Balck Levels

[Andrew Howe]

Hi,
Just got a Blu-Ray player
Only problem is the picture, more precisely the black levels. They're awful. I have the same problem with DVDs and any other digital video I play. The problem is that my Nvidia graphics card/drivers/software messes with all digital video. It whacks the brightness right up and leaves what should be pitch-blacks a murky grey. I know it's not a problem with the video, because if I tell PowerDVD to take a screenshot, the screenshot looks perfect. I tried changing settings in the Nvidia control pannel and I get nice blacks but it then messes up contrast and colour

Does anyone known how I can get Nvidia to leave my video as-is?

[maxmcleod]

go into the nvidia control panel and check to see if you have the enhancements turned on.
I personally use the enhancements, to tweak my tvs settings.
you might want to try the new drivers for nvidia... or the beta drivers I should say... I noticed a huge improvement in video quality on my system when I installed them. the version is 174.74
much richer colors, and the enhancements seemed to be a little clearer.

[hendra]

I think black level has more to do with your monitor than with your video card. Sony XBrite HiColor has one of the best black level.

[Blaumann]

Originally Posted by Andrew Howe

Hi,
Just got a Blu-Ray player
Only problem is the picture, more precisely the black levels. They're awful. I have the same problem with DVDs and any other digital video I play. The problem is that my Nvidia graphics card/drivers/software messes with all digital video. It whacks the brightness right up and leaves what should be pitch-blacks a murky grey. I know it's not a problem with the video, because if I tell PowerDVD to take a screenshot, the screenshot looks perfect. I tried changing settings in the Nvidia control pannel and I get nice blacks but it then messes up contrast and colour

Does anyone known how I can get Nvidia to leave my video as-is?

This is probably a pc level/video level problem. Without going into details (that i couldn't correctly explain anyway ) the solution is probably this:

You need to calibrate your monitor/HDTV to the PC levels your PC seems to be sending out. Best thing would be to use a calibration disc (or one of the test pattern included in some BDs) to set up your blacklevel ("brightness") and whitelevel ("contrast") correctly. Calibrate the display, don't mess with the nvidia settings. As you have seen, that is rather counterproductive.

If you don't have such a test pattern, simply tune down the "brightness" of your display, until black looks black again.

After that you'll also need to turn up "contrast" on your display, to compensate for the first step. (actually you need to turn up contrast, until "white" is "white" again without crushing, but that is harder to see than the blacks. Hence it is better to use testpatterns.)

[Andrew Howe]

Thanks Blaumann - I've readjusted my monitor's display settings and now have a nicer looking picture all-over. But the Blu-Ray playback is still pretty bad. With my monitor's brightness on 0 the darkest blacks still display as misty greys

It's annoying because in full-screen mode, the black bars to the top and bottom of the video are great (what my system is calling RGB 0,0,0), but it's like the lowest value it will assign to video is about 30,30,30.