Should people disable one of their brightness/contrast settings?

[brocksmith]

Should people disable one of their brightness/contrast settings (either hardware or software) and only enable the one that looks better?



I just bought a new computer about half a year ago. The whole time I was using my computer I was never quite satisfied with the image quality of it. The monitor is a Compaq LCD monitor.

Anyways, when going to websites with dark backgrounds, I could see some movements in the dark areas of the screen. I'm unsure what this was, but I just figured it was a sign that my monitor was crap.

Today I was fed up and decided to tinker around with my onboard graphics settings through 'display properties' in Windows XP. I went to the 'color correction' tab and noticed that there were pre-set brightness and contrast settings already enabled through my computer's software. Immediately after seeing this I thought of something.... I thought "My monitor having it's separate hardware brightness/contrast settings turned on at the same time as my software brightness/contrast must have been the cause of the horrible picture quality."

I decided to turn the software brightness/contrast to 0. After doing this I decided to set my hardware brightness/contrast to what I found desirable. Well, the thing is that I could not set my monitor to look good after putting all of the bars to 0 in the software settings. So then, I decided to do the opposite. I turned the values on my monitor to 0 and went into my software brightness/contrast settings again. After setting the software bright/contrast values to their default numbers, the picture on my monitor looks fantastic!!!

So now I have a question.... Will the software settings always look better, or not?

I have a feeling that enabling both hardware and software brightness/contrast at the same time will always have undesirable effects on the monitors image quality.

[Krispy Kritter]

You typically use a combination of the two. Nvidia (and likely ATI) drivers have a calibration tool that walk you through adjusting all of your monitors settings for correct brightness and color levels.