It’s been a while after calibrating white balance on my Xperia Z. Watching movies in there looks so good why in my laptop looks so dead. I don’t think I can withstand this much longer so it’s time to spend some effort for more enjoyable screen. As this will be quick settings for beginners or lazy people who’s not videophile, I’ll keep it brief with selected value for average use.
1. Backlight (Maximum): or you can also call it screen brightness but please don’t be confused with color brightness below. Set it to maximum for best quality pictures. You can dim it down later for battery life after you’re done with calibration.
2. Hue (0 or -2 to 2): I would say they’re factory calibrated already but most cheap laptops under grand wouldn’t have perfect color that looks so good by default. Unless you’re sharp with your eyes and know what you’re messing with, you should leave it untouched. But if you want to change it, try increasing or decreasing by 1 or 2 and see what you prefer the most. For my case with Asus K43TK, setting +2 gives life to pictures.
3. Saturation (+4%): Unless your monitor has high dynamic contrast like Macbook Pro or something, default saturation gives dull impressions for movies. Increasing a little more like 4% will give better impressions but not beyond 5% unless you want to lose circle shape of color sphere. If it looks too vivid, try 2% instead.
4. Brightness (-20%): Since most people tend to use laptop with optimal backlight level, setting 100% color brightness is definitely not good for white balance so we should reduce brightness about 20% off for generally optimal white balance.
5. Contrast (10% off): Backlight with default contrast can be pain to eyes for long session. I recommend reducing a little bit so that you can be more relaxed by trimming contrast down by 10%.
Example configuration for Radeon configuration
Hue: 0
Saturation: 104 (or 102 for less Vivid color)
Brightness: -20
Contrast: 90
Example configuration for nVIDIA configuration
Hue: 0
Brightness: 40
Contrast: 45
Color Vibrance: 52 (or 51 for less Vivid color)
I tested on few laptops I have here and result is quite satisfying. I wouldn’t go as far as RGB correction as it won’t be general optimizations anymore. Keep in mind that default configuration isn’t bad but every good monitor needs calibration for user’s optimal use and I’d like to share mine that’s all.