NVIDIA
The NVIDIA Forceware Control Panel does offer more color controls in one page than AMD Catalyst Control Center. You can use Digital Vibrance to alter saturation settings - but only upwards. You'll notice that in our setup, Image Sharpening is greyed out. Much like it did in XP, it does allow for sharper images, but it also sometimes introduce ringing. What is unfortunate is the lack of the 'Graph' slider in Vista. Much like Advanced Mode in the old NVIDIA control panel, it allows you manually edit the color graph, for all channels or each independently.
From the amount of controls available, there's a lot more you can adjust with NVIDIA's Forceware Control Panel. Much like in XP, you'll need to play a video in a media player (that uses overlay) to see the difference. We like NVIDIA's decision not only to allow gamma adjustments for overlays, but also the ability to set gamma for each channel individually. Sure, most users will likely never feel the need to adjust such settings, but its nice to know that its there if you need them. Say you have make color corrections to your desktop. You can use these overlay color correction settings to compensate for your color correction settings or vice versa.- you can apply color correction settings to videos only. By default, these color controls are disabled and that's why they're greyed out in the screenshots.
For low bitrate videos with lots of blocking and blurry visuals, Edge Enhancement and Noise Reduction settings may be able to help image quality so that it's more 'palatable'. Particularly if your video decoder doesn't do a good enough job of deblocking the video. In our experience, setting Noise Reduction too high actually blurs any Edge Enhancement, so you'll likely have to experiment to find the setting you're comfortable with.
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