I suppose this is going to seem very novice to all you disc carrying, meter owning, filter using experts out there… I am trying to decipher what seems to be a good discussion on brightness and contrast (Bill Blackwell, 2005) and making sure that you don’t crush either blacks or whites with calibration settings. However, the article only mentions two controls - contrast and brightness, and does not discuss backlight (or maybe he is referring to contrast and backlight, and is not discussing brightness – no way to tell). For those LCDs that have all three controls, it would be helpful to understand the basics of how to get the best results when you are messing with all three at the same time. If it makes any difference, I am working with a Sony 40XBR2 and a Mitsubishi LT-46133.

Anyone seen such a thread, post, or link? Or can someone just provide a short discussion? Thanks.

The backlight control raises the overall brightness from black to white.

The idea is to have the backlight as LOW as possible while still maintaining a bright enough picture in a given enviroment.

If you have to raise the backlight to acheive a bright enough white, you then are also affecting the blacks by making them appear grayer in color.

In my case, I have a completely light controlled enviroment with Idealume bias lighting, so I went into my LCD's service menu and lowered the backlight as far as I possibly could, then I adjusted my blacks and whites with test patterns to avoid black crush and ensure I could still acheive significant light output in the whites.

Which in my case I was able to do with such a low backlight setting. So now I have the absolute deepest blacks my LCD can reproduce (short of adjusting the polarizing plate) and I still acheive bright whites without color intrusion!

Hope it helps,

-Brian

Yes that helps thanks! I'm not getting into the service menus, but I don't have a pitch black room to work with either. So I guess in my case I set the backlight as low as I can stand it under normal lighting conditions (about 20% of maximum on either set) and then leave it alone. I was a little worried on the Mitsubishi, because in that case I have to set the brightness control up around 39 (62% of max) to get whites where they belong (seems high), but I guess every set is different.

You are correct about setting the backlight for your viewing conditions, but I hope when you say "I have to set the brightness control up" that you mean the peak white control (usually called contrast) and not the black level control!

Since LCD's are inherently (sp?) poor with deep blacks, the idea is to just get the absolute darkest blacks you can in your viewing enviroment by lowering your backlight (overall light output) as much as possible. If you could darken your windows during movie times and thus lower your backlight for those times, you would have deeper blacks and seemingly brighter whites!

-Brian

Thanks Brian. I was in fact struggling with this. Seems that I lose some shadow detail (compared to the Sony) when I set the brightness (black control) down. When I put it back up to regain the shadow detail, my blacks do get a little blue or green or gray. But at least I know what I'm trading off now, and I'll leave it set at the lower end (better deep black) for awhile.