As I get older and more decrepit my specs get ever more complex - you could start fires with them now. When I was a younger man I used a 12" monitor, then I graduated to a fancy 14" one. My last one was a 19" widescreen and it appeared that someone kept making everything on screen a bit smaller every day.
I bought a 20" non-widescreen LCD TV from a car boot sale a couple of years ago because it had a VGA input, but my graphics card didn't get on with it (got horizontal stripes all over the place . . . ) I updated the drivers for the card but no matter what I did I still got the stripes. Nothing wrong with the TV - it worked OK on my wife's laptop so I shelved that idea for a while.
Then someone recently gave me a new video card - an NVIDIA Geforce 610GT with 1Gb of onboard memory and the capability to use great chunks of my 8Gb system memory at will. It comes equipped with an HDMI socket, so I plugged it into the giant HD TV in the living room to try it and sure enough it gave a great picture.
So now I started looking for a suitable (i.e. cheap . . . ) HD equipped TV to use as a monitor, and found a 22" Bush widescreen one which was 'HD Ready' for £20 on Preloved. Went and bought it, plugged it in and got a reasonable picture on it. Bit of overscan, but I played with the settings on the video card a bit and found that although the TV was showing 1080p @ 60Hz, the graphics card thought it was 30Hz. Quick click of the mouse and the overscan problem disappeared.
But the fun was only just beginning. Although I had a *reasonable* picture on the screen, the colours were a mile out. Reds were really overpowering and the brightness and contrast were all over the place. The TV has its own menu where you can adjust the picture settings - it has Standard, Personal, Soft, Dynamic and Movie modes, with only the 'Personal' setting being customisable. At the same time the video card has its own settings, where I can alter the brightness, contrast, sharpness, colours - either all at once or for the individual Red, Green or Blue channels.
So, what's the best bet for setting up the TV to give a good picture overall? Do I go for the Standard settings on the TV and use the video card settings to change the effect, or do I leave the video card on default settings and alter it on the TV? And where do I start with the settings anyway? I've been playing around with this off and on since Sunday and just as it seems I've got it right, I discover that I'm wrong.
Anybody have any experience of this please?