I can't speak to the rest of the text or the laptops themselves, but as someone who works with color reproducibility in video and print, those photos comparing colors of two different screens are worse than useless.

Uncalibrated screens photographed at different angles in different lighting conditions are not a valid basis for comparison. If you want properly calibrated displays, you need to purchase hardware (datacolor makes one such device) and calibrate them.

Even "factory-calibrated" monitors will benefit from this, because the quality of that calibration varies widely and your color reproduction is going to vary based on ambient lighting conditions etc.

▲

YorickPeterse 11 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The photos are just meant to illustrate the difference to the reader, not to be anything scientific. Of course manual calibration is ideal, but having a somewhat sensible default calibration isn't much to ask for and is in fact something many other laptops do just fine.

	▲	daviddever23box 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Problem is, display profile support for Wayland has been, at best, spotty until recently - and, there should be multiple accurate targets available on any good display panel. My factory-seconds F13 (using 11th-gen Intel, still the best in terms of power savings) shipped with the older glossy display, which had a known, disclosed-as-cheaper LUT issue at lower brightness settings. After a couple of calibration rounds, it is spot-on and my go-to PC laptop. Decent keyboard, too. Of course, things are often more expensive in Europe (compared to the US) for zero good reason, so the F16 will always be at a proportional disadvantage compared to the F13. You may find that a much better fit.

▲

Groxx 11 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I can add anecdata for the factory profile being very over-red - it's quite obvious out of the box. Not as bad as many Samsung OLED phones you see in stores (typically set to some crazy "enhanced" mode), but it's certainly closer to them than a calibrated screen.

One thing that has bugged me for a while though: why isn't it possible to make my own color profile by hand? Everything seems to imply that you can only get a profile definition file from a calibration device, and I don't have one... but I can eyeball it significantly better than the default profile. Is there something software out there that will let me adjust my curves, like the OS already does with night-mode color balance changes?

	▲	GranPC 10 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I too would be interested in such a tool. I've had some luck finding close-enough ICC profiles, but it would be great to dial it in.