Hi:

I'd appreciate it if everyone would take a moment to chime in on this subject:

Hopefully, this will be useful to those of you who have created a design on your own system--a graphic, or perhaps an entire web site--only to find that it looks quite different on a friend's or client's system (e.g., dark blues appear as light blues, light blues appear as pale blues, or visa versa, etc.

Not only do brightness and contrast monitor settings affect your system's display, but so does your display adaptor settings, especially your gamma settings. I read an article on the subject some time ago, which claimed that most people's gamma is set between 1.8 and 2.2. However, the factory default for my system is only 1.0. Of course, once you start playing around with your system's gamma settings, you will have to alter the brightness and contrast settings accordingly...

In the interest of discovering what a cross-section of you see when viewing the same graphics on different machines, so that I can calibrate my own system's settings, I would appreciate it if everyone would view the page displayed in the link below, then post the Row number (4 rows), and graphic number (12 per row) that you can actually see with your current system settings. For example, with my current settings, gamma of 1.0, I can see the following shades of gray:

Row/Graphic #

1 - 11
2 - 6
3 - 0
4 - 0

So, currently, I can't see any shade of gray past row #2, graphic #6. The remainder of graphics, as well as row #1, graphic #12 are indistinguishable from the white page background on my system. Yes, I could change the settings to see all of the graphics, but that causes a few new problems with the way that other colors are displayed. What is more, considering that most people aren't graphic artists/web designers, they have probably never changed their gamma settings from the system's default. At most, they may have changed their monitor brightness and contrast settings to suite.

shade chart


Thanks for any input!