Need advice about adjusting my LCD monitor

[ptw]

I recently bought a BenQ 19" T903 LCD. Picture is nice and sharp. I use a AIW Radeon 9700 PRO. I am using a DVI cable, but I don't see much if any difference between that and the analog cable with a DVI connector.

Unfortunately I do have one problem. The brights (white in particular) on this LCD are far, far too bright. When I adjust the Brightness and Contrast on the LCD, and the Brightness, Contrast, and Gamma in the ATI utilities, I can get the colors to look right but then anything bright is far, far too bright. A white webpage makes me recoil from the glare, and in games the details are lost in the blinding brightness.

So when I set the Brightness and Contrast to neutral (50 out of 100) on the LCD and then start turning down the Brightness, Contrast, and Gamma in the ATI utility, I can get the whites/brights to be more reasonable but then all of the darker colors pretty much turn black!

Any suggestions? Is there one setting (for example--contrast) that I should be focusing on to fix this problem? Thanks!

 

[NokiaDude]

DVI just eliminates the possiblility of noise being introduced into the signal. Sometimes powercords running paralell to a VGA cord will make the display look like crap. It also helps wiht color reproduction a tiny bit. LCD's are bright, almost too bright for their own good. The best advice is just to keep tweaking it. It takes time to get an LCD to the optimum brightness/contrast settings.

 

[ptw]

Hmm...I found part of my problem. In the ATI control panel I have a Desktop setting, and a 3D setting. I put the settings identical between the two. On the desktop it looks ok (though still a bit too bright with whites), but when I go into a 3D game it is far too bright. When I exit the 3D game, the desktop is also far too bright. As soon as I go back into the ATI control panel and select the desktop setting, *poof* everything darkens to the proper setting again.

Obviously the 3D games are ignoring the 3D settings in the ATI control panel and using some sort of default instead. Is this a known problem? I haven't updated my ATI drivers since before Christmas because like with a lot of drivers, if it ain't broke don't fix it! Nothing scares me more than a sound card or an ATI video card driver update.