A picture of perfection

Basic ergonomics dictate the ideal position for your screen, the top of which should be level with your eyes when you're sitting in front of it.

Avoid placing your monitor in front of a window where bright light behind it can strain your eyes, or in a position where light sources reflect off the screen.

Even if you've moved your monitor away from a direct source of light, ambient light can diminish the quality of any onscreen image and interfere with the accuracy of the adjustments that you make to the colour and contrast.

Probably the best situation is in low light, something that you will be unlikely to get in an office with overhead lighting. Obviously you'll want to avoid having your monitor in direct sunlight so that you can see your display clearly.

Refresh rates

For cathode ray tube (CRT) monitors, setting the vertical refresh rate is vital, as flicker is practically guaranteed to give you a headache over time.

Don't depend on the default Plug-and-Play driver, which can often result in a refresh rate of 60Hz. Check that you've installed the appropriate INF file for the monitor you're using.

This will ensure that all the supported refresh rates and resolutions are available to your operating system (found in Display Properties/Settings/Advanced/Monitor) unless you're using Windows NT, in which case you'll need to set them manually.

A vertical refresh rate of 75Hz is generally considered to be 'flicker free', but we'd recommend 85Hz or better if your monitor supports it. CRT monitors also have an optimum that will provide the best results. Use the table below as a guide.

Also, make sure that you've set your colour depth to 32-bit, otherwise a process known as dithering could be used to reproduce some colours.

With liquid crystal display (LCD) monitors, the native resolution is predetermined and, because of the way pixels are addressed, a refresh rate of 60Hz is optimal.

Unless you have a graphics card with a digital video interface and a monitor that supports digital signalling, your biggest problem is likely to be phase jitter caused by an inaccurate signal lock.

The best way to eliminate this is with a test image that features an 'on/off' pattern of pixels (one black, one white, easily created as a background pattern for your Windows desktop) then manually adjusting the phase setting in the monitor's menu system until any noise or soft edges are removed.

Regardless of the type of monitor, you'll need to adjust the contrast and brightness settings. Ideally, you need a grey scale test pattern for this. These can be found on the internet if you search for monitor test patterns.

Make sure the contrast is set to a level that doesn't bleach out shallow tones and that brightness isn't so high that black areas look grey against the solid edge around the screen.

As well as having a grey scale test, it's also wise to check that your colours aren't washed out because you have the brightness set too high, or too dark because of your contrast setting.

At www.zonezero.com there's a useful monitor calibration that will help you get the best colour on your display.

Moire cancellation

Some monitors offer more control than others, so it's a good idea to familiarise yourself with your manual. You might find advanced colour controls, moire cancellation and convergence adjustments, all of which can be used to enhance the quality of your monitor's image.

Moire patterning is where you get what looks like cross hatching or swirling lines across an image or your display and is only found on CRTs.

Convergence, or in fact misconvergence, is when the three coloured dots that make up a pixel are converged badly causing the image to blur.

Monitor resolution guidelines:

14in - 640 by 480
15in - 800 by 600
17in - 1,024 by 768
19in - 1,280 by 1,024
21in - 1,600 by 1,200

If you're using a flat panel, it's always wise to run the display at its native resolution otherwise the image could well be distorted and unclear.

TOP TUNING TIP

• Make sure that you set the resolution and refresh rate of your monitor to its optimum size, especially if you're using a CRT display.
• Adjust your brightness and contrast to make sure that your image is as clear as possible and that your blacks aren't grey.

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