Monitor with real brightness control?

TheManko

Weaksauce
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Jun 13, 2004
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So all LCD monitors I have owned so far have had so called brightness control, but they have always only controlled the backlight. This has become more and more of a problem for me since many games (especially console ports) are made with the 16-235 standard in mind, not the pc 0-255 range of nuances. So for example the worst case scenario for this is NFS Undercover which has brightness controls, but on my Benq E2400 I have to reduce brightness in the game to 0% in order to get proper blacks in the game calibration screen. When I do that the gamma becomes seriously messed up and all the colors become over saturated.

On all tv sets the brightness control actually does what you'd expect so in Undercover I can have the in game brightness at 50% and reduce the tv brightness setting to get proper blacks.

I want to have real brightness control on a monitor, so which ones do? I mean old crt monitors had proper brightness control so it can't be that hard to do on a lcd as well.
 
Uh. No thanks on that. Having real backlight control is much more important, Try changing your contrast if you want to mess with panel blocking, or using your video card settings.
 
In Xp you could do brightness control that would go over any game setting, but in Vista and Windows 7 that doesn't work.

Of course I want backlight control, but I want it to be called backlight and also have a seperate brightness setting as well as contrast like all tv sets do.
 
What you're talking about is image contrast, not related to your display. If a game was made with a colorspace other than RGB in mind, you would expect that RGB(16,16,16) might be interpreted as "black", but altering the white/black point in a reduced gamut image, you're further reducing the total range. This is contrast, not brightness.

Take a screen shot of the game. This should be a direct framebuffer copy of what you see on screen. Now go into Gimp/Photoshop/Paint and sample your "black" colors. What's their RGB value? You might be surprised to find that black was never intended to be black in the first place.
 
to get proper blacks

Your problem is that you are attempting to get proper blacks with a TN, and that's where 6-bit color is kicking you in the slats. How exactly were you doing the brightness control in Win XP? My guess is that it wasn't doing what you thought it was.
 
When I was still using Xp (which was years ago) I only very briefly tried to alter the image with the GPU driver settings. It never ended well, so I have always run with the default settings. My "reference" right now that I'm using to compare the image of the monitor is an old CRT tv which I have calibrated using a calibration dvd with the nvidia video settings at 16-235. What I'm noticing in games like Undercover, Dead Space, Dark Athena, Grid, Dirt, Fear 2, Crysis and so on is that while I'm seeing more stuff on the LCD it's pretty much only junk information which makes the game look worse. Most of these games have calibration images in the options and the crt is perfect by default in all of them while the lcd is showing more blacks steps than intended.
 
It's impossible for any LCD to approach the black levels of a CRT, so you've spoiled yourself. TNs have the worst black levels, and there's really not much you can do about it. VA panels have the least worst blacks for an LCD, but they tend to have more input lag than other panels. IPS monitors aren't quite as good as VAs for black levels, but have better image quality in almost every other respect, but aren't quite as fast as TN panels.

But the fact that you'll never be able to get around is that LCDs do not have good black levels.
 
I know I won't be able to get the black levels of a crt, I just want to be able to set it up so that the calibration images in games look correct without having to buy a lcd or plasma tv.
 
I know I won't be able to get the black levels of a crt, I just want to be able to set it up so that the calibration images in games look correct without having to buy a lcd or plasma tv.

Maybe the gamma curve of your monitor is messed up. Have you considered calibration? (not sure that works in games though).

My NEC has much better calibration of black levels than any CRT I ever owned.
 
I have a Spyder 3 Pro and I regurarly calibrate the screen, so the color balance and gamma is very good for a budget screen. The colors have drifted quite a bit since I bought it, so I'm getting very good use out of the calibrator.

My issue is just with games made for 16-235 screens. The Benq screen shows all the 1-16 steps distinctly and clearly, so it's great in games like Stalker and all Valve games which are made for pc monitors. But when I play 360 ports the blacks are just too bright since the game was made with the assumption that it was calibrated for the video standard. Since I have this crt tv to test with I know that if I change the in game brightness in these games to remove the lower nuances the gamma becomes messed up.

In fact it's exactly like when you switch between 16-235 and 0-255 in the Nvidia video settings (under advanced) so with 16-235 mode the blacks are just never black in these games and you're seeing all sorts of artifacts in the graphics that are not visible on the crt tv since it's clipping out the darkest parts.

EDIT: Ok I just recalibrated the screen again (it's been a couple of months) and now everything does look a lot better. The games are still too bright in the blacks, but overall it's much nicer.
 
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That is quite poor programming to not get the color range correct for the PC. No real excuse for that. There should at least be a setting in the game somewhere for Monitor/TV usage or something.
 
LCD screens have their "black limit", i.e. the lowest value of the backlight intensity and the most effective crystal light blocking. You can't go below that even with the best calibration tools. You can wait, the backlight strength will get weaker in time :)
 
That is quite poor programming to not get the color range correct for the PC. No real excuse for that. There should at least be a setting in the game somewhere for Monitor/TV usage or something.

Yes the most annoying example of this is Dead Space because when it came out I had to play it on my old Dell 19' CRT monitor for various reasons and this old CRT has fantastic black level detail no matter how you adjust the monitor brightness, so it was impossible to get even near the recommended brightness setting in the game. Even with in game and monitor brightness turned as low as they would go I could see everything clearly the entire game and never used the flashlight to navigate.

When my brother later played it on his Samsung lcd tv he could at least set up the tv brightness to recommended levels and thus when the lights went out in the game he could not see anything without the flashlight like intended.
 
I have a Spyder 3 Pro and I regurarly calibrate the screen, so the color balance and gamma is very good for a budget screen. The colors have drifted quite a bit since I bought it, so I'm getting very good use out of the calibrator.

My issue is just with games made for 16-235 screens. The Benq screen shows all the 1-16 steps distinctly and clearly, so it's great in games like Stalker and all Valve games which are made for pc monitors. But when I play 360 ports the blacks are just too bright since the game was made with the assumption that it was calibrated for the video standard. Since I have this crt tv to test with I know that if I change the in game brightness in these games to remove the lower nuances the gamma becomes messed up.

In fact it's exactly like when you switch between 16-235 and 0-255 in the Nvidia video settings (under advanced) so with 16-235 mode the blacks are just never black in these games and you're seeing all sorts of artifacts in the graphics that are not visible on the crt tv since it's clipping out the darkest parts.

EDIT: Ok I just recalibrated the screen again (it's been a couple of months) and now everything does look a lot better. The games are still too bright in the blacks, but overall it's much nicer.


Download program called Monitor Calibration Wizard, save the current current profile you are using after starting the program and then enable Load At Startup and Persistent Profile. This forces your calibration profile to stay on in games (they tend to reset it), meaning proper gamma levels and brightness (though no color correction as that requires color aware program so saturation is still there) and therefore proper black depth. Though this also renders ingame brightness sliders nonfunctional but those are not needed as you have calibrated your monitor to optimal brightness anyway.
http://www.softpedia.com/get/Tweak/Video-Tweak/Monitor-Calibration-Wizard.shtml
 
Download program called Monitor Calibration Wizard, save the current current profile you are using after starting the program and then enable Load At Startup and Persistent Profile. This forces your calibration profile to stay on in games (they tend to reset it), meaning proper gamma levels and brightness (though no color correction as that requires color aware program so saturation is still there) and therefore proper black depth. Though this also renders ingame brightness sliders nonfunctional but those are not needed as you have calibrated your monitor to optimal brightness anyway.
http://www.softpedia.com/get/Tweak/Video-Tweak/Monitor-Calibration-Wizard.shtml

Are you trying to tell us, that this little application can force games to actually respect a colour profile?
 
Are you trying to tell us, that this little application can force games to actually respect a colour profile?

No. He indicated calibration corrections to gamma curve, not profile (which requires color aware app). But even that is a step in the right direction and might help the OP.
 
No. He indicated calibration corrections to gamma curve, not profile (which requires color aware app). But even that is a step in the right direction and might help the OP.


This. Even non color-aware programs understand the gamma and brightness settings of the profile, but actual color correction requires color aware program so this will NOT fix oversaturation of colors. The problem is that games, despite your calibration attempts, tend to reset your gamma settings to default 0 so your monitor is pretty much uncalibrated when you start a game. With this utility you can force the color gamma and brightness to be forced to your calibration settings and this will/should fix the washed out blacks and colors problem in games that uses mismatching gamma standard.


IIRC Powerstrip also has a similar brightness/gamma locking feature as MCW.
 
So all LCD monitors I have owned so far have had so called brightness control, but they have always only controlled the backlight. This has become more and more of a problem for me since many games (especially console ports) are made with the 16-235 standard in mind, not the pc 0-255 range of nuances. So for example the worst case scenario for this is NFS Undercover which has brightness controls, but on my Benq E2400 I have to reduce brightness in the game to 0% in order to get proper blacks in the game calibration screen. When I do that the gamma becomes seriously messed up and all the colors become over saturated.

I believe that the "black level" setting on my 2490 does exactly what you're talking about. Ordinarily it's useless to most people but would probably map your 16,16,16 to 0,0,0.
 
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