Can't get gamma right in Windows. In Ubuntu it's very good by default

Question

I'm having a hard time adjusting my monitor's gamma to my liking in Windows.

I'm not a photographer/video editor or anything like that, I don't need precise calibration, but the default settings in Windows with my graphics hardware and monitor are just WAY off it actually hurts my eyes.

Although this miscalibration is obvious just looking at the desktop (gray lines on the icons of text files aren't visible), a quick look at this page confirms that gamma is way off. Under the gamma calibration section the 48% images "blend in" at gamma 1.3.

In Ubuntu 14.04, interestingly, with default settings it is great.

I have a HP Envy 15 notebook, which has a Intel HD 4600 and a Nvidia 840M.

The first thing I tried was to fiddle with the settings in the Intel graphics control panel, but even turning gamma and contrast all the way down still results in the 48% images blending at 1.9 while the 10% images are barely visible because the screen goes too dark. I tried all combinations of settings in the Intel driver, but I can't get it right this way.

The Nvidia driver doesn't have color settings and later I disabled it in device manager to make sure it doesn't affect the screen colors.

Interestingly the colors are off even when booting Windows in safe mode, where neither driver is loaded, I suppose.

I also tried loading the icc profile used in Ubuntu into Windows, but it doesn't do anything. I then downloaded a test icc profile, which should result in crazy color shifts, to test if the profile is even loaded. I followed these steps to load the profile and I also disabled the igfxpers.exe in msconfig, since some people reported this to mess with icc profiles. Since all this didn't do anything, I disabled all Intel and Nvidia related things in msconfig, still without success.

Now I pretty much don't know what to do anymore. I'm very grateful for all suggestions.

Answer 1

I'd invest in a cheap-ish colorimiter - even a Huey Pro [discontinued, look on eBay] or ColorMunki Smile would be less painful than trying to do it yourself.

There are better, no doubt there may be worse, but those are 2 cheaper ones I've tried with reasonable success

Answer 2

To conclude this thread, I'll tell what I ended up doing. I did get a colormeter and calibrated the notebook display - and all others I own. The results on the notebook display are OK. The colors are much better and gamma also slightly improved. It may just be the best that can be achieved with this display and I can live with how it is currently. The results on other monitors of mine are great, however, and I'm not unhappy that I got the colormeter.