Brightness / Contrast settings advice

greenwich

This is not a trick question, only a naive one. I need to understand the pros and cons of tweaking the brightness and contrast settings on my monitor. I have a TFT monitor from LG. It comes with various presets. I am currently using the Night Movie preset, which has 80% brightness and 60% contrast. There is also a User Mode preset that lets me choose my own settings.

My eyes are sensitive and I want to be comfortable reading text on the screen. Should I go for high brightness (which looks a bit glary) or low (which must make my eyes work harder)? Is high contrast better than low? What does it all mean? Physics was never my strong subject.

Any advice from someone who's expert in this would be much appreciated.

ManAtHome

Forget the presets, just adjust the brightness/contrast manually until you get something which looks right. In ye olden days it was recommended to set B+C with a monochrome ('black and white') picture on screen, then bring the colours up to a comfortable level. Note that you may need to adjust the brightness depending on lighting conditions (ie turn it up a bit during the day).

wolfman

Go for what's most comfortable.

As a side article, read this
http://www.tftcentral.co.uk/articles/brightness_and_contrast.htm

Very interesting.