LCD or CRT

[Clare s Wheeler]

Hi

I have a Windows Applications written in C#. End users of the application
may have either CRT or LCD monitors.

I would like to display some very light shades of colour. However the
colours look different on a LCD & a CRT monitor. Light colours look darker
on a CRT monitor & very light colours hardly even show on a LCD monitor.

Is there anyway to determine what type of Monitor a computer is running?
That way I could alter the colours depending on the monitor type - and
ultimately have my application look very similar regardless of monitor type.

Thanks
Clare

 

[Richard L Rosenheim]

To the best of my knowledge, no, there isn't a sure proof way. Especially
the ones that uses standard video cards. My suggestion is to provide a menu
or configuration item in your program and let the user selects the monitor
type they are using.

Richard Rosenheim

 

[Robert Jacobson]

The Win32_DesktopMonitor WMI class might help you:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/wmisdk/wmi/win32_desktopmonitor.asp

There's a code snippet here on how to use it:
http://groups.google.com/groups?q=W...et.*&selm=eWNo23G4BHA.1864@tkmsftngp04&rnum=2

That said, do you really want to go this route? Even if you can detect the
correct type of monitor, there will be color variations between different
models of LCD displays. (Plus, users might override the default color
through color calibration tools.) It might be more robust if you could
simply select colors that were safe for all monitors. If that weren't
possible, perhaps you could let the user modify the color (such as through a
slider bar in an options page that adjusts the color darkness/intensity.)
Just my two cents.