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Steele
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New Acer monitor too bright!

Fri Jun 20, 2014 5:07 pm

^Title, but there's more to it.

Anyway, to be honest, the only part that's too bright is the WHITE areas of my screen when there are any. But anything ELSE looks just fine, like my desktop image, for example, or opening Photoshop.

If I adjust my settings to a point where the white areas no longer blind me (like this very page, ow), everything ELSE looks too muddled out or dark.

I can't win! Is there a way I can reduce the brightness of ONLY the white space on my screen?

FYI, I have an Acer s241HL, if that makes any difference.
-Steele ^_^ \/,,
 
just brew it!
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Re: New Acer monitor too bright!

Fri Jun 20, 2014 6:00 pm

Have you tried messing with the color temperature settings?

Edit: Or if your video card's drivers support gamma adjustments, try that too.
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JustAnEngineer
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Re: New Acer monitor too bright!

Fri Jun 20, 2014 9:45 pm

Steele wrote:
Adjust my settings to a point where the white areas no longer blind me (like this very page, ow!).
Above the title of this message thread, click on "ImageUser Control Panel".
Click on the "Board preferences" tab. You will already be on the "Edit global settings" page.
To the right of "My board style:" select the dropdown. Change "tr_prosilver" to "tr_prosilver_blue" (these are the only two options).
Click on the "Submit" button at the bottom of the page.
Your eyes will thank you.
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LASR
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Re: New Acer monitor too bright!

Fri Jun 20, 2014 10:03 pm

I will never honestly understand how monitors can be "too bright" - whenever I get a monitor, the first thing I do is to turn up the backlight all the way up. Why would you want to intentionally want a **** picture? I will never understand.

That said, try looking for factory settings menus - these are usually accessed through some hidden key combination - these will usually allow you to tweak backlight settings. You definitely don't want to be turning down the "brightness" setting. What you want is the backlight setting.
 
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Re: New Acer monitor too bright!

Fri Jun 20, 2014 10:16 pm

LASR wrote:
I will never honestly understand how monitors can be "too bright" - whenever I get a monitor, the first thing I do is to turn up the backlight all the way up. Why would you want to intentionally want a **** picture? I will never understand.

That said, try looking for factory settings menus - these are usually accessed through some hidden key combination - these will usually allow you to tweak backlight settings. You definitely don't want to be turning down the "brightness" setting. What you want is the backlight setting.


This post doesn't surprise me from someone with the username LASR :lol:
 
Steele
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Re: New Acer monitor too bright!

Sat Jun 21, 2014 10:04 am

Well brightness in general isn't a huge problem, except when it's blinding, like this:

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v398/ ... 1f7f74.jpg

Ok, that's an exaggeration and me purposely tricking my camera's light auto-configuration feature, but that's what it FEELS like. The Desktop looks OK (it's actually kinda dark), but anything with a white background just makes my retinas explode. Way too much HDR.

So I tried adjusting the gamma (both hardware and software). By the time the white stopped blinding me, everything else was too dark. I tried to adjust contrast, but then white turned into gray. I can't figure out how to turn down the backlight... in fact, when googling how to do so for this monitor, THIS THREAD is the third item on the list >_<

Unless it isn't labled as such? I found some settings like "Eco" "graphics" "movies" and "user" which seem to do something to the general brightness level. Eco is way too dull, graphics and standard are too bright... Movies is a bit dull, but I guess I can tweak my brightness up a bit to compensate...

Thanks for the tips, regardless! I'm gonna keep an eye on this thread for a couple days just to see if anyone else has any bri-... er, good ideas!

JustAnEngineer wrote:
Steele wrote:
Adjust my settings to a point where the white areas no longer blind me (like this very page, ow!).
Above the title of this message thread, click on "ImageUser Control Panel".
Click on the "Board preferences" tab. You will already be on the "Edit global settings" page.
To the right of "My board style:" select the dropdown. Change "tr_prosilver" to "tr_prosilver_blue" (these are the only two options).
Click on the "Submit" button at the bottom of the page.
Your eyes will thank you.


This is useful, thanks! Unfortunately, unless there's a way to do this for google, youtube, and other pages with a white background, it doesn't help solve the problem completely =(
-Steele ^_^ \/,,
 
Melvar
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Re: New Acer monitor too bright!

Sat Jun 21, 2014 6:07 pm

Try setting it to user mode and see if "Brightness" controls the backlight.
 
mnecaise
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Re: New Acer monitor too bright!

Sat Jun 21, 2014 7:37 pm

LASR wrote:
I will never honestly understand how monitors can be "too bright" - whenever I get a monitor, the first thing I do is to turn up the backlight all the way up. Why would you want to intentionally want a **** picture? I will never understand.

That said, try looking for factory settings menus - these are usually accessed through some hidden key combination - these will usually allow you to tweak backlight settings. You definitely don't want to be turning down the "brightness" setting. What you want is the backlight setting.


Some of us are used to living in dark places with minimal lighting. At one point, my office was in a room, inside a windowless building, against a 12' thick shielding wall. I'm pretty sure my radiation dose was lower than the average. I had my computer cycle images from SOHO and Yohkoh as a background just so I'd get some sun.
 
Chrispy_
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Re: New Acer monitor too bright!

Sun Jun 22, 2014 8:59 am

Sounds like a classic contrast issue to me; black crush and dazzling whites. This is the result of marketing twerps advertising 50,000,000:1 contrast levels - the end user suffers by going blind.

  1. Turn your brightness down to the highest you can deal with on a pure white screen. It should be comfortable to look at, not retina-searing.
  2. Disable dynamic contrast, intellibright, game/movie/auto modes, or any other bullsh*t that messes with the brightness and conrast, they're all worthless on a monitor.
  3. Go to lagom.nl's contrast test and adjust gamma/contrast on your monitor's OSD until you can see all 32 distinct shades of the bars.
  4. If you're struggling with step 2 and you're using an HDMI cable, look for HDMI black level in the OSD. Normal/low will depend on your graphics card to some extent, but one of the settings with either wash out or crush black level details.
  5. If you still can't get all 32 distinct bars visible from step 2, you have just bought an absolute pig of a monitor; Return it for a refund and buy one with good reviews rather than a low, low pricetag, which is about all Acer is capable of doing.
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cniggeler
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Re: New Acer monitor too bright!

Sun Mar 06, 2016 11:57 am

Hi, I am doing a bump to this page to see if there are other ideas. I have an Acer G236HL and it's like you're looking at a night sky with lots of light pollution. It passes all the gradient and gamma tests on the site whose link Chrispy provided, and I've adjusted contrast and brightness all up and down, but everything on the screen is still washed out - the backlight is too bright. I use the term "backlight" even though I'm not sure LED monitors even have such a feature - they certainly don't have a control for it like the old LCD panels. But I am talking about how gray suffuses the background no matter how much I adjust the brightness or contrast.

It may be related to (lack of) viewing angle. To get the same brightness top to bottom, I actually have to tilt the monitor so that the bottom is away from me, almost the full 5 degrees the stand allows. If I tilt it so the bottom is out a little bit, which most sites recommend and for me is the most comfortable viewing angle,
a) The top of the screen is perceptibly dimmer, and
b) A gray band where the backlight is too bright appears at the bottom of the screen, 2-3 inches in width.

My Dell 24" monitor does not do this, so I'm wondering if indeed it IS related to the huge contrast ratios advertised these days? 100,000,000:1 (really???) for the Acer, vs. a "mere" 1000:1 for the Dell. Note that 1000:1 is the static ratio for the Dell, while Acer does not even publish the static ratio for theirs.

Thanks!
 
anotherengineer
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Re: New Acer monitor too bright!

Sun Mar 06, 2016 12:30 pm

A lot of times monitors ship with brightness at 100%, and a lot of times, correct or the 120 cd range of brightness is around 20 to 40.

I guess it's a lot easier to set up a monitor when you have a colorimeter though ;)

Try setting brightness to 35 and contrast to 85 to start
This may help also

http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/
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Chrispy_
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Re: New Acer monitor too bright!

Sun Mar 06, 2016 12:32 pm

cniggeler wrote:
I have an Acer G236HL and it's like you're looking at a night sky with lots of light pollution.

To get the same brightness top to bottom, I actually have to tilt the monitor so that the bottom is away from me,
a) The top of the screen is perceptibly dimmer, and
b) A gray band where the backlight is too bright appears at the bottom of the screen, 2-3 inches in width.

Thanks!

Yup, sounds 100% like a cheap and nasty TN with viewing angles so bad that the sweet spot is so narrow that it's actually nonexistent.
The problem is very clearly visible in the short video review here.

Good TN panels are barely acceptable, and you seem to have a bad TN panel, for which there is no cure. It's bad by design and you'll just need to tolerate how lousy the image is or flog it cheap and buy a better one :(

Some people pretend that TN panels are okay, but in reality that's only true for the most expensive gaming TN panels. If it's a budget model there's really no excuse to defend TN, they're barely 20% cheaper than IPS or VA models and they're universally dismal when it comes to image quality.
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cniggeler
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Re: New Acer monitor too bright!

Sun Mar 06, 2016 1:13 pm

Well, good thing for me to remember in the future: review multiple sources!

I saw the very high rating it got on Amazon, plus it's the #1 monitor sold on Amazon too (actually it was its 21" little brother, but since they're sold from the same Amazon page, I assume it is the same technology as the 21"). The fact it was a name brand was a plus for me, but didn't make any difference.

I don't think I can return it unless "design defect" counts for a defective unit ;-) I will continue to use my Dell as my primary monitor and this for my less frequently used computer.

Thanks for your replies, though - maybe the next person considering an Acer won't fall into the trap I did!
 
JustAnEngineer
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Re: New Acer monitor too bright!

Sun Mar 06, 2016 1:36 pm

cniggeler wrote:
I don't think I can return it.
If you've had it less than 30 days, Amazon will take it back.

There are plenty of inexpensive IPS or VA LCD monitors on the market. You don't have to buy a TN LCD just because your budget is small.
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Ryu Connor
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Re: New Acer monitor too bright!

Sun Mar 06, 2016 2:14 pm

You might look at a calibration tool.

Monitors come out of the box way too bright.

120 cd/m2 is what you're after. Most modern monitors out of the box are at least double that if not more.
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Captain Ned
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Re: New Acer monitor too bright!

Sun Mar 06, 2016 2:16 pm

Ryu Connor wrote:
Monitors come out of the box way too bright.

Agreed. My ancient Dell 2007WFP is running at "25" brightness.
What we have today is way too much pluribus and not enough unum.
 
cniggeler
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Re: New Acer monitor too bright!

Sun Mar 06, 2016 7:15 pm

JustAnEngineer wrote:
If you've had it less than 30 days, Amazon will take it back.
There are plenty of inexpensive IPS or VA LCD monitors on the market. You don't have to buy a TN LCD just because your budget is small.

I have initiated a return request with Amazon. Return shipping will be about 15 bucks.
And thank you for the retail list of IPS/VA monitors, in the size range I was interested in, even sorted by price - very thoughtful :D
 
LightenUpGuys
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Re: New Acer monitor too bright!

Sun Mar 06, 2016 7:34 pm

http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/ is what i use for calibrating. Remember that "contrast" isnt actual contrast(gamma is), its actually picture level.

Keep in mind that pretty much any of the cheap monitors you get now will need to be set to warm color temperature because their white points are nowhere D65.

Dynamic contrast ratios are nonsense. Just ignore them.
 
Chrispy_
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Re: New Acer monitor too bright!

Mon Mar 07, 2016 7:45 am

Wow, I'm super-impressed that Newegg categorises monitors by panel type; That ability is sorely lacking from most retailers and it's something that almost all manufacturers of TN panels try very hard to obfuscate.
They don't list it as TN; they either flat-out don't list it at all, or they make up some useless Jargon like "RealView LCD technology" which is meaningless and literally translates to "anything we can say to hide the fact this is TN".

Also, since my original post in this thread is from 2014, Acer have actually started making some decent monitors. They also still make even more awful monitors, but I though it was worth pointing out that a Acer monitor is not automatically bad now. As of late 2014 Acer has been producing AHVA models which qualify as IPS-type and their high-end TN monitors have acceptable (if not good) viewing angles.

For want of an easier option, these are the three common types of screen panel you'll find in computer monitors.

TN: (Mostly) Cheap junk.
It won't say TN. You'll know it's TN because they won't specifically list it as either IPS or VA panel technology. Expect it to be given a meaningless marketing term instead.
160-degree vertical viewing angles, but generally that's a gross overstatement. More like 0-to-30-degree viewing angles is realistic!
If you look at benchmarks and reviews, the "tested" results show good colour gamut and good black levels (which means high contrast) but even a minor shift in angle (like 10-degrees) can halve the results from 'good' to 'unacceptable'

IPS variants (also PLS and AHVA are the same thing)
Barely more expensive than TN in some cases but much better.
178-degree viewing angles all around. Good colour gamut from any sensible angle and average black levels (which means average contrast). Almost all IPS screens are good and worth having over TN.
The downside of IPS is that gaming used to be laggy with smearing movement trails but even the slowest IPS screens today are fast enough for 60Hz gaming.
IPS also suffers from "corner glow" which I won't explain in detail but can be an issue on larger monitors like 27" and 32" models. Even then it's relatively minor compared to TN off-angle washout.

VA variants (or PVA/SPVA/MVA/AMVA)
It's halfway between TN and IPS, but much closer to IPS in practice.
The black levels (and contrast) are better and there is no corner glow, but the tradeoff is a reduction in colour accuracy when viewed off-angle. Still way, way, way better than TN though.
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