Why is Contrast control disabled when using DVI?

If I remember correctly, the contrast setting is something sent along one of the DVI lines in order to provide the best appearance. Because you are using a Mac, I don't know what to tell you because most things not designed by Apple are going to fight. (I still love how I-Tunes will randomly crash on my PC, it being the only program other then AIM that does) I would look into the Display options from the control panel. If there is not an option there, look at the support from Apple's web site.

Sry, dunno the answer why the contrast controls is locked out when using dvi (on my 2001fpw) but here's a trick i use at nighttime when the brightness is set @ 0 and is still too bright for me: I just go to the "Main Menu", select "color settings" and select the blue preset. Trust me, it truly saves the eyeballs from burning up.

Great!  Thanks for the tip... I'll check it out see how it works out for me.

Thanks again!

Don't know the exact why of the question, other than to say that it's just The Way It Works. Most people find the brightness too high and end up setting it to zero in the OSD. Any further adjustments would be made from your video card drivers... do you know what video card you have in your system and what drivers are installed?

From your desktop, right-click on a empty spot and try: Properties / Settings and see what it says for Display. It should say something like "Monitor type (Digital or Analog) on Graphics card". Mine, for example says "Dell 2405 (Digital) on NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GTX". From there try the "Advanced" button and there should be a tab with your video card's name on it. From there you should be able to make any other changes that you need to the Brightness or Contrast. For an Nvidia card, there should be a 'Color Correction' sub-menu where you would set those items.

excellent suggestion chulett. I checked on my video card ati 9800 "catalyst" program and I can indeed change my brightness levels that way. Another way (if you are lazy like me since I only change the brightness levels for nighttime viewing) is to change the "user preset" color settings (red,green,blue) to 75% (under color settings menu of the osd). This will allow you to change the brightness w/o having to go thru the desktop display properties menu.

Message Edited by 26y on 02-16-2006 05:25 PM

To answer my own original question...

Several people mentioned using the video card controls to adjust brightness. While this will work, it is not the optimum way, generaly speaking, to adjust display contrast, and that goes for any display. However only high end displays have the circuitry to handle optimum contrast control.

Keep in mind, I mentioned that I was using this display on a Mac. In that case there are no video card settings to adjust. For whatever reason, Apple has chosen to not make any video card driver adjustments available via the OS. So that option is out. So basically, if you connect this display to a Mac, the only control you will have is brightness (much like the way Apple's own Cinema Displays work).

The reason for disabling all these settings, at the display level, when using the DVI connection comes down to cost. It is more difficult (expensive) to employ circuitry that can do digital signal processing than it is to use circuitry that can do analog processing. So therefore, Dell (and other manufacturers as well) simply disable certain features when connected via DVI and leave those omitted funtions for the video card to handle.