Info: Monitor brightness TEST

[Rosollia]

LCD monitors struggle with the dark colors. There is a backlight on LCD monitors that is always on. This means that you can not get pure black. Perhaps higher end LCD monitors and ones that use LED for backlight can cope better with the dark colors, but they will never be as good as CRT monitors IMHO.

CRT monitors on the other hand have the electron beam that lights up the phosphor layer to produce pixels at exactly the wanted brightness levels. So CRT monitors usualy have a lot better color gradient and are able to display a wider range of brightness levels.

I have a 2 year old 22" LCD monitor that was in the middle price range when I bought it and it is impossible to make that line in the example picture disappear.

The only good thing about an LCD monitor is that it weights less than CRT and takes less room. Also it has a wery sharp image quality at its native resolution.

Other than that CRT monitors are supperior especialy in color richness and displaying various brightness levels. Also CRT is able to produce any resolution not just the native resolution. LCDs suffer in image quality while trying to emulate lower than native resolutions.

Down side to CRT is that they may struggle with the HD resolutions at 1920 × 1080. Also CRT monitors may flicker anoyingly if they have a lower than 85 Hz refresh rate. LCD monitors do not have this problem since they do not have a beam riding the screen. Granted some early LCDs had the trailing problem due to the crystals turning too slow.

[DRG]

Originally Posted by Rosollia

I have a 2 year old 22" LCD monitor that was in the middle price range when I bought it and it is impossible to make that line in the example picture disappear.

Even with that would you consider the colours you do see in the game rich and saturated or weak and thin?

It would be so much simpler if we could exchange screen shots but everyones monitor shows the screen shots to their individual performance level


Don

[Rosollia]

Here is a gradient I made using the grey bar in the flag.
The gradient is split into 4 segments.
On the last segment (the darkest one) number 28 would be the color seen in the flag. The gradient starts at luminosity 240 and ends at luminosity 1.

[Rosollia]

And here is a gradient using the blue color.
This time the gradient starts from luminosity 120.

If the monitor is set up too bright you will loose detail on the high luminosity levels. The bars fuse together in the brighter colors.

If the monitor is set up too dark you loose the colors in the dark segment of the gradient.

You need to find a good balance for you monitor where not too many bright colors or dark colors disappear.

[Imp]

The line is well defined & stands out well as it is several shades removed from the black background, I would describe it as a dark grey rather than a lighter shade of black.

There are free tests out there (try google) to allow people to set their monitors brightness contrast & gamma correctly so the monitor shows true colour to the best of its abilty.
That way things like photos display correctly as they assume you have your monitor set like this. As would most game designers I would guess & indeed these games look very good indeed on these settings.
I have seen it on other monitors both oversaturated making it look "gamey" & washed out with poor greys & greens, I would guess set to bright & lacking contrast, looked horrible.

XP & Win7 come with a very basic set of tests under display if I remember correctly that are better than nothng.

All monitors vary there are good & bad ones but it looks equally clear on my desktop & on my laptop. The laptop however has a small viewing angle otherwise the colours are washed out slightly. The line is still cllearly visible but the black is no longer a "rich" black its like the brightness is set to high & is possibly due to the backlighting.

Somebody mentioned LCDs cannot display pure black, this may or may not be true I dont know but the gradient supplied displays fine on my laptop. All the colours are distinguishable apart from the first & the last (lightest darkest) which look the same as the one beside it. Also tried looking at a photo of a black car & there are lots of shades of black so detail is defned.

ATI Radeon Mobility HD 5470 graphic card on Dell Inspiron N7010 Laptop display so probably an above average graphic card for a laptop. Setting it up correctly makes up for the deficencies in the display near enough so long as its viewed "head on"

That said the game is not graphic intensive it does nothing fancy & I think runs in 256 colours so even a basic on board graphics card & monitor should be able to display the game correctly if setup properly.

[Imp]

First appologies for multi post upon reading think you were wanting line not to be visible so hope this helps though it throws a spanner in the works.

Size makes a big diffrence to the visibility of the line.
The picture you provided I can see the line just as displayed on the web page thumbnail but very clearly if I view the full picture.

However

If I run my game setting magnifcation so flag is approximately the same size I cant see the line. Infact I cant see the line at all on any magnifcaton for unit flags but I can cleary see the line at any magnification on the victory flags.

Ths is probably due to the human eye & extra width of the stripe letting your eye defne it.

Guessing here but this says to me if anything my game is fractionaly darker than yours or at least the picture provided.
Perhaps also my graphic card & or monitor is better than yours allowing the line to stand out easily to the eye once it gets above a certain size/ width.
On the gradient provided a diffrence of 3 or more along is clearly visible. In otherwords on a casual (normal) look 3 adjacent colours would not be noticed but the next would.
Considering its 20+ shades away from black it therefore stands out easily