Too many LCD monitors are made with contrast pre-set to ungodly high values, so that image looks more "vibrant" for the unaware and sell better. This cuts off both the dark adn the bright ends of the brightness range... But it really makes all colors more saturated than what the monitor is really capable of.
I had to tune all LCD monitors I bought using test images. The default presets are always wrong, the shadows are black and the highlights are bleached.
It's much worse with a CRT monitor where due to tube aging the image gradually becomes darker. Eventually this leads to darker tones being cut off even when you set brightness to 100. I had to cure this by readjusting certain voltage on one of the electrodes of the electron gun, but that requires a good knowledge -- not to mention the necessity to work on an exposed monitor where voltages of 700 and 25000 volts are just a wrong move away from your fingers. And after curing the black level you have to adjust beam focusing because changing voltage disturbs the balance of the gun. A lot of fun, that since there usually are two controls, for focusing horizontally and vertically, and both affect different part of the screen in different ways. You get a perfect focus in the upper left corner, the center blurs. And so on (Never do this without a special test pattern on the screen and a mirror so that you don't have to bend around the exposed high-voltage parts while you are picking in the monitor's ass). And after you found the acceptable focusing trade-off you can find that in doing so you disturbed the black level (as everything is interconnected) and have to start again
Im sooo glad the CRTs are history