Design & CSS: DVI vs. VGA

[gothwalk]

Originally published at Now Is A Long Time Too. You can comment here or there.

I have two identical monitors on my workstation in work. One of them is connected to the video card by DVI, the other by VGA. The differences are quite astounding.

DVI seems to have sharper, clearer colours. In’ve no idea if this is inherent to the connection, or if it’s something on the video card, but it’s making life interesting around now. One one of my two screens, I can distinguish black from a dark navy - that’s VGA. On DVI, they look almost identical, but orange and grey colours that are almost invisible on the VGA monitor stand out bright and clear. There’re a range of shades of light grey that look white on VGA, too. Given we use all these colours in our new designs, making things usable for everyone is going to be tough.

Comments

[cpio.livejournal.com]

Try changing your gamma settings if you want to differentiate between the darker colours -- sounds like it's set a bit to low for your design work.

Different gammas have always been a problem for deciding on colour schemes for websites. Macs historically have tended to have higher gammas (1.7 - 2.2) than Windows PCs (often 1.0) because they were used for a lot of DTP work.

Disclaimer: Please note, I may be talking complete crap, in which case I retract any or all of what I have just said. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma_correction for something more approaching the truth.