Ok, now im trying to set my Contrast using DVE HD Basics. it says i should have Brightness at 50 (or halfway) and it says to lower contrast alot (or something like that) but im not sure how far to go down (it dosent say how much) should i go all teh way to 0? and how will I know when to stop going up? because it goes darker then brighter, then when it hits certain level going up, it turns darker again then brighter. should I go as high as I can? I have a LCD BTW. please, this is really starting to kill me, I really want my HDTV looking as close to the best as it can. also, what about teh brightness setting I did in the first section? do I completely disregard that because there asking me to mess with the brightness again in the Contrast setting?

Ok, now im trying to set my Contrast using DVE HD Basics. it says i should have Brightness at 50 (or halfway) and it says to lower contrast alot (or something like that) but im not sure how far to go down (it dosent say how much) should i go all teh way to 0? and how will I know when to stop going up? because it goes darker then brighter, then when it hits certain level going up, it turns darker again then brighter. should I go as high as I can? I have a LCD BTW. please, this is really starting to kill me, I really want my HDTV looking as close to the best as it can. also, what about teh brightness setting I did in the first section? do I completely disregard that because there asking me to mess with the brightness again in the Contrast setting?

The problem with setting contrast (which really controls the peak white level, as it sounds like you understand already) is that you don't know where you are without a meter. THX recommends 30 fL for peak white level in a dark room so you can watch a movie or 2 all the way through without getting eyestrain from the panel being too bright. In a movie theater, you may be getting only 10-14 fL for a white area on the screen. Without a meter, you can't tell if you are at 10 fL or 40 fL - obviously 10 fL is quite a bit darker than 40 fL and you can easily tell which setting is darker and which is lighter, but you can't tell that neither setting is where you want to be for a dark room.

You'll see and read statements about not setting contrast so high that you get discoloration at the bright end of the luminance scale - you have to view a grayscale ramp pattern to see if that's happening... preferrably one with more than 11 steps and preferrably one with at least one step that's whiter-than-white. 11-steps just isn't enough to see a discoloration that happens in a narrow luminance range... 20 steps would be better, 40 or more would be great - beyond 64 steps or so, the "stripes" in the ramp pattern get so narrow it can be hard to see what's happening.

Anyway... about the only way to know what contrast setting is roughly equivalent to 30 fL (again, for a dark room) is if somebody in the owner's thread for your TV has a meter and measures the light output for various settings.

In LCDs, light output is controlled by 2 things... Contrast and Backlight. If you have the backlight on high setting, you will need a lower setting for Contrast to control the light level. If backlight is set to a lower setting you need contrast set higher to get 30 fL (you still need a meter to know where 30 fL is). SOME LCDs don't have the ability to get down to 30 fL... which means you will always need some light in the room to avoid eyestrain that can cause headaches or discomfort. Other LCDs can be adjusted to get peak white much lower than 30 fL.

A high setting for Backlight means more light will bleed through the panel when the panel is supposed to be black - that will make black appear more like charcoal gray than real black in a dark room. So... IN GENERAL... for dark room viewing, you want the Backlight set as low as you can get it and Contrast set high enough to get 30 fL. You have to... again... have a meter to know what levels you are working with and you need to keep checking for problems at the high end of the luminance scale. A meter can help with that also as it will detect an "off" shade of white before it gets obvious to you.

Some LCDs also have "issues" when the backlight is set really low... sometimes there are color shifts you can't detect by eye - again, you need a meter, and a very good meter at that since modestly priced meters are often not very good at measuring color, especially the complementary colors - yellow, cyan, and magenta. So again, either you need a meter to find a good spot for the backlight (low, but not TOO low) or you need someone in the owner's thread for your panel to do the measurements and share them with the owner's thread. While sharing panel settings usually doesn't work very well, I find Contrast (and Backlight) settings tend to be at least relatively close from panel to panel.

Some will say to just set Contrast as high as you can without discoloration appearing in the grayscale ramp pattern (starts at black and progresses to white in steps, gray bars are usually vertical but may be horizontal also). But if you START with discoloration in the ramp pattern, what are you supposed to do then? Again... only a meter and knowledge of calibration technique will reveal the right answer. You may or may not get info to that level of detail in your TV's owner's thread on AVS - it all depends on how much the person or people with meters who own your TV know about calibration - they may be expert or newbie so it's hard to know in advance how good their info will be.

Sorry for the long answer for a short question - but it's a complex topic that can't be answered in 1 or 2 lines of info. You are essentially directionless without a meter when it comes to setting the peak white level using Contrast and Backlight.

PLease read the FAQ, this is discussed in great detail. You want to maximize the white level as high as possible on an LCD to just below the point of clipping or colorshifting. Adjust the backlight to a suitable brightness to suit the viewing environment and your viewing preferences.

PLease read the FAQ, this is discussed in great detail. You want to maximize the white level as high as possible on an LCD to just below the point of clipping or colorshifting. Adjust the backlight to a suitable brightness to suit the viewing environment and your viewing preferences.

You should know from logic alone that this is NOT the proper way to setup an LCD panel. Many have problems with the light spectrum when you decrease the backlight too much. AND many models cannot be set below 50-90 fL when using the method you mention and that is much too bright for comfortable viewing in a dark room. Their backlight system cannot be dimmed enough to achieve a reasonable 30 fL in a dark room with Contrast set to a relatively high value. In fact, some LCDs cannot be dimmed below about 50 fL with ANY combination of Contrast and Backlight.

Setting the peak white level on LCD panels has no one method that is correct for all LCD panels - you need to spend some time, preferrably with a meter, to find out the settings that produce the best images, grayscale, and color response. The variability of the panels, variability of the brightness range of the backlight, and variability in the color response of the backlight as you change the brightness of the backlight make finding the optimum peak white level setting tricky at best.

I didn't get the impression that the OP had any measurement capabilities, so while legitimate, I don't think your concerns are hugely relevant here. The basic task is still the same, maximize as much as possible the display's CR capabilities without pushing too far and clipping/colorshifting, then adjust backlighting as necessary to taste for the viewing environment.

The basic point is that if it's too bright because the backlight is all the way up, you don't want to crank down your white level (on an LCD) to an appropriate viewing level, because all you are doing is just obliterating your CR performance.