Display settings

The above shows the display (video card) settings as reported by your browser. Unfortunately, there is no way for this web page to find out what the capabilities of your monitor are, but for good image quality, the video card and monitor should be matched. The resolution displayed above should be the same as the native resolution of your LCD monitor or a lot of these tests will not work. The tests requiring a matched resolution are labeled as such in their description. In case of doubt, check the manual or do a web search on the model number of your monitor. The color depth should be 24 or 32 bits for the best test results; a 16-bit color depth will cause some artifacts in the test images that do not have anything to do with the monitor quality per se.

Not sure about your native screen resolution? Search for your monitor brand and model (add 'resolution' to the query):

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Color management

This collection of test images is supposed to help you evaluate and adjust your monitor. However, your operating system (Windows, MacOS, Linux) can alter the images to compensate your monitor. Before adjusting the contrast, brightness, and gamma settings of your monitor, you should switch off all color management in your operating system. To make things more complicated, there two locations where this can happen:

1. The color profile loaded by the operating system (Windows: Display properties > Advanced > Color management > Profile). Set this to 'None' or 'sRGB'.
2. The video card color correction settings, for the more advanced video cards. Set everything to neutral.

Mac users can read more below.

Background

Mac users

If you are using a Mac, it is very important that you are aware of the color management issues mentioned above. Macs are more likely than Windows systems to apply corrections to the image before sending it to the monitor. This is a good thing when you browse the web, but not if you want to calibrate your monitor.

You can find your color profile under Apple > System Preferences > Displays > Color. If you have no color profile, you can check under > Calibrate > Gamma. It should be set to 2.2 (not 1.8) for this test.

The above is to enable optimizing the monitor settings. If you wish to test the system color profile combined with the monitor, you can re-enable the color management. In this case, you have to view the test images in Safari, because other browsers such as Firefox (up to version 2.0) will ignore the sRGB "perceptual encoding" tag that is embedded in the test images.

See also: GIF/PNG/CSS color rendering test.

Resolution

The number of pixels (horizontal×vertical) from the point of view of your operating system. Also shown is the standard name for that resolution (e.g. SXGA) and the ratio between width and height.

Description

A rough indication of what class of monitors might have such a resolution. If you have a brand-new and expensive 20-inch monitor and the description says that it might be a low-end laptop display, then it's likely that your monitor is not running at its native resolution, which will make the screen appear fuzzy. For some of the test images (the ones that involve patterns with fine details), the resolution above should match the native resolution of your monitor. This is important for the clock/phase test, the sharpness test, the gamma calibration test, and the inversion test. If you think the screen fonts are too small in the native resolution, then consider increasing the default font size rather than running at a low resolution. If you don't know the native resolution of your monitor, then the easiest way to find out is to do a web search for "resolution brand modelnumber".

Color depth

An indication for the color resolution.

• 8 bits: this is very rare nowadays. It can display up to 256 colors simultaneously. Most of these test images won't be very meaningful.
• 16 bits: each of the red, green, and blue components can have 32 or 64 values, which is roughly what the "quick gamma/contrast test" below shows. In total, about 260 thousand colors are possible. It is also called Highcolor or "Thousands of colors". This is not enough for showing subtle color nuances, but decent image viewers and good web browsers such as Firefox (at least the Linux version) will use dithering to compensate for this, with quite nice results. The joke that is called Internet Explorer will not use dithering. Anyway, with a 16-bit color depth, the tests on this pages that are about subtle color nuances won't tell you anything about your monitor quality. This applies to the gradient test, the contrast test, and the white saturation test. I recommend to use Firefox to view this page and simply ignore these three tests.
• 24 and 32 bits: each of the red, green, and blue components can have 256 values, which means that 16.8 million colors are possible. It is also called Truecolor or "Millions of colors". The difference between 24 and 32 bits is a technicality that only matters for software developers.