Thought I'd share how I set up my 2408WFPs, as they were very bright and I had an
extremely hard time trying to figure out what to do. I don't have a hardware calibrator so this was all manual. I was beating my head against a wall trying to get the brightness down.
This article finally provided a breakthrough for me when I read,
"the next calibration step involves setting the black (brightness) and white (contrast) levels to their optimum values." I was trying to use brightness to set the white level, and I just couldn't get the monitors dark enough (I could drop brightness all the way to 0 and they were
still too bright). Once I realized I was doing it
backwards, it made all the difference. I also took a cue from reading that people had to dispense with the preconfigured settings (Desktop, Multimedia, etc.) and use custom RGB levels to avoid making everything wash out in drab greyness.
So here's what I did:
- Reset everything to factory defaults.
- Chose Custom RGB mode and moved all three down to 60.
- Moved brightness to 0 and contrast to 100 (resetting to default had put them both at 50).
- Loaded this page and walked my brightness up till I saw the three shades of black in the circles on the left. Ended up at brightness 20.
- Using same page, I walked my contrast down till I saw all three shades of white in the circles on the right. Ended up around 80, I think.
- I then put up a program with a mostly white background (Windows Explorer or something) and continued to walk my contrast down until white level was overall acceptable. Ended up at contrast 65.
- Used this page to set my sharpness (ended up at 40).
- And then used this page to revisit the RGB settings. They were pretty good at 60, but I ended up with 56/60/60 to get rid of a bit of a pink tinge.
I actually have slightly different settings on each of my two monitors, since I went through the above process separately for each of them and one didn't have as much pink, comparatively. But these monitors are now quite comfortable to sit in front of all day (I work from home and sometimes pull 16 hours straight at my computer due to either working long hours or just doing personal stuff after I'm done working). They also have very nice color, not washed out. Text is easy to read, and programs with heavy white background don't bother me (I can work on an Excel spreadsheet for hours at a time). I'm very happy with them at this point. Having said that, I still plan to buy a hardware calibrator to take them to the next level.
Hope that helps somebody out.