Recently bought myself a second-hand #ThinkPad T480. A very good laptop, except for two things.

The first is the worst IPS display I have ever seen. I've found an ICC profile that improves things a bit. But it's still somehow manages to be both under-saturated and over-saturated.

The second is a pair of anaemic speakers. I tried Easy Effects, which uses LV2 plugins. It does vastly improve the sound, but it uses a lot of CPU. So, I've switched to JamesDSP - almost as good as Easy Effects and uses a fraction of the CPU. Plus it handles profile switching much better than Easy Effects - I can have separate profiles for the speakers, my headphones, and the HDMI outputs.

End of the day, though, you can't polish a turd. A replacement panel is on my shopping list, as soon as I can find a reliable supplier. I've also seen a couple of speaker replacement mods on Reddit, so I might attempt one of those.

Coming from the Vaio, where the screen and speakers were excellent (for a 13" ultrabook), it's been a bit of a shock. But the rest of the laptop is excellent. Especially the keyboard. Plus I get a TrackPoint and a trackpad.

@thelastpsion I had a work t*5*80, and the display was the same - it was really hard to describe, colours just didn't 'pop'
@penguin42 Exactly this. I know these are meant to be "business" machines, but they do have to be used by humans! From what I gather, the T490/T590 onwards had much better displays. From what I've seen, T480 panel replacement mods usually just use the panels for the T490.
@thelastpsion The older t530 I had before was much nicer colour wise. Even as a business machine it sucked, things like highlighted text, or the colours of peoples text in chats didn't really show up; I'd love to know what they actually messed up.

@penguin42 Indeed.

According to hwinfo, it's an LG panel, so it's not like it's a no-name brand.

@thelastpsion I did wonder if it could be a bug (e.g. getting the colour depth wrong somewhere?)