Archived from groups: microsoft.public.windowsxp.configuration_manage (
More info?)
On Sat, 11 Jun 2005 18:59:14 -0500, "Shenan Stanley"
>Usually your monitor has controls built in for contrast/brightness - just
>like a television.
>Also - if you have your proper video drivers from the manufacturer
>installed, they usually have utilities (accessible from Control Panel ->
>Display properties) for this as well.
What the eye craves is contrast, and so the tendency is to make things
brighter and brighter, just as it is to turn music louder and louder.
But a bright screen makes the rest of the room look dark, and a bright
CRT blasts more UV at you (other frequencies, such as X-Rays, may be
within the Recommended Daily Allowance, but a particular UV is high)
So normally what I do is turn brightness down to the point that the
glimmer on "black" vanishes *test with a full-screen Cmd prompt), then
turn up the contrast to taste.
This may still leave you with games and pictures looking "too dark",
and the best answer there is not to fiddle with brightness (washes
everything out as "too pale") or contrast (stretches the dynamic
range, making things harsher, but mid-tones still too dark).
Instead, look for a gamma control. The monitor won't have this, but
your display drivers in Windows might. What this does is change the
relationship between how dark the mid-tones are, with how dark they
appear - the normal (1.0) straight line relationship can be curved
upwards for gamma > 1.0, so that mid-tones lighten up while the blacks
and bright whites stay the same.
CRT and laptop LCDs have different gamma charactaristics, which is why
the UI greys often look nearly white on a laptop's LCD. You may well
need to compensate for CRT's typically too-dark mid-tones, which is a
problem familliar with players of Doom, Quake, etc.
You can sometimes get scientific about this, if you have a "gamma
card" dialog box to play with. This compares various mid-tones with
patterns of black and bright white, so they can be adjusted to match;
this gives a truly neutral gamma on the display, irrespective of how
skewed the actual monitor's charactaristics are.
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