What brightness/contrast do you have your monitor at?

M

metroidfox

Well-known member
There have been a few conversations here over monitors and picture quality.

So in a non-serious way, I figured I'd ask what your monitor brightness is set to in its menu options.

I've not officially measured them, but these seem closest to calibrated to my eyes.

SDR:
  • 18/100 brightness
  • 68/100 contrast
  • standard picture mode
HDR:
  • 100/100 brightness
  • the monitor locks contrast to 70/100
  • cinema picture mode
Additionally, I've got this set in the Nvidia Control Panel
  • 'Change resolution' => 'NVIDIA colour settings' set to 10 bit bpc, and output dynamic range is full
  • 'Adjust desktop colour settings' colour settings are set to 'Override to reference mode'
 
SDR
  • Brightness - as it back light - 33 to 100% depending on how bright the room is. My room gets awefully bright on a sunny day with the windows open.
  • Contrast - Factory calibrated to 75%. I haven't tried moving it yet.

HDR
It's my general understand both should be maxed out for this to work properly.
I've not put much effort into making HDR look better though. It looks great outta the box with contrast at 75% in HDR mode. I should try adjusting it.
 
I'd recommend not changing the contrast from the factory setting. I've found that the contrast is usually set to the optimal setting for the panel and if you mess with it you get crushing toward the black or white end of the spectrum. It becomes really obvious when you attempt to calibrate the display that a lot of stuff is thrown off.

For that reason on my monitor, LG32GK600, I have the contrast on the default setting of 70. I have my brightness set to 30 most of the time, but sometimes if I'm working on a lot of black text on a white background (i.e., word processing) I'll turn the brightness down to 0 just so it's easier on my eyes. Or the reverse if I'm playing a really dark game or movie. But usually 30 is a pretty good medium.

I don't generally have super brightly lit rooms, so I don't need a lot of brightness. I think the display ships with the brightness on max, with it blazing nearly as bright as the sun, so I toned it down a lot. ;)
 
While monitor settings will be specific to the monitor, do you not find 30% brightness to also be searingly bright?


I would argue that maybe it's too bright if you find yourself needing to adjust the brightness when looking at dark vs. bright content.
 
Usually play at night with a dim yellow light behind the monitor.

SDR on my new monitor 50% both brightness and contrast, was MUCH lower on my older panel (something like 15 brightness, 30 contrast)

HDR unchanged, supernova enough as it is
 
Since I have a colorimeter I try to get the brightness as close to 100 nit as I can. I don't remember what brightness setting that is for my 2 monitors and really that is very model specific.

I never touch the contrast control on an LCD since anything other than the default setting is going to clip the signal so it's best to leave it alone.

HDR the content should be controlling the brightness, your monitor should be locking you out of those controls when in HDR mode.

The only thing I do for HDR is turn down Windows SDR brightness control so SDR white is around 100 nits. After doing that I actually can't tell when HDR mode is on unless I'm viewing HDR content.
 
metroidfox said:
While monitor settings will be specific to the monitor, do you not find 30% brightness to also be searingly bright?


I would argue that maybe it's too bright if you find yourself needing to adjust the brightness when looking at dark vs. bright content.
Click to expand...

It's not really that bright at 30, maybe even arguably a bit on the dim side, which is why in some dark games I need to turn it up. If I used my computer exclusively for gaming/movies 40 or 50 would probably be closer to ideal.

It's just a different experience with full screen graphics of different gradients of colors (few of which are full white), versus a screen that is 75-90% blasting out full white light. The thing is when I'm working on text I don't need the background to even be remotely white. As long as I can read the text, if it's like dingy gray it doesn't matter. In the past when staring at text for hours I've felt that putting the brightness on the minimum helps with eye fatigue. Maybe my eyes are just more sensitive to this sort of thing. With my current monitor I don't usually turn it down from 30, so it's not that bad at that setting.

The other thing to consider is that your eyes adapt to different brightness levels, so you can quickly acclimate to different settings up to a point. So, when turning down from 100 brightness to say 50, or from 50 to 30, for a second or two it looks really dim, but then your eyes adjust and it looks pretty much the same.
 
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Loser-P said:
Since I have a colorimeter I try to get the brightness as close to 100 nit as I can. I don't remember what brightness setting that is for my 2 monitors and really that is very model specific.

I never touch the contrast control on an LCD since anything other than the default setting is going to clip the signal so it's best to leave it alone.

HDR the content should be controlling the brightness, your monitor should be locking you out of those controls when in HDR mode.

The only thing I do for HDR is turn down Windows SDR brightness control so SDR white is around 100 nits. After doing that I actually can't tell when HDR mode is on unless I'm viewing HDR content.
Click to expand...


Agreed on the points about HDR.


However, for SDR I found yours + Trunk0's comments about not touching the contrast a bit surprising, so I tested it with the Windows calibration tool:'Cinema' in SDR seems to be calibrated bright (100%) on my monitor. It also locks contrast to 70%. If I turn the brightness down to 18%, it definitely makes the shirt look washed out. Knocking the contrast down stops it from clipping as you mentioned.
 
metroidfox said:
Agreed on the points about HDR.


However, for SDR I found yours + Trunk0's comments about not touching the contrast a bit surprising, so I tested it with the Windows calibration tool:'Cinema' in SDR seems to be calibrated bright (100%) on my monitor. It also locks contrast to 70%. If I turn the brightness down to 18%, it definitely makes the shirt look washed out. Knocking the contrast down stops it from clipping as you mentioned.
Click to expand...

Regarding not messing with the contrast control on LCD's I'm just echoing the advice that I've heard from experts at monitor calibration.

My understanding of how the contrast control works on LCD's is that it sort of mimics how CRT contrast worked by adjusting peak white level. On an LCD if you raise the contrast over the default you're usually going to clip white losing any detail in highlights, and when you lower it you're just limiting it and by extension the actual contrast ratio of the monitor.
Neither are good so it's better to adjust the gamma curve instead to fix any issues.
 
So I've found a few good ways of doing this by eye. I guess using a colorimeter would be a good check, but first:
  1. if using a monitor set RGB range to 'Full' instead of 'Limited'. TVs should use the limited option
  2. if you set your RGB setting to 'Full', set your monitor's black level to the high, or normal settings (not the lower setting)
  3. I then like to set the backlight level to something that will not wash out a black screen. This page should have the lowest black level barely (if at all) visible http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/black.php. To be honest, I can't even see the lowest black level on an OLED.
  4. adjust the contrast such that 254 is barely visible http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/white.php
  5. double check your contrast settings with the white bar on this page http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/contrast.php. Ensure the white bar specifically has roughly even delineations between the bars
  6. finally, if your monitor has a 6 way colour calibrator, adjust the hues/saturation to ensure all the colours on the page above are delineated, and ensure the colours are roughly even
I guess the colorimeter would really help with getting step 6 right, but you can get most of the way there by eye.

A few notes note about using the 6 way adjuster by eye:
  1. always do the overall contrast white point first
  2. I like to first play around with the hues on each colour before adjusting saturation. Slide the hues all the way to the left and right to get an idea of where the colour shifts to the next colour in the spectrum. Set the hue level to the halfway point between the colour shift to the left, and the one to the right
  3. adjust saturation until you have roughly even delineations between each colour
In my case, my monitor actually got the colours basically right. There was very minimal adjustment required.


I also double checked my results against various pictures of things I knew well, and compared with other monitors.
 
great write up my colors are slightly off but that's just because i like to use a bit of nvidia digital vibrance.
 
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