Contrast is the difference between the brightest light and the darkest black.
A common misconception amongst video neophytes is that contrast is simply brightness.
To add to the confusion, when you turn up the brightness setting, you are infact setting the black level, and contrast setting sets the difference between the black and the light, in short, contrast sets your light level.
Play around with the settings in a video player.
So if you think a dark scene is actually too dark, you set the black level higher with the brightness and the inverse if it's too bright and if the bright scenes aren't dark enough you turn up the contrast.
Basically brightness setting= setting up your darks and contrast= setting up your light scenes.
Since you likely have a dual out video card, hook up a decent crt to one port and an lcd on the other and watch some movies on them and note the lack of deep blacks on the lcd.
If you think I'm just trying to put you down for having a display worth more than all my computer, simply read up on lcds.
As I've said, lcds are bright but they can't reach the black level of a decent crt.
This is the last post I'm going to make that explaining this to you.
Everything I said should be mostly true, some stuff is kinda hard to explain so I might have mixed up there, but lcds simply cant hold a candle to crts when it comes to deep blacks, which in turn makes the contrast lower since the difference between the lights and the darks is smaller.
Having a backlight always on which cannot be totally blocked takes away any chance you had at a good black level.
A common misconception amongst video neophytes is that contrast is simply brightness.
To add to the confusion, when you turn up the brightness setting, you are infact setting the black level, and contrast setting sets the difference between the black and the light, in short, contrast sets your light level.
Play around with the settings in a video player.
So if you think a dark scene is actually too dark, you set the black level higher with the brightness and the inverse if it's too bright and if the bright scenes aren't dark enough you turn up the contrast.
Basically brightness setting= setting up your darks and contrast= setting up your light scenes.
Since you likely have a dual out video card, hook up a decent crt to one port and an lcd on the other and watch some movies on them and note the lack of deep blacks on the lcd.
If you think I'm just trying to put you down for having a display worth more than all my computer, simply read up on lcds.
As I've said, lcds are bright but they can't reach the black level of a decent crt.
This is the last post I'm going to make that explaining this to you.
Everything I said should be mostly true, some stuff is kinda hard to explain so I might have mixed up there, but lcds simply cant hold a candle to crts when it comes to deep blacks, which in turn makes the contrast lower since the difference between the lights and the darks is smaller.
Having a backlight always on which cannot be totally blocked takes away any chance you had at a good black level.
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