I was reading the Guru3D review of the i7 980x and the reviewer had this comment regarding monitors:"Before playing games, setting up your monitor's contrast & brightness levels is a very important thing to do. I realized recently that a lot of you guys have set up your monitor improperly. How do we know this? Because we receive a couple of emails every now and then telling us that a reader can't distinguish between the benchmark charts (colors) in our reviews. We realized, if that happens, your monitor is not properly setup.This simple test pattern is evenly spaced from 0 to 255 brightness levels, with no profile embedded. If your monitor is correctly set up, you should be able to distinguish each step, and each step should be roughly visually distinct from its neighbors by the same amount. As well, the dark-end step differences should be about the same as the light-end step differences. Finally, the first step should be completely black."The scale that he used can be seen here:http://guru3d.com/article/core-i7-980x-review/11I have an Asus VW266H 25.5" LCD with a BFG GTX 285OCFU. Using the Nvidia control panel I have adjusted and adjusted and can only see 17 levels. The guy said that you should see 255 unique levels, I only see 17!!!!!!!!!How many do you see?If you see 255 or a lot more than 17 anyway, any suggestions in why I only see 17?Rod

LCDs have horrible black-grey-white gradations. At least those with TN panels do. You can try to calibrate your monitor's brightness and contrast settings to achieve better results, but you'll never get the kind of results that can be achieved with a better panel or even a plasma.

Despite what manufacturers claim, many modern flat screen LCD and TFT screens are not as good at displaying colours in the sRGBIEC61966-21 range as the old CRT tube monitors are. More recent developments with plasma screens have improved matters, and they needed to, because with the advent of bluray and HD equipment, the gamut range that traditional RGB used is not sufficient to take advantage of the wider gamut ranges of colour models other than RGB that are starting to be used outside of what was once only the domain of professional repro.Displaying stuff properly is a common problem in reprographics, and you generally find that professional reprographics programs, such as Photoshop, have saturation and gamma correction settings in the advanced tab of their colour profiling utilities so that more modern monitors can be physically compensated to match the colours that will eventually be sent to print for CMYK and spot colour process, so that what you see on screen matches Pantone colour swatches and real CMYK values from FOGRA 27 and SWOP-coated profiles, which in itself is problematic because of smaller gamut ranges in process repro. Some of this is affected by the lighting in the room that you are in too, and you can see this if you ever go to a professional repro house, where the lighting is often subdued and the monitors are equipped with hoods to block out much of that. They are also generally calibrated on a weekly basis with special tools that attach to the screen via suction cups and test the gamut range of the display without having to cope with surrounding ambient light.Without doing all that malarkey, it is doubtful you will ever match the kind of colour repro it is possible to get from a monitor.Al

I was reading the Guru3D review of the i7 980x and the reviewer had this comment regarding monitors:"Before playing games, setting up your monitor's contrast & brightness levels is a very important thing to do. I realized recently that a lot of you guys have set up your monitor improperly. How do we know this? Because we receive a couple of emails every now and then telling us that a reader can't distinguish between the benchmark charts (colors) in our reviews. We realized, if that happens, your monitor is not properly setup.This simple test pattern is evenly spaced from 0 to 255 brightness levels, with no profile embedded. If your monitor is correctly set up, you should be able to distinguish each step, and each step should be roughly visually distinct from its neighbors by the same amount. As well, the dark-end step differences should be about the same as the light-end step differences. Finally, the first step should be completely black."The scale that he used can be seen here:http://guru3d.com/article/core-i7-980x-review/11I have an Asus VW266H 25.5" LCD with a BFG GTX 285OCFU. Using the Nvidia control panel I have adjusted and adjusted and can only see 17 levels. The guy said that you should see 255 unique levels, I only see 17!!!!!!!!!How many do you see?If you see 255 or a lot more than 17 anyway, any suggestions in why I only see 17?Rod

Flyingbits had a great post on this somewhere about what to look out for. Many panels are actually 6 bit dithered instead of 8 bit color hense some are $200-$300 and others $600+

Thanks for the replys!What I am getting out of all this is that the reviewer was in error when he made the blanket statement that everyone should be able to see 255 levels of brightness.I will stick with my $269.00 25.5" 17 levels of brightness Asus VW266H LCD, rather than go spend who knows how much so I can have 255 levels of brightness!Rod

Thanks for the replys!What I am getting out of all this is that the reviewer was in error when he made the blanket statement that everyone should be able to see 255 levels of brightness.I will stick with my $269.00 25.5" 17 levels of brightness Asus VW266H LCD, rather than go spend who knows how much so I can have 255 levels of brightness!Rod

Nice budget monitor for sure.It is a 6bit panel even though some sites have the spec mislabled as 24 bit color. Here is a link to a test and reporting on the 6 bit http://techgage.com/article/asus_vw266h_255_lcd_monitor/3