i have to have the settings on my monitor (contrast, brightness) constantly up at full, just to get the display to the correct brightness!
even then, dark images and especially games show up really dark, making games such as splinter cell virtually unplayable (and any other games that have dark/shadowy levels)!
i manage to struggle through playing a lot of games, even though those that have their own brightness settings, have to be set on full, and is often still too dark!
but these days a lot of games don't come with these brightness settings, let alone the even more useful gamma setting!

ever since purchasing the computer a few years ago (originally with a matrox g200 graphics card), the monitor has had its brightness on full.
it wasn't untill later games came out that i started to realise how dark the display actually was.
not realising at the time that it was my monitor NOT my graphics card (idiot), when i upgraded my graphics card (to the present geforce4 mx440) i expected it to solve this problem - no luck!

i realise now that my monitor was quite possibly faulty when i first got it, but i can't afford a new one yet.
does anybody know a way that i can tweak (via software) my graphics settings, so that the overall brightness/contrast/gamma can be set at a higher level, so that i can lower the settings on my monitor (a belina btw).

i have adjusted the colours on my monitor, but this does not help.
i have also tried adjusting the nvidia diplay properties settings, but this only seems to change any video content in a game!

'e-colour 3deep' has been recommended by a friend, but he himself has not used it.
has n e body got n e experience with this or any other similar piece of software?

OEM monitors are generally very poor, and low contrast/brightness is common. I think you're flogging a dead horse there.

Well, Belinea monitors shouldn't be that bad (the cheap line is not too bad for it's price, and the higher priced ones are quite good). If I remember correctly, you can somewhere set settings for OpenGL and DirectX mode, including brightness & contrast. I believe the setting was somewhere in the NVidia driver.

I can't take a look right now, since I only have 1 NVidia card left (went Ati a while ago) and that computer isn't connected...

Download PowerStrip, it's free. You can enable hot keys and change gamma and other settings in-game and it will remember these settings for that game when played.