- Jun 23, 2014
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If you have a HDMI IPS monitor, you probably have noticed that the colors seem washed out for some reason, and could look worse than your TN panel. Why is this happening? Is IPS a scam?
Well no actually, it's a driver issue that causes this to happen on HDMI only monitors.
HDMI was designed from the start as a multimedia cable for the television, not for a computer monitor. Plus, TV's in general have a limited range of colors compared to advanced TN and IPS panels. To make sure there are no compatibility issues, your GPU will always default to a setting called "Limited RGB" because it does not know that the display it's connected to supports "Full RGB" which is what we want.
Note: This guide is not needed for DVI, VGA, and Display Port users, because those connections are specifically designed for monitors. The GPU already knows those are monitor designed outputs, and will automatically set the right color range.
Since the driver doesn't know if your display supports full RGB or not, we have to do it manually:
1: Open the NVidia control panel. (Simple way is to right click the desktop)
2. Go to "change screen resolution"
3. Go to the bottom of the right window where you can see the color depth, output color format, and output dynamic range settings:
4. Change the output dynamic range from limited:
To Full:
Note: You probably have noticed another setting under Output color format called "YCbCr444". I'm not entirely sure what the difference is compared to Full RGB. However I've noticed that the blacks are way to black and the whites can sometimes be way to bright.
Simple as that!!
Unfortunately I don't know how to do this in the AMD or Intel drivers, you'll have to google that yourself. If somebody knows how, please PM me and ill put that on this tutorial.
A year ago, when I got my first IPS panel the Asus MX239H I was so exited! However, I began noticing the colors looked really washed out, my old gigabyte laptops TN panel had far better colors than this. So for most of the year I thought it was my laptop's HDMI port/GPU driver that was messed up. When I bought and built my new PC, I still had the same problem. Until just a few days ago I was messing around in the NVidia control panel and came across this RGB color setting.
Once I changed that to Full everything looked AWSOME!!! Colors were PERFECT! I could not believe nobody told me of this feature for a whole year of having this monitor. That is why I wanted to share with you my experience and how to fix it to everybody that's having this same problem.
I hope this helps. If you have issues with a HDMI TN panel this technique will probably work as well. However, I haven't tested it with TN.
If you have any issues, feel free to PM me.
Well no actually, it's a driver issue that causes this to happen on HDMI only monitors.
HDMI was designed from the start as a multimedia cable for the television, not for a computer monitor. Plus, TV's in general have a limited range of colors compared to advanced TN and IPS panels. To make sure there are no compatibility issues, your GPU will always default to a setting called "Limited RGB" because it does not know that the display it's connected to supports "Full RGB" which is what we want.
Note: This guide is not needed for DVI, VGA, and Display Port users, because those connections are specifically designed for monitors. The GPU already knows those are monitor designed outputs, and will automatically set the right color range.
Since the driver doesn't know if your display supports full RGB or not, we have to do it manually:
1: Open the NVidia control panel. (Simple way is to right click the desktop)
2. Go to "change screen resolution"
3. Go to the bottom of the right window where you can see the color depth, output color format, and output dynamic range settings:
4. Change the output dynamic range from limited:
To Full:
Note: You probably have noticed another setting under Output color format called "YCbCr444". I'm not entirely sure what the difference is compared to Full RGB. However I've noticed that the blacks are way to black and the whites can sometimes be way to bright.
Simple as that!!
Unfortunately I don't know how to do this in the AMD or Intel drivers, you'll have to google that yourself. If somebody knows how, please PM me and ill put that on this tutorial.
A year ago, when I got my first IPS panel the Asus MX239H I was so exited! However, I began noticing the colors looked really washed out, my old gigabyte laptops TN panel had far better colors than this. So for most of the year I thought it was my laptop's HDMI port/GPU driver that was messed up. When I bought and built my new PC, I still had the same problem. Until just a few days ago I was messing around in the NVidia control panel and came across this RGB color setting.
Once I changed that to Full everything looked AWSOME!!! Colors were PERFECT! I could not believe nobody told me of this feature for a whole year of having this monitor. That is why I wanted to share with you my experience and how to fix it to everybody that's having this same problem.
I hope this helps. If you have issues with a HDMI TN panel this technique will probably work as well. However, I haven't tested it with TN.
If you have any issues, feel free to PM me.
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