To lower or not to lower RGB on the onscreen menu

[KLE-France]

Hi again,

In my ongoing quest to get the best out of my “meh” monitor (a  Dell P2414H),  and truly know my way around the color management rabbit hole, I’d love to have your opinions on the following:

When you get to the interactive display adjustment step (this screen),  DisplayCal asks you to use your onscreen menu to adjust RGB gain and brightness. In my monitor’s default state, the RGB gain values are all at 100 and the brightness value is at 75.

If I do the necessary adjustments while trying to keep the RGB gain values close to 100, I need to lower brightness down to around 35 to get a 120 cd/m2 white level.

However, lowering the RGB gain values lowers the screen brightness as well. For example, if I lower the RGB gains to around the 80 mark and work with them there, I can get to the 120 cd/m2 white level with the brightness lowered only to around 68.

However, the few discussions I found on the web seem to disagree on the interest of lowering RGB gain values. Some say it is advantageous, others say the opposite. This discussion at the Luminous Landscape forum summarizes well what I found.

So I figured here is probably the best place to ask this question: When calibrating a monitor, is it a good idea to lower the onscreen RGB gain values, or should one always try to keep them as close as possible to their default 100 value?

Or does it just not matter?

Thanks in advance!

[Florian Höch]

It is always better to only use the backlight (on LCDs, usually labeled “brightness”) to set the luminance if possible, i.e. keeping RGB gains as high as possible (but watch out for clipping the individual channels, which some less well designed LCD controls do not account for). Otherwise, the screen will take more power to operate (as the backlight needs to be set higher) than necessary, and using RGB gains to adjust brightness may also cause other artifacts like banding (in LCD monitors, “gain” is implemented using internal 1D LUTs, which have a limited precision).

[KLE-France]

Theeere’s the reliable info I (we!) need.

Again, thanks for your availability, Florian. Gentleman and a scholar.

[Author]

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