[Doom10]

No, it is definitely not a mistake. Using your TV's full range option is not recommended:

Q: My TV supports Full mode, shouldn’t I use this?

A: No. TVs support Full to make them easier to calibrate. Most TVs will not display a black level below 16 because video content should never have it. By letting you see Black 15 or 14, it can make it easier to calibrate the display and get the black level correct. However, you really should not use this as your main setting as most displays are not designed to display levels below 16, and often introduce color tints when doing white levels past 240 or so. Additionally, if you restrict yourself to levels 16-235 you wind up with a brighter image with a better contrast ratio, as you can turn up the contrast level higher. Contrast Ratio is the thing your eye notices most, and so it will produce a more pleasing image.

madshi, nevcariel, etc. recommend pc levels:

My recommendation is always to set configure your display so that it expects PC levels (full range). This has 2 important benefits: (1) Levels will be correct for everything, including games, photos, applications and video playback. (2) There should be no problem with image quality.

If your display can't do PC levels, or if you have good reasons for not using this solution, then you have 2 alternative solutions:

(a) Either set the GPU to limited range and madVR to PC levels. This means madVR will render to PC levels and the GPU will afterwards stretch the madVR output (and desktop, games, applications, photos etc) to limited range. Using this approach still has the benefit of having correct levels everywhere. But image quality might suffer because the GPU usually uses a rather bad stretching algorithm, which can introduce banding artifacts.

(b) Or set the GPU to fullrange and madVR to TV levels. This will result in good image quality (no artifacts) and correct levels for video playback. However, desktop, games, applications and photos will have wrong levels

http://forum.doom9.org/showpost.php?p=16...ount=19433

Ok, that is understandable. But you still have to calibrate your TV for PC levels. All of the Brightness, Contrast, Color, etc. would be different in this mode. And I still believe that your TV won't give you the best image in this setting. But this is debatable.

This is a situation where I wouldn't just trust madshi. It would depend on the TV.

The double conversion is a fact, and even if GPU does apply dithering then films will have noise from madvr dithering plus noise from GPU dithering. And games, desktop, etc. noise from GPU.

Even the writter of jriver guide you refference recomends full range:

If your display supports 0-255, then setup is easy - set everything to 0-255 and you don't have to think about it.
If your display does not support 0-255, you probably should not output 0-255 from the video card (using madNvLevelsTweaker.exe) and will have to compromise.

The first option is to have everything set to 0-255, except for the video card output, so that on the output stage it is being converted to 16-235. This means that all content is kept at the same levels (desktop & video) but the conversion to 16-235 on output may introduce banding. If you are using your PC for more than just video playback, this is the setup you have to use.

However, if you are going to be using the computer exclusively for watching videos through madVR, you have a second option. What you can do is set the video card output to 0-255, and set madVR to 16-235.

This will avoid the potential banding from having the video card compress the output levels to 16-235. But it will make anything that is not video look terrible, as anything on the desktop will still be outputting 0-255, and all values above 235 and below 16 will be clipped. (very high contrast image with no shadow/highlight detail)

I would only suggest doing this if your are only using the PC for video playback, and are seeing banding from the video card outputting 16-235.

http://forum.doom9.org/showpost.php?p=16...ount=18062