardware calibration procedure?
As described earlier the process of calibration involves placing a discrete hardware color calibrator (specialized web camera) onto the display itself and then running the software that guides users through the process. First it advises users to adjust their physical monitor settings to set the recommended brightness to only 120 lumens, then to adjust or normalize the color controls to neutral. After that the process will flash a multitude of colors about 120 in total (not just the 3 primary colors), then it’ll apply the perceived corrections and will verify its work by flashing a few more colors. Finally the process will complete and a new verified ICC Profile will be created and applied to the display settings.
How often do you need to calibrate?
Every 30 days. Yup, that’s right, a proper color calibration is required to be re-done every 30 days (or every month) to maintain true color accuracy. A proper color calibration is an on-going process, because as the display ages its capabilities are changing and drifting, and a calibration that is performed on a display that is new, will inevitably change even 30 days after the purchase. Of course the changes are minute and most users will never even notice the difference, but this will depend on the individual panel and can be quite different between identical models as they age. Over time, even the most accurate panels will drift and will require discrete hardware color re-calibration.
So what about the Lenovo / X-Rite process and the pop-ups?
In 2008 Lenovo has released a W-series of ThinkPad mobile workstations that had a discrete hardware color calibrator built right into the laptop. It would perform a regular re-calibration procedure when the lid was closed and was unobtrusive to the users.
The current arrangement by Lenovo and X-Rite of pre-calibrating panels during assembly and offering to re-download an ICC Profile is a departure from the typical on-going discrete hardware color calibration process practiced in the industries that depend on high color accuracy professionally. It does not address the fact that colors drift over time, especially in the first few months of a new LCD panel operation and it provides a false sense of security to professionals that do not utilize a discrete hardware color calibration process in their practice. But since the color drift in modern panels is relatively low, only noticeable by machines, and because the default color profiles applied by Windows or MacOS are usually pretty accurate for human eyes, the entire “value-added service” provided to Lenovo users is kind of moot. It is not bloatware in a typical sense, but it can be safely removed from start up and disabled, as the benefits of it are marginal at best.
What if accurate colors are important to me?
As our article shows, the current Lenovo / X-Rite process does not guarantee accurate colors, especially over the life-time of your computer’s display, but if you would still like to ensure that your display is showing the most accurate color according to its capabilities for years, we highly recommend the X-Rite’s wide range of professional and prosumer products as they are one of the original computer color accuracy companies, relied upon by thousands of design companies, film studios and desktop publishers. Simply use your favorite search engine to look for their website or jump on your favorite jungle site and search for a hardware color calibrator. A proper discrete hardware color calibrator can be had for about $300 and then you also can maintain a proper discrete hardware color calibration process in your work-flow, regardless of whether your display came from Lenovo’s parts bin, or from us.
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