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Star-Fire · May 22, 2006, 06:05 PM

So I've seen this posted on the Apple board, but has anyone here noticed there Macbook display having a pink hew? It's starting to get to me and wondering if it's common or not and if I should go back to the Apple store.

MiniMac · May 26, 2006, 11:30 PM

I just received my black Macbook today and it has the magenta tint as well. Numerous attempts at calibration didn't help. I'm sending it back and have already ordered a replacement. I sure hope these aren't that abundant. Any one else have this problem?

mathus · May 26, 2006, 11:50 PM

I also just bought a MB and I noticed the pink color when I first started it up. It is very apparent when I am taking notes in class with the bright fluorescent overhead. When my screen goes to sleep I can see the hue in the reflection of the bulbs, but now as I sit in bed it isn't very noticeable. I was wondering if the coloring was apart of a protective coating.

brassplayersrock² · May 27, 2006, 12:14 AM

i actually asked the people at the apple store about this (the first day they came out i went over and got to play with them) and they calibrated the one i asked about, heh, than after that all of them. i didnt notice the pink hue after they calibrated them. i hope this isnt going to be like the cinema display drama

Guy Kuo · May 27, 2006, 06:53 PM

After calibration with GretagMacbeth's Eye-One spectrophotometer, my MacBook no longer suffers the off color grayscale problem. As shipped, you don't get a display profile that actually calibrates the LCD correctly. Apple's software calibration tool in the display preferences simply won't produce a truely accurate and uniform grayscale tracking. The color of gray varies with the intensity of gray. It also does not hit the target color of white quite right.

I calibrated min to D65 and a gamma of 2.6 (2.6 because I prefer to emulate CRT response) and now the grayscale is quite uniform with an white intensity of 160 candella / meter ^2.

I'll make the my .icc profile available to others if you have a place the file can be hosted.

Makes a HUGE difference in how good the display looks. Of course, it will be fully accurate only on my particular unit, but if other MacBooks share the same batch/manufacturer of screen, it should be much better than the generic profiles shipped in the MacBook.

Photo678 · May 27, 2006, 07:10 PM

i can host it....send to me mullerDOTsteveATgmailDOTcom

Guy Kuo · May 27, 2006, 07:15 PM

Just sent it. Hopefully helps others out. Completely changes the display. Before calibration, mine was essentially useless for any critical viewing.

MiniMac · May 29, 2006, 04:57 PM

That would be great...please let us know when it's available!

Star-Fire · May 29, 2006, 06:18 PM

Well I had to swap Macbooks due to my first one randomly shuting down and the new one isn't anywhere as bad as the old one, I also used a eye-one monitor pro to calibrate the first one and while it was better still wasn't correct, the new one I was able to use the built in tool to get it very close.

Photo678 · May 29, 2006, 06:25 PM

whoops...

sorry guys, forgot about it, dont have my gmail account linked in mail.app yet.

give me a bit and i will post a link

Guy Kuo · May 29, 2006, 07:09 PM

Be sure to use Eye One Match 3. The older, Eye One Match version 2 software would not produce a uniform grayscale on my MacBook. The version 3 software does a much better job.

hldan · May 29, 2006, 09:06 PM

i just left my local Apple retail store spending an hour or so testing out the MacBooks and the MBP's. I looked for any pinkish tint on the black MacBooks and didn't see anything like that. I compared the color quality of the MBP vs the MacBooks and the whites look white from all corners of the screen. I opened up MS Word since it has a perfect white background and moved the window around the screen and there was no change in color.
What I actually noticed was that the 17"MBP had a bluish tint and the 15"MBP had a warmer tint and this was noticable on the brushed metal on Safari and in iTunes, on the MacBook the screen had a natural hue to it.
In all fairness I have seen the 17"MBP in another Apple store and it had perfect color and the settings were set to factory as was the one I saw today so LCD's calibration will vary even if they are from the same 2 machines so I would recommend to either try and get another MacBook or just accept how it is because you might get a perfect color screen but it could potentially have a bad pixel.

Photo678 · May 30, 2006, 03:41 PM

sorry for the delay guys....here it is

stevenmuller.net/MacBook_GKuo_D65 g26.icc

right click (ctrl click) download to desktop.......remove.txt at end, and add to library>colorsync>profiles

gjbeprise · May 30, 2006, 04:23 PM

For fun I tried the profile on my 20" cinema display (Imac) - made the screen dark brown...yuck - Interesting, I need to see this color problem. Hopefully my white MB won't have this problem.

Photo678 · May 30, 2006, 04:57 PM

yeah, it does read as a brownish hue on my MB, however with brightness all the way up its pretty neutral

Hi I'm Ben · 07:20 PM

Originally Posted by Photo678

sorry for the delay guys....here it is

stevenmuller.net/MacBook_GKuo_D65 g26.icc

right click (ctrl click) download to desktop.......remove.txt at end, and add to library>colorsync>profiles

Yikes! no thanks!, it's too... wrong.

Guy Kuo · May 30, 2006, 10:54 PM

It's only going to work with MB's that have the same LCD panel as on mine. Might be a few different panels out there.

Skypat · Jun 3, 2006, 05:40 PM

Thank you for the colorsync profile. The color of the screen now looks much more accurate.

Does anyone know how I could make the display a bit brighter though... coming from this profile posted by Photo678 ? The only thing that I really liked with the original color profile was its brightness ;-)

Thanks in advance !!

Hi I'm Ben · Jun 3, 2006, 05:48 PM

I've been using this...

http://www.imben.net/macnn/Ben2-4271780.icc

Skypat · Jun 3, 2006, 06:04 PM

Ben the profile you made does not show in my "Display profile list" after I have installed it ...

Photo678 · Jun 3, 2006, 06:11 PM

Thanks ben,

Just a hair too cyan on my machine.....hardly even noticable........

but pat, give that one a try, thats much brighter, and a bit more neutral

oh, and you might have to remove the .txt from the end of the file name....also dont forget to add it to library>colorsync>profiles

Hi I'm Ben · Jun 3, 2006, 06:14 PM

Originally Posted by Photo678

Thanks ben,

Just a hair too cyan on my machine.....hardly even noticable........

but pat, give that one a try, thats much brighter, and a bit more neutral

oh, and you might have to remove the .txt from the end of the file name....also dont forget to add it to library>colorsync>profiles

Yes, I had noticed that as well.. was too lazy to try and fix it because I liked the brightness and the improvement. I prefer the cyan over the pink too.

Skypat · Jun 3, 2006, 06:24 PM

I don't know why it does not show up in my list ...

Photo678 · Jun 3, 2006, 06:38 PM

do you have the "show profiles for this display only" ticked?

Skypat · Jun 3, 2006, 06:44 PM

Nope. Yours show in my list. I put Ben's in the exact same folder and ... nothing

Guy Kuo · Jun 3, 2006, 06:53 PM

The darkness of my icc profile is probably due to my target tamma of 2.6. That makes the middle tones darker than the Macintosh traditional 1.8 or the PC usual of 2.2. Much of my work is for producing accurate, reference quality video signals and I keep my machines matching studio CRT as much as possible. Here it isn't a matter of liking one color of white over another. The standard color of white is D65 so I calibrate for that. For other uses, a different white point and gamma may be desirable.

That darned 1.8 Mac gamma curve creates some really interesting results as Apple's video playback software adds an extra gamma correction to try making video look correct despite playing back on displays with odd gamma. This is fine on the desktop, but if you try output to a large, home theater display that already has normal gamma characteristics, that extra manipulation by Quicktime means the transfer characteristics will be wrong.

Frustratingly, this means video playback is much more accurate on an ISF-RL certified Windows Media Center Edition PC. On those, we tune the playback device to be as neutral as possible and also maintaine Rec 601 and ITU 709 signal levels. Black is proper video black. White is proper video white. Footroom and headroom in the video signals don't get clipped. On the other hand, Apple has fantastic user interface and stability, but clips everything below nominal black and above nominal white due to expansion to computer RGB video levels. Gamma in the Mac video signal also gets distorted and there is no way to turn that Off in QT.

MiniMac · Jun 4, 2006, 10:45 AM

I found this thread very helpful:

http://episteme.arstechnica.com/eve/...m/500001739731

...try downloading the various profiles and I'll bet you'll find one that works for you...I settled on the Macbook pro native profile.

Skypat · Jun 4, 2006, 01:35 PM

Thanks MiniMac ! Very useful indeed. Found that macbook 6500k and ibook 6500k are pretty ok

MiniMac · Jun 5, 2006, 08:13 AM

Originally Posted by Skypat

Thanks MiniMac ! Very useful indeed. Found that macbook 6500k and ibook 6500k are pretty ok

Glad to help!

striker100 · Jun 5, 2006, 09:24 AM

Geez, this sounds like the 23" Cinema Display problem all over again. I was at the Roosevelt Field Apple Store yesterday and started using a black MacBook and was surprised to see the gray background on Apples web site was decidedly "pinkish". Too many problems with Apples laptop lines lately in my opinion.

Skypat · Jun 5, 2006, 04:56 PM

Striker, it's just a calibration thing. The screen is gorgeous once calibrated. As far as the 23" displays were concerned, even a calibration could not fix the problem. Here the issue is different ;-)

nJm · Jun 6, 2006, 04:41 AM

The 1.8ghz display model at my local department store has a strongly magenta tinged LCD, and no amount of calibrating in OS X would fix it. Everything was washed out too, quite different to all the other MB's I've seen around the place which have had rich colours.

striker100 · Jun 6, 2006, 06:53 AM

Originally Posted by Skypat

Striker, it's just a calibration thing. The screen is gorgeous once calibrated. As far as the 23" displays were concerned, even a calibration could not fix the problem. Here the issue is different ;-)

Yes but shouldn't the display be calibrated correctly from the factory? The average consumer would know nothing about calibrating the display.

Guy Kuo · Jul 28, 2006, 03:04 AM

I just calibrated my replacement MacBook's screen with my GretagMacbeth EyeOne. The new MacBook definitely has a different LCD panel. The new week 25 machine has a white point quite close to D65 even using Apple's Color LCD profile. The older machine was very pinkish with those settings.

Of course, this means my old profiles are green on the new machine.

fox-orian · Jul 28, 2006, 10:30 PM

Originally Posted by Guy Kuo

I just calibrated my replacement MacBook's screen with my GretagMacbeth EyeOne. The new MacBook definitely has a different LCD panel. The new week 25 machine has a white point quite close to D65 even using Apple's Color LCD profile. The older machine was very pinkish with those settings.

Of course, this means my old profiles are green on the new machine.

While my macbook has perfect 6500K temperature (out-of-the-box,)

I have to admit -- my first Nintendo DS-lite was perfect, but it had a broken mic! When I replaced it, the top screen suddenly had a pink glow, different from the second screen! Looking at the screens, you could never tell they're two different hues of white, but if you look at the glow of the screens off of a wall, suddenly the glow of the top screen is noticably pinker than the lower screen. Very odd!

I can't wait for LED back-illumination to take over. No inverters!