Why do Laptops have problems displaying red (looks orange!)

[mbaff]

I recently shopped with my daughter, an aspiring artist, to get a new laptop to replace a 6 year old HP pavillion laptop. However, every Ryzen based laptop at Bestbuy and many Intel (though not all) laptops had the same inability to match the 6 year old laptop's red - red looked orange; and purples looked blue, but otherwise color reproduction looked normal (white was white so no consistent tint across spectrum). This occurred across vendors, but even when I compared two laptops made by the same vendor, one ryzen based and one more expensive intel based, where other than CPU they were identical, only the Intel one displayed red like it was actually red. We are talking same exact IPS panel descriptions. The bestbuy salesperson mentioned that many screens come with some kind of filter, but this isn't mentioned anywhere I can find. Anyone know what this is, and how to avoid picking laptops with this obnoxious color changing filter? I can't imagine anyone that uses a laptop for anything except 100% coding should accept such a limitation, what appears to be intentional distortion of the display fidelity.

 

[hang-the-9]

Did you check the color settings in display options? You should be able to use the screen calibration option to get a color you like. Also keep in mind the lighting in the store will affect how colors look. You should do a web search for good laptop screens and look at those models. https://www.laptopmag.com/benchmarks/best-laptop-screen

 

[mbaff]

I actually sent the laptop into HP (the 2in1 360 using Ryzen5) and they just said that the monitor was performing to spec. Bad spec in my view. I couldn't adjust the calibration well with the built-in tools and downloaded the AMD drivers to get more control of the output, but none of the AMD tools did much to correct the issue; no changes allowed the red to look like red even if it tinted the entire screen. I ended up going into best buy where I could see the actual screens, and then bought a Dell that actually demonstrated good color handling - Dell Inspiron 15 7500 (not the 5593, it had this issue). There were more than one laptop with the exact same color representation issue, it seemed to be a pretty consistent reproduction issue across OEMs (not much difference in the red output) and even models from the same vendor: there were some pretty expensive ones with this issue, as long as you didn't go to say OLED - the exception was on certain IPS models, one of which I picked. There were too many systems exhibiting this issue to be an accident or a bad calibration of a single system or type; it seems like some kind of standard or filter in use that is blocking the color, it would be very useful if there was some kind of spec or indication that would tell one (muted red) to the other even if just within IPS models.