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Roen
Weaksauce
- Joined
- Aug 7, 2021
- Messages
- 102
Local Dimming
I don't use it anymore. It's completely useless on this monitor once you know the problem it causes. The zones dim too readily, dimming entire scenes constantly, drastically reducing contrast within each zone itself, making scenes darker than they should be with a subdued, veiled, washed out look especially to scenes in the mid to low-ish luminance range. Only a very bright scene keeps the zones undimmed. Zones that are dimmed are only really good for showing pure black but they are used to show everything from mid bright to 0. Don't use it.
LD being so bad it's not usable means using HDR content instead of SDR content has no benefit other than color depth.
DCR
DCR is basically dynamic brightness control and produces deeper blacks than local dimming. Dark scenes make the screen go darker, bright scenes make it go brighter up to what the brightness setting is. DCR doesn't make normal scenes too dark like LD does and doesn't cause that washed out look I mentioned earlier. Its downside is that you don't get highlights in scenes that are majority dark even with the brightness maxed. I still prefer DCR over LD. It is best paired with a brightness setting of 100 with which (unlike without DCR) blacks are still good and you need at least 75 to get enough highlight pop in average lit scenes. Cranking the brightness doesn't have as much of an effect in average lit scenes as it does without DCR. When a majority bright scene comes up which can include certain menu / load screens or whatever, it's blinding because DCR then no longer reduces the backlight.
Find the sweet spot
LCD tech has limited dynamic range. The LD implementation sucks and DCR isn't a perfect solution either. You may be better off simply finding the brightness setting's sweet spot between acceptable blacks and acceptable highlights. It does depend on how much ambient light there is and your preference but a brightness of 28-30 is a good compromise. Beyond 30 dark scenes really start to look more washed out. Anything over 35 will begin to wash out almost any scene as the light starts to bleed into everything.
Make a 4k pure black image in Paint, open it with the Windows built-in 'Photos' app and press F11 for fullscreen. Disable local dimming and DCR if you haven't already. Set the brightness to 0 and start increasing it to see just how much that raises the black levels. The effect on black depth of going from 0 to 15 is huge already.
Sweet spot method vs DCR
In practical terms, the difference between simply setting the brightness to 28 vs using DCR is that the latter lets you run a much higher brightness which gets used in bright scenes only so you don't mess up the black depth in other scenes. In return, you give up having highlights in dark scenes and dark scenes can be displayed darker than the creator intended.
After testing I ditched DCR (and LD both) and just use a brightness setting of 28. For Dead Space (2023) with so many dark scenes 20 seems to be the sweet spot. I even lowered it to 10 for a brief section that's in almost complete darkness. DCR reduces the backlight too much in semi dark scenes just to get the best possible blacks, making semi dark scenes dull / low contrast and difficult to see in.
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I've contacted Gigabyte.