If you've invested in a quality monitor for your computer, you owe it to yourself-- and your eyes-- to spend 15 minutes setting it up properly for your viewing environment. I'm not talking about a high-end color calibration, although you can certainly do that. I'm talking about basic computer display calibration 101.
Make sure none of the gray bars have a tinge of red, green, or blue. You may need to fine tune brightness and contrast again after adjusting the color balance.
That’s a lot harder than it sounds. Your perception of correct white and grayscale colours on a display has a lot to do with what you’ve become accustomed to. After calibrating my monitor properly, everything initially seemed like it had a hell of a red cast!
If all else fails, a Pantone strip helps.
Wish I knew of a free way of generating an ICM profile; even though I don’t care about rigid calibration myself, I’ve had people ask about it.
Mike Johnson,
As far as I know most laptops these days (at least 14" and up) come with DVI ports. Maybe not ones with lesser integrated graphics chips. I know some high-end Acers come with dual-link, I think it’s a standard feature of the higher-end mobility cards.
Great! Thanks for sharing this.
I had used the color tuner which came with nvidia’s drivers and recalibrated my screen according to your tips… wow… Where did all these shades of gray come from?!
Too bad the whole calibration video thingy isn’t available in Win XP pro.
Great article, but what’s with the Gucci Male Models for the contrast/brightness check? Couldn’t we just use diagrams? 
Also, I should point out that on most LCD’s the “brightness” control isn’t really quite the same thing as it was in the CRT world. On a CRT, the brightness would actually adjust the black point of the output to the screen. On an LCD, the brightness control is usually just the intensity of the backlight, the black point of the pixels themselves remains the same.
An excellent point. The brightness control is a very different thing on a LCD and a CRT. We should be looking for a gamma adjustment on the LCD, shouldn’t we? I’ll update the post to reflect this.
Good summary with animated black level GIF here.
http://www.drycreekphoto.com/Learn/Calibration/monitor_black.htm
Some DVI also carries analog signal. It’s a bit deceiving though. If you have a DVI LCD doesn’t mean you’ll be getting digital. Mostly it’s the earlier generation of LCD. The DVI connection you shown above it’s 24+1 (Dual Link). The digital+analog version of DVI will have the extra 4 pin on the right hand side, making it 24+5 (DVI-I). Analog version only will have 12+5 (DVI-A). This latter one can’t even be plugged into the DVI port you shown above. Sad
Btw, DVI-VGA converter is just merely connecting the analog signals.
Helpful! But don’t forget that a useful alternative to adjusting the brightness of your monitor is to post a stream of blog posts and comments demanding that every website in the world change to using white-on-black text in order to stop hurting your eyes…
Here’s a hardware horror for you. My company recently replaced my crufty ancient desktop with a snazzy new one, including replacing the 1024x768 CRT with an LCD, with both VGA and DVI inputs. The new box also has a video card on it that will apparently pump out up to 2048x1536, via DVI only.
But… the monitor is hooked up to the MOTHERBOARD video (max 1280x1024), with an ordinary VGA cable!
Amusingly, my Dell FPW2405 has a DVI input, but the functionality is crippled when you use it. In analog mode you can tell it to preserve the aspect ratio of anything it is sent or not. In digital mode it forces everything to the ratio of the screen and disables the menu option. So any games that don’t support wide screen resolutions look stretched and you are forced to resize any non-widescreen videos on the PC side before they are sent to the screen.
@Mal Thanks, apparently it was an NVIDIA setting causing the behavior. I had no idea that the game and video player applications could be set to one resolution and the graphics card decide to output a completely different one.
Many of the new Dell PCs I setup come with LCD screens with DVI inputs and cables, but VGA only on the PC.
@a If you investigate your graphics card settings there will almost certainly be an option to have the graphics card set the aspect ratio, rather than the monitor. The nVidia control panel certainly does - as far as the monitor is concerned it always gets a full resolution signal, but the graphics card is using its internal scaler letterbox or scale as appropriate to provide the correct aspect ratio. No more ugly stretching (and no gaming performance hit either if your worried).
My new HP came with an LCD (though I upgraded to a bigger LCD), and VGA only on the computer. It does have an PCIe slot, but all of the video cards I have laying around are AGP (though all of the cards I’ve purchased in the last 6 or so years have DVI outputs).
Guess I’ll be springing for a new video card eventually, though I’ve been planning on doing that since I brought the PC home and realized there wasn’t anywhere on the computer to hook up the damned cable.
Whatever. I have never noticed the difference between hooking up an LCD to DVI vs. the HD15. Unless I just have crappy monitors, which is entirely possible.
You state that brightness is the number one problem you see with LCDs but I had the opposite problem. As a gamer I had issues with how my monitor looked washed out compared to the exact same monitor my wife had. It took 6 months before I found out that Vista has a “nice” little option that alters between “normal” display and “movie” display. Movie display is what the normal one is and the reason my monitor looked washed out compared to hers no matter what I did. Video card options, display options, monitor options, NOTHING except this one little checkbox hidden deep within Vistas controls would change this. Just a heads up if your monitor isn’t displaying as well as you think it should and you run Vista.
For those people out there not convinced of the benefit of DVI over VGA, I suggest you try this test some time if you can access the equipment:
I tried this when working helpdesk some years ago and having access to such equipment. The difference was totally night and day, DVI is just far superior especially when it comes to crisply rendering high contrast edges and text.
Also, I should point out that on most LCD’s the “brightness” control isn’t really quite the same thing as it was in the CRT world. On a CRT, the brightness would actually adjust the black point of the output to the screen. On an LCD, the brightness control is usually just the intensity of the backlight, the black point of the pixels themselves remains the same.
Furthermore, if you want to properly calibrate your monitor, I suggest picking up a hardware calibrator like the Spyder2 Pro. The Express version is only around $100 dollars and it really does make a noticeable difference when it comes to accurate color rendering. If you have multiple monitors and want to calibrate them all (I’m looking at you, Jeff) you’ll have to shell out a bit more for the Pro version.
“Many of the new Dell PCs I setup come with LCD screens with DVI inputs and cables, but VGA only on the PC.”
I’ve just got a Dell for the family when I move away and noticed that too. In this case it was fortunate though because I’m taking the (far superior) monitor with me and my computer has DVI output.
@Dave Aronson:
I’ve hit the same problem a couple of times while working in the offices of other companies: perfectly good DVI connections available on the PC and monitor, but analog cables connecting them.
Naturally obtaining a DVI cable through official channels would mean forms filled out in triplicate and battles with the “it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” droids.
So instead I just bought my own cable which I smuggle in with me whenever I move to a new office.
(Unfortunately I’m currently working at our main office, where I have a nice widescreen HP L2045W, but no DVI connection available on my fairly recent HP PC. Maybe I need to smuggle in a decent video card next…)