Why too bright is too bright?

[Serge Cashman]

From what I can tell a monitor profile does not contain  a luminance description (I may be wrong about it).

Luminance (black and white) can be sometimes targeted during calibration and set to industry "standards" (100-130 cd/m2 for white luminance  I suppose).

Now, people use monitors that are, like, 500 cd/m2 and it's becoming a norm. What are the reasons that 500 is "too bright"? I understand ambient light is a factor, but 400-500?

 My understanding is that 500 cd/m2 can not be reasonably compared to print or to a CRT monitor. It is also too bright to be comfortably used under low ambient light. Is there a better explanation? Or you can tell users to go ahead and knock themselves out with brightness?

[dlashier]

After years of being too dim it appears that LCD's have taken the old axiom to heart: "if a little is good, more is better, and too much is just right".

I just bought a new Dell laptop and the first thing I noticed is that the display is too bright even for ordinary use. Fortunately turning down the backlight makes it reasonable, not causing undue eyestrain.

I still use a CRT of image editing but the switch is forseeable, but one of my primary criteria will be ability to control "brightness". The Nec looks good in this regard, the Apple not so good.

- DL

[Mark D Segal]

As I think most of us know, the key thing is how closely the soft-proofed monitor image and the print resemble each other, (making mental adjustment for inherent differences between reflected and direct light that just cannot be converged). I'm using a calibrated and profiled LaCie 321 monitor in a dimly lit fairly neutral room. Under these conditions I found it necessary to adjust the monitor's contrast setting down to about 42, and in ColorEyes I set the luminance calibration parameter to 130. This gives me a combination of brightness and contrast that has proven most reliable for anticipating the DR and brightness of the kind of prints I make (on Epson Enhanced Matte paper). Because everyone's combination of computing environment and media are different, no one recipe will work for all.