Best Brightness and Contrast Settings For Your Monitor

Achieve a satisfying image display with these settings

4 min. read

Updated onJanuary 26, 2024

updated onJanuary 26, 2024

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The best brightness and contrast settings for your monitor will be dependent on select variables. Nevertheless, they’ll be different for everyone as preference plays a major role.

Other factors that come into play when choosing your brightness and contrast settings include the ambient lighting conditions, your specific monitor model and calibration as well as your level of eye comfort/strain.

What are the best brightness and contrast settings for your monitor?

Brightness

Adaptive brightness

Adaptive brightness automatically adjusts the brightness level of your monitor based on the content displayed and surrounding light conditions. It’s important to find a balance that provides comfortable visibility and minimizes eye strain for your individual needs.

In well-lit environments, a higher brightness setting may be more suitable, while in dimly lit environments, reducing the brightness can help reduce eye strain.Brightness control softwaremay also be able to help you out where adaptive brightness fails.

Night light

Night light adjusts the color temperature of your display to reduce blue light and make it easier on the eyes in low-light environments. Also, when adaptive brightness and the night light feature have been enabled, you may notice yourscreen dims, or the brightness keeps changing.

In this case, you’ll have tomanually adjust your brightness settingsto a level that works for you, but be careful not to set it too bright. Such configurations can easily lead to awashed-out HDR, making items on your screen difficult to read.

Contrast

High contrast theme

If the built-in contrast themes do not satisfy your needs, you can get more from the Microsoft Store.

2.Download contrast themes

While the Microsoft Store has a wide variety ofdark themes for Windows 11, their biggest limitation is that they’re only applicable for the Desktop. Most apps will remain the same, so the changes will be insignificant.

Should brightness be higher than contrast?

The optimal ratio of brightness to contrast for a monitor is a matter of personal preference and can vary depending on the surrounding lighting and other factors.

However, for purposes of general settings, we recommend setting the contrast slightly higher than the brightness for image quality concerns. A 60% to 70% level should be comfortable enough for reading.

Remember that these guidelines serve as a starting point. For the most effective and efficient performance, combine withother display settingsfor better graphics. Better yet, you caninstall display color calibration softwareto do the job for you.

Overall, it’s important to find the right balance that provides comfortable visibility whilereducing eye strain. These features can be highly personalized, so we encourage you to experiment with different settings and adjust them based on your individual needs until you find that sweet spot.

While you’re playing with these settings, we cannot forget to mention that yourWindows 11 brightness may not workat times. No worries, though, as we’ve already addressed this issue in our extensive guide.

We’re curious about your brightness and contrast settings. What configurations would you say work best for you? Let us know in the comment section below.

Best Brightness and Contrast Settings For Your Monitor#

What are the best brightness and contrast settings for your monitor?#

Brightness#

Contrast#

Should brightness be higher than contrast?#

Best Brightness and Contrast Settings For Your Monitor

What are the best brightness and contrast settings for your monitor?

Brightness

Contrast

Should brightness be higher than contrast?