Sat. Mar 17, 2001
Please Adjust Your Monitor
Please Adjust Your Monitor [via Pat] – I know a lot of people who need to go to this page, or the one referenced below, and fiddle with their monitor settings. In fact, I am often aghast at what I see over people’s shoulders on their screen.
I’m particularly pained (literally) by refresh rates much below 85 mhz, yet offices seem filled with flickering bright white screens that might approach a 72 mhz refresh rate. I can’t stand it for ten seconds, so I don’t know how they do it all day. But aside from that personal pain, it seems most people have their monitor set way too bright. Even photographers, who should know better, and would never produce a flat print with no blacks whatsoever. Yet their monitor looks like the equivalent of something a rookie would bring out of the darkroom. Washed out and flat.
I often take them to this page, and you should go, too. You’ll find a series of numbers with greyscale squares below them. The point is to ”find the first square in the sequence that you can see as a lighter color against the black background” If your answer is ”1” or ”2”, your monitor is probably set too bright.
A couple of things should be noted. If you view this during the day, and at night, you may get differing results due to room brightness. Also, there are inherent hardware differences between Macs and PCs that cause them to display at different gamma’s, and this may affect these test pages.