Widescreen Gaming Forum

hello,

i have just purcahsed a dell 2405 lcd monitor, and it is really great.... the only complaint i have is when i play a "fps" game, such as "call of duty 2", the dark areas are really not very black, kind of a dull grey.... is this just a problem with lcd monitors? or are there any settings i can adjust for this?

i am using the "dvi" input, and have turned the brightness way down, and that helps a bit, but still, the dark areas of a game are really not as black as they appeared on my old crt monitor.

any help will be greatly appciated.

thanks,

jr

black level on LCD is poor generally, because of the backlight they use :(

i went back to a CRT atm and its a lot better for dark games :P

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Im afraid there isnt much you can do about that, its a trait of all LCD monitors, until they come up with a better technology (a few are in the works, but arent practical yet).

Its because your whole screen as a light source behind it (to light up the pixels), and so even when parts of the screen are black, theres still light coming through.

thanks for the info you guys..... it's too bad, some games are made to play in the dark..... i guess i'll just have to get used to it....

jr

While the black levels aren't great on the 2405 (or any LCD at this point), I did have to fiddle with the settings of both the monitor and my video card's driver to get the blacks and colors looking better. By default, my 2405 was way too bright and the blacks were very grey. After tweaking, the blacks are much darker and the colors are far more rich than originally displayed. Most likely you will need to tweak as well to get the best picture.

hi gabbo,

i would really appreciate it if you could post those video card settings you made to get blacker blacks with you 2405. :)

i just reset the gamma setting on my video card control panel, and it seems to help quite a bit..... so, it looks like the trick to these lcd monitors, is to tweak the color & gamma settings, at the video card, to get the best picture you can.....

also, i would imagine that each person will have different levels that they will adjust at.... for instance, i have a slight color blindness to greens & reds, so my settings probably won't work for a person who can see all the colors clearly.... :shock:

again, thanks for the info....

jr

Well there is a thread somewhere here where some of the others were posting their settings... but I ended up trying a few but then starting over from scratch and tweaking for/by my own preference.

Do you have an ATI card or Nvidia? I can only tell you the general steps that I took with my Nvidia 6800GT.

First thing I did was run the "Display Optimization Wizard" in the Nvidia driver after setting my monitor to its defaults. From there, I manually tweaked the "Color Correction" settings. I make sure to set the first dropdown box to "All". There are 3 settings: All, Overlay and Desktop. The "All" will effect the overall color settings and this is what the 3D games will get adjusted under as well. If movies are looking bad, select "Overlay" and tweak those settings seperately.

The setting that made a big difference to me was the contrast setting. If it is set too low, everything (including black levels) will wash out and brighten up.

All I can say is if you have an ATI card, the same principles would apply but the steps would be different (for obvious reasons).

This is all a matter of personal preference and my steps may not work for you at all... so... uh... there you have it.

Sorry if this post makes no sense... it's late.
:?

Oh... and welcome to the WSGF! I'm new here too!