Tweak Monitor Settings

[Cliff S]

It doesn't make any sense to invest a bunch of money in an expensive monitor or an even more expensive GPU, if you don't tweak the monitors settings.

1. Set the monitor/TV & GPU to their default settings.
2. Unless your monitor/TV has the possibility to set two presets(like my LG 32"LD350 with 2 Expert settings one day-1 night) set the lighting in the room for when you use your PC the most.
3. Set your backlighting to where it's most comfortable.
4. Go to LCD monitor test imagesThe Logom LCD monitor test pages and read through first and make sure you understand everything, then follow the instructions.
5. You may have to flip/flop between tweaks because an adjustment here can change an adjustment there. for example contrast and brightness- after setting the Black level(Brightness) then going to White saturation(contrast) it can/will make the Black level brighter meaning you have to reset it again, which will, of course, change the contrast a bit and so on and so on. The idea doing it visually without a colormeter is to find the best compromise acceptable for you. The same goes for tweaking the sharpness.

Some might say "Hey I have a Blu-ray movie that came with a tweak section" or like me "I have the HDTV Calibration Disk from AVS forums!", well that's just fine for your Blu-ray player or Home Cinema, but for online gaming or browsing you need to set your monitor for that. It's like with my TV I have slightly different settings for my Blu-ray(1080p) and television(1080i & 720i) because of the differences compression, and also to reduce artifacts. Another reason is that for any differences in types of connections and the difference between a PCs GPU and the integrated graphics of a player.


After you have tweaked your monitor/TV you can then tweak your GPU, being that they are now optimized your GPU/integrated graphics will also have to work less thus reducing lag time and improved performance & resources where it's really needed--online gaming, you tube, or whatever.

 

[ARC1020]

I think it should be industry standard to factory calibrate all monitors to sRGB colour space at the factory before they even get to the customer and manufacturer created ICM profiles load through Windows Update when the monitors are plugged in.

Dell definitely factory calibrate their thin bevel monitors (the UltraSharp U2414H and UltraSharp U2415), which IIRC are made my Sharp and I think ASUS also do it on some of their monitors too. Not sure about other manufacturers, but I think it should be a standard requirement for all monitors.

 

[Cliff S]

The problem is viewing conditions. when calibrated at a factory they are not in the viewing environment you have at home. For example daylight in your living room with a large picture window, or in the cellar in with a 40 watt bulb, or in a darkroom or at night with lights off...etc.
One needs to calibrate no matter what. It's like that $10.000 HDTV looked good in the show room, but when you get it home in the evening it burns your eyes out and is full of artifacts.

 

[ARC1020]

That's what people who sell calibrating equipment seem to tell everyone, but monitors only need to be calibrated to standards. Monitors provide their own light source and the human brain is more than capable of dealing with ambient light. Getting people to make adjustments by eye is a recipe for disaster. I can adjust my monitor by eye so the whites are yellow and look terrible, but within 5 minutes my brain will just adjust itself and the whites will look fine.The brains ability to adjust itself is a PITA for anyone who deals with a lot of images because your brain will constantly self-adjust and trick you to the point you regularly need to take a break and then come back again to regain your sanity.

Reflections or the sun moving round and shining through your window in the afternoon will be a problem regardless of monitor calibration. And the best hardware to cure that is curtains.

 

[Cliff S]

The thing is I don't want unnatural colors or sharpness(blurry is better). When I look at a picture be it television or from my computer the colors are natural. For example when I watch the news on N-TV(a German news sender) and see grass and trees in a report, they are the exact same shade(gray scale) and color as the grass & tree outside my apartment. I bought this TV so everything looks real not surreal, or so if I'm watching a movie it looks like what the director wanted us to see. To get that I "tweak" it visually( the LG 32LD350 comes with built in RGB color filters). Like you said the brain can adjust, but the eyes cannot if it's set to harsh.

 

[ARC1020]

Yeah, me too. I'm not sure whether they still do it, but Samsung for example used to significantly boost the colour saturation so that when people saw it they'd think it was an amazing screen because the colours were so vibrant. Although, despite the cartoon colours, it doesn't bother me quite as much on a TV screen because it's more of a closed system where most of the content that's displayed on it is coming from commercial broadcasters where it's their problem to worry about broadcast consistency/standards.

With a computer monitor though where it's common for the user to make adjustments to images on it, then it's more problematic and is primarily where I think the solution needs to be at manufacturer level, not user level, so that it isn't a free-for-all with different people and manufacturers all having different interpretations on what's the correct colour.

Please don't take my comments as a dig towards you, it's a dig towards poor solution's we've had to endure for way too long. I've gone through all this more times than I care to remember from doing it manually using Adobe Gamma, to using hardware screen calibrators and even cross referencing the Lagom test pages you linked looking for inaccuracies. The thing is, none of those solutions were particularly adequate and were a bit like a car manufacturer telling it's customers to check their wheel alignment themselves. Good for tyre manufacturers.

In the days of CRT's it was perhaps more necessary for people who were concerned about accurate colour to calibrate their monitors and then re-check them on a regular basis, but now with todays monitors and with some monitor manufacturers factory calibrating to sRGB, that in my opinion is a better solution and having that as the default monitor setting is the way forward. Not only is it more reliable and less hassle, but you have the added bonus that it will be consistent across all desktop programs, not just the ones that take advantage of colour management. I doubt many people even noticed, but even Internet Explorer isn't colour managed, IE9 onwards just converts any images with embedded colour profiles (such as AdobeRGB) to sRGB and totally ignores any Windows colour management.

 

[Cliff S]

I know what you mean. For example I have no real way to tweak my ASUS laptop screen(crappy AUO and not IPS), but for my tower I have a S-IPS and that its a HDTV you can go in and make adjustments. The default presets from the factory are just too horrible when I spend a weekend on the keyboard. I was thinking more about gamers who really need to tweak to reduce resources in their GPUs to reduce lag and people who stream their media to get the best picture possible.