Mike Chaney's Tech Corner

Hi,

I have a NEC MultiSync LCD2070N monitor, a few years old, but adequate for my purposes. Its inbuilt menu allows adjustment of Brightness, Contrast and a choice of 3 dv modes (I do not know what those are, except they seem to allow three different pre-sets for brightness/contrast.) The Nvidea card allows adjustment for Brightness, Digital Vibrance, Contrast and Gamma. I have infrequently used a Monaco Optix dangly thing to set what I think is a reasonable ICC profile for the monitor, but I never bothered with or altered the Nvidea settings.

I now need to recalibrate the monitor, having fiddled with the Nvidea settings, and I'm wondering what would be the best settings for the Nvidea card. I'm running XP, so luckily M$ are unlikely to screw my settings.

If anyone is using a Nvidea card, could you say what settings you have applied there? I'm not sure if adjusting the gamma in the card will be similar to the inbuilt adjustment available on higher end monitors. There is also a graph shown on the same part of the Nvidea control panel - should that be a straight line? Or do you just leave it all set to the default settings? The card is a geoforce 8600GT, but I suspect the user interface will be similar for many Nvidea cards.

Best wishes,

Ray

Hi Ray,
I have always understood that the calibration process and software produces data for the graphics card look-up-table (LUT) and during Windows start-up the LUT is loaded. You can usually see the screen appearance change as it does so.
The LUT data is contained in the profile. If you use the XP Color Settings Power Toy, the profile name has an asterisk next to its name when LUT data is present - that's how I learnt about this! See attached screen snap.
What you are wanting to do is not unlike calibrating a laptop where the only adjustment is brightness, the LUT does most of the setting.

Does the Optix software allow you to check for brightness (luminance)  and guide you with the monitor setting? If it does, than you can test the different monitor pre-sets that are available. They may also set different colour temperatures. I assume the calibration software allows you to set gamma, colour temperature etc.that you require.

I would have thought it is not necessary to set the NVidea via it's control panel, just let the calibration software process and profile do that. I leave mine well alone.

Terry.

Hi Terry,

Thanks for the information. The software with the puck is Monaco Optix (not Optix pro). I left the video card settings to default, and have now recalibrated the monitor. The software reported that it was last calibrated 714 days ago  ::). Anyway, the instructions re setting ambient light were not as the software indicated - (they referred to using it to measure the light reflected from a sheet of white paper, but there was no stage in the measuring where that could be done, as far as I know). I set white-point to 6500k,and gamma to 2.2 - the windows standard settings - I haven't worked out why that should be different than the Apple settings, or if other settings would be better. Anyway, at the end, the new profile seems to cover a slightly wider colour space than the older one, both being larger than srgb. The proof will be if the screen colours more closely match the print colours, I suppose. Annoyingly, on this monitor, there are small buttons at the base of the screen, and it is easy to accidentally alter the contrast and brilliance settings (mainly because I stuff old invoices and the like underneath ??? ). I have to write the settings on a label, which I stick by the buttons.

Prior to 714 days ago, I calibrated it more frequently, but it never seemed to drift, however, it may be now improving with age... a bit like us :).

Best wishes,

Ray