Question about my Sony HS94P

[Holyhandgren]

I was browsing through the menus and came across the contrast, set to 70. Is it set to this by default because leaving it at 100 will damage the monitor? Just kind of curious as to why they would default it to something less than optimal, dont want to damage my baby (No dead pixels, very little noticable backlight on black)

 

[oddlycalm]

While setting the contrast to 100% won't damage your display, the chances are it won't be optimum. Most factory settings are awful, and your panel should be way too bright at 100%. I haven't spent a lot of time with that Sony model, so I can't tell you the exact settings, but my recollection is that I felt it looked best when the brightness and contrast were both set around 35% and the color to 6500K.

Try using the calibration utility at Monitors Direct.
monitor utilities

oc

 

[Holyhandgren]

New question: half the options on my display have been greyed out. How do i get these back? No idea what caused it.

 

[Ford]

When using DVI some options might be greyed out, these are set automatically. Also if the sRGB profile has been chosen, you can't make any color adjustments.

 

[ben johnson]

I have the Sony 23" P234B and having your contrast set to 100% is best, because it's common sense. You get deeper blacks and brighter whites. Do a search for "lcd contrast" and you will find out that having more contrast means more vibrant colors. Mine was also set to 70% when I received my monitor. I changed it to 100% and had to do quite a bit of tweaking to get the picture right, but the picture on my monitor is so much better and definately worth the hour it took to tweak the settings. The whites are birght and the blacks are dark, a lot darker than they were. I would suggest doing it, and if you dont like it you can always reset all of your settings back to default.