You are seeing this page for one of two reasons:

you clicked on a link on one of our other pages, or you typed an inquiry about monitors into a search engine, and clicked on a link to get here.

If you’re here from a search engine, we’re happy to help you set your monitor up properly. Feel free to look around our site when you’re done reading this page. You may like our unique, original animal head sculptures for your home, office, or cabin, or as a gift for a friend, relative or child. To see them, click on one of the links at the top or bottom of the page, or on one of the pictures.

Some people have told us they have problems viewing our animal images on their systems. Some have even said that if they print out our pages, they can see the animals better than they can on their screen. This is hard to understand, because almost any color monitor that’s working and adjusted properly should show a better image of a web page than most printers. Because of such comments, we wrote this page to help make our site look better on your monitor.

There are 4 parts to our story:

Adjusting Brightness and Contrast Setting the Number of Colors Color Balancing Focus or Brightness Problems: Repair or Replace?

Aside from on and off, brightness and contrast are the most basic adjustments on a monitor. As the first step in adjusting these, please look around the edges of your screen. Do you see black edges on all four sides, about equal in thickness? If so, please skip down to Find Brightness and Contrast.

If you don’t see any black edges, or some black edges but not on all four sides, or if they’re seriously different in thickness, we need to adjust the size and location of the image on your screen.

Horizontal Size
Horizontal Position
Vertical Size
Vertical Position

The controls we need are called Vertical and Horizontal Size and Position, and have the international symbols shown to the right. Some monitors have separate controls for each of these. On others you select one of these settings using one set of buttons, and then adjust that setting using "+" and "-" controls. And some monitors may adjust all of these using on-screen displays. If you don’t know where your monitor’s Horizontal and Vertical Size and Position controls are, look around, push buttons, and find them. If all else fails, find the manual for your monitor and read it.

Adjusting these may be easier than finding them. If you don’t have black bands on the top and bottom edges of your screen, adjust the vertical size smaller (-) until you do. If you don’t have black bands on the left and right sides, adjust the horizontal size smaller (-) until you do. If the bands on the top and bottom are of different heights, equalize them with the vertical position control. If the bands on the left and right aren’t equally wide, equalize them with the horizontal position control.

How big should these black bands be? For our purposes, just big enough so you can see how black they are. But if the edges of your image look funny or different from the rest of the image, you might try making the image a little smaller, to get it away from the edges of the screen. (It’s good to keep the bands on all four sides about the same size, so that your overall image stays close to its "native aspect ratio".)

You may notice other controls as well, like “tilt” or “rotation”, or “pincushioning” which is how straight the sides of your image are. If you see such a control, and see that it can be adjusted better, do it! These words will wait patiently for you.

Find Brightness and Contrast

Brightness
Contrast

As of 1998, many monitors still have actual physical knobs for brightness and contrast, but they’re often partially or even totally hidden “for esthetic reasons”. The icons for brightness and contrast are shown to the right. Some monitors adjust even brightness and contrast on-screen. (Ours has a knob for contrast, but adjusts brightness in the on-screen display.) If you don’t know where your brightness and contrast controls are, look around and find them. Again, if all else fails, try to find the manual for your monitor and read it.

First turn the contrast all the way up (+, “more contrasty”). Now compare the black rectangle to the right with the black bands around the screen. Adjust the brightness for the brightest setting that keeps the black rectangle as black as the black bands. If you can’t quite do this, do the best you can. If the black rectangle is noticeably lighter/grayer than the bands around the screen at any usable brightness level, this is one reason to get a new monitor.

Some monitors look best with contrast turned all the way up. Others look “too contrasty” — this is your call, depending on what you like to look at. And some monitors foul up their focus or show color fringing when contrast is turned all the way up. In either of the latter two cases, turn down contrast to its best setting.

Brightness and contrast aren’t supposed to interact much, but on some monitors you’ll want to adjust brightness if you reduce contrast. Keep the brightness as high as you can, while keeping the black rectangle as black as the black screen edges.

You say things ended up just about where they were? If so, it means you didn’t have to do any of this. But how could we know this, unless we tried?

Most of the images on the World Wide Web are of two kinds, called GIFs and JPEGs. A GIF image can only contain 256 different colors.

For photos that contain more than 256 colors, GIF images are “dithered”, which means that pixels of different colors are mixed close together, to look more or less like the original photo. JPEG images can contain more colors than GIFs, so they avoid the funny-looking dithering patterns that occur in some GIFs. And JPEG images are typically smaller than GIFs for photos, so they download faster. Because of these advantages, all of our animal images are JPEGs.

But JPEGs look better than GIFs only if you have your machine set to display more than 256 colors. If you know that your display is set for more than 256 colors, or that your machine can only display 256 colors, go on to Color Balancing. Otherwise, find the section below that applies to your system.

Windows

Click on Start, then Control Panel, then Display. Click on the “Settings” tab near the top, then check the Color Palette selection box below the picture of the monitor on the left. If it says "Medium", click the triangle/arrow to the right of these words. If “True Color” is offered as an active choice, choose that, otherwise choose or “Highest”.

Macintosh

Click on System Preferences (the Apple light switch) in the Dock, then on Displays. Select the diplay tab, then find the Colors selector and set it to Millions.

Color Depth vs. Resolution and Performance

On most systems you can trade off resolution against the number of colors. That is, the amount of video memory in your computer may allow more colors with a smaller number of pixels, or less colors with more pixels. Many web pages are designed to be seen at 72 pixels per inch, but many PC users take a “more is better approach” and push their resolution much higher than that, and a result have trouble reading text on web sites. The point is that less pixels with more colors may be good for you, not just in terms of how photographic images look, but in making text on web pages more readable as well.

In theory and in the past, selecting a greater color depth slows down your computer’s performance, particularly in terms of the time it takes to draw or redraw a screen. But on most computers bought within the last few years, most people won’t notice any performance difference as a result of selecting more colors. And if you do, you can always switch back!

Reasonable-quallity monitors have separate red, blue, and green controls in their on-screen menus. Look for controls on the front of the monitor to activate on-screen menus, then navigate look through them for color controls. If your monitor doesn’t have color controls, skip this section.

Correcting the color balance on your monitor can help you not only in seeing the animals on our site more accurately, but in seeing everything on the Web and in your applications better. The hardest part may be in finding where the color controls are.

Color balancing involves comparing white on the screen with a piece of white paper. Your monitor makes its own light; the paper wants to be lit by white light. Most fluorescents are greenish or yellowish, incandescent light bulbs are reddish, but daylight is pretty white. If your monitor is in a room without any windows or glass doors, an about-equal mixture of incandescent and fluorescent light is about the best you can do. If your computer room has a window or glass door but it’s night now, bookmark this page and come back and do this when there’s daylight.

If possible, turn off all artificial lighting and open any blinds/shades/curtains to get as much daylight as possible around your monitor. (But you don’t want direct sunlight shining on the monitor screen.) Or set up an equal mixture of fluorescent and incandescent light. Locate the whitest sheet of paper you can find. (Among white printer papers this tends to mean the most expensive paper.)

Fold the paper once or twice to keep monitor light from shining through it. Hold it next to the white rectangle to the right, parallel to the screen so that it’s illuminated by the daylight or incandescent+fluorescent, rather than by the monitor. Adjust your red, green, and blue controls so that the white space to the right is the same color as the paper.

Don’t adjust all the controls in the same direction. If the screen looks too blue, you can turn blue down, or turn red and green up. If you set your brightness and contrast as described earlier, adjusting different colors in different directions helps keep the same brightness setting. (Adjusting all three colors in the same direction is the same as adjusting the brightness in that direction.)