What Is It?

Display Tuner is a simple and easy to use utility to change the basic colour and geometry settings of your primary monitor. It also allows the volume settings of the monitor audio system (if you have monitor speakers and microphone) to be changed for both the speakers and microphone. Individual profiles can be set for different situations which are easily changed by user defined hotkeys.

Why Would You Want It?

Display Tuner provides a simple and one-stop shop for changing the settings on different manufacturers monitors. While graphics card and monitor manufacturers distribute software for specific makes and models they are generally limited to their own specific items.

What Does It Do – The Essentials?

Summary:

• Changes colour controls – red, green, blue
• Changes Brightness and Contrast
• Changes Horizontal and Vertical size
• Changes Horizontal and Vertical position
• Changes Monitor Speaker and Microphone Volume
• Allows user profiles to be set

Pros: What’s Good?

• Freeware

• Portable (Comes with Installer but files can be transferred)
• Hotkey Profile changes
• Simple to Use
• Settings are retained when program is not running

Cons:What’s Not So Good?

• Only works with primary monitor in a multi-monitor setup

More About What it Does in Detail:

The developers site Nicomsoft gives the following information:

Display Tuner
Manage your monitor settings with ease!

Display Tuner provides convenient access to the monitor settings, such as brightness, contrast, color settings or geometry. If your monitor has speakers or a microphone, Display Tuner will allow you to change their volume easily. You can define several profiles with different color settings (for example, "Films", "Text", "Games") and Display Tuner will allow you to easily change the color settings, just press a hotkey! There is no need to use the OSD of the monitor anymore, Display Tuner is a much more convenient tool!

Display Tuner supports all monitors whose settings can be changed from Windows. It works in Windows 2000/XP/2003/Vista and it supports almost all video cards: nVidia, ATI, Intel, S3, SiS, Matrox, etc.

Display Tuner is much more convenient than MagicTune, NaViSet or similar software:

• Display Tuner supports all monitors whose settings can be changed from Windows, not monitors of only one manufacturer.
• Display Tuner allows you to have several color profiles and easily switch between them using a hotkey.
• Display Tuner starts faster and it can be minimized to the system tray.

Display Tuner has an easy-to-use interface.

System Tray Icon

Double left clicking on the System Tray Icon starts the main program window. Alternatively Right Clicking displays a menu of options which when clicked displays the relevant section of the main program.

The main window has seven buttons to the left side each of which changes the main window display to enable setting of the relevant controls and options or to provide information. The default is to display the

Image Settings

Here the colours, contrast and brightness are set using sliders or + and _ buttons for fine control

Geometry

Basic settings for width and height along with horizontal and vertical position.

Audio

Changes the monitor speaker volume and the monitor microphone gain. (I couldn’t test this as I don’t have built in monitor audio )

Profiles

Here you can Add – Delete – Rename – Activate individual profiles as well as being able to set individual hotkeys to activate each profile from the keyboard.

N.B The setting changes are automatically saved for the current profile so there is no Cancel or Undo facility. If you are going to play about with this use a new profile and keep the Default |Profile for your original settings!

Settings

Settings to:

• Always Update Monitor Information
• Use Visual Effects
• Start with Windows

Info

Provides information on the monitor.

As I didn’t test this on different monitors I cannot say if more or less information is provided depending on the manufacturer or type. I did notice that the Horizontal and Vertical Frequency are both zero which may be because I am using an LCD display

What are the Technical Details & Compatibility?

What is the My Free Review Experience?

A useful utility, particularly if you need to have different profiles to change your monitor settings for different applications or day and artificial light settings.

Personally I rate this as:

A useful utility but not essential

What Could Make it be Better?

• Multi-monitor compatibility/settings
• Display Current Profile (Titlebar/systray tooltip etc.)
• More advanced settings for monitor control

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Why I decided to Write this Blog

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This entry was posted on Thursday, April 10th, 2008 at 6:52 am and is filed under Freeware. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.