am i a victim of 6-bit color on LCD monitor (Samsung 930B)?

[imported_navboy]

i just moved to an LCD for the first time (19" Samsung 930B) from an old 19" CRT on my NVIDIA GeForce FX5500, and while everything else on my WinXP PC looks great (after turning down the brightness), UnrealTournament looks like utter crap. I've tried the MagicTune, but it didn't do anything i hadn't already tried my manually adjusting parameters. Am wondering if i just haven't hit upon the right combination of settings, or if it looks so bad because of the 6-bit versus 8-bit color issue. I've got about 7 days left to take it back to Best Buy and get something with an MVA technology panel. Cost is an issue but this is pretty disappointing.

Specifically, in Unreal Tournament (the only game i really play currently) the QUALITY of the images texture-wise look great, but the colors look all washed out, like there's a lot of haze. The only way i could get close to any vibrancy at all was to play with a digital vibrancy setting somewhere in the NVIDIA tab, but it just shifted it in one color direction, so for example reds got good while the other colors got even more washed out.

Furthermore, the way the pools of lighting are rendered is real mottled and kind of grainy, not smooth and controlled the way it was on the CRT. It looks fake and garish to me. The confusing thing is i'm not even sure how to determine whether it's because i have a 6-bit color panel or not, since everything else seems to look pretty damn good, and Samsung's website only says 16.2M colors or whatever the number is, and doesn't say 6-bit or 8-bit. Or whether newer monitors are 8-bit and older ones 6-bit, etc.

I've been convinced from prior threads in here that all the fast response time TN models were 6-bit and until now fast 8-bit NVA's were hard to find in 19" size, but that Viewsonic has one. Are there others? How can i determine if the color bit issue is actually the cause of my problem? I'd hate to return this monitor i like so much in other ways, try to find an affordable but fast NVA, possibly pay to ship it here, only to find out UnrealTournament looks exactly the same as it does on my Samsung 930B, heh ...

 

[imported_navboy]

More info ...

I solved much of the color and look problems in UT ... I think originally i was so annoyed by the overbright nature of the monitor coming from my CRT that i dropped the brightness and gamma in the NVIDIA settings dialog, then went through calibrating the monitor and all sorts of other attempts to make it look good ... Once i reset the NVIDIA color setting back to all defaults, then went into UT and dropped the gamma a notch it's actually looking real good, not quite as good as the CRT but pretty good.

But, when i'm out of the game, everything looks awful and washed out, including digital photos in Adobe that used to look awesome. Browser, desktop, everything looks bright and washed out, even if i drop the OSD brightness to 30 and put contrast at 75 (something in the neighborhood of MagicTune's "text" setting). In fact, i guess i just don't understand - if you take a CRT monitor and drop the brightness to zero, doesn't the screen go black? On this LCD, you can drop brightness to zero and it's still plenty bright - just a dull image of what's there - not dark by any stretch. Not sure how i feel about having to reset the NVIDIA display settings between game playing and normal usage every time.

 

[xtknight]

In the ForceWare control panel, there are Color Profiles you can set for different games.

 

[imported_navboy]

Originally posted by: xtknight
In the ForceWare control panel, there are Color Profiles you can set for different games.

Hmm, i see the Profiles under Desktop Management in the NVIDIA dialog ... Is that what you mean?

I think i finally figured out what the problem was. Even though i initially dropped the brightness and gamma in the NVIDIA color correction settings, it was the reduced brightness there and NOT the reduced gamma that was making the game look so awful. Once i put them both back to default and turned off the digital vibrance, turned off the Full color enhance setting in MagicTune, and adjusted the monitor, i got the nice looking game but the washed out and overdriven look in everything outside the game.

So i went back into NVIDIA color correction, reduced the gamma to 0.58, and now my digi pics and desktop look great, and in UT i had to bump the Bright (gamma) setting up one notch to where it was originally on my CRT, and now things look great in both game and everywhere else. End up with OSD brightness/contrast at 38/52 just roughly adjusting them.

 

[jonmcc33]

nVIDIA cards have always had color issues.