[Big Mac]

We just got a new 23" Samsung LCD, and it looks really nice. I am wondering about a particular issue, though. I calibrated the LCD, first by turning the contrast to 100 and then by turning the brightness down so that the circle would be only barely visible. The problem is, even when bringing the brightness all the way to zero, I could not get the circle to blend with the background the way the Colorsync Assistant wants and what I have always been able to do with other displays. I then went through the rest of the steps with the brightness at zero, and what I ended up with was a much too dark display profile. I kept the profile but turned the brightness up to 55% in order to get something that looked reasonable. I'm wondering why this issue came up. I don't see other people reporting it. Does this LCD simply lack the normal range, is it defective, or is the Colorsync assistant just not up to calibrating this particular display properly? I'll note that this is the higher quality panel type than the cheaper LCD type to which I am accustomed.

[Big Mac]

I think I figured it out - I had to explore the display's menu system to find three different gamma settings. When I changed to a different native gamma I was able to do the first step of Colorsync calibration properly. The calibrated setting still looks a bit too dark but far better than the first attempt. I'll reserve final judgment when my eyes aren't tired and I'm not that sleep deprived.

[reader50]

The "zero brightness" setting on most displays would be more correctly labeled as "minimum brightness" - an arbitrary value the factory decided was the lowest anyone would want to go. I've hit it before when trying to manually calibrate.

Eventually, I got a cheap hardware calibrator. It had gotten too difficult to make multiple displays match.