Dimming Display Brightness to Zero

Hello All,
I have been having a problem with the display brightness adjustment for a long time. Basically, the display of my 17" 1GHz G4 cannot be dimmed to black. From the System Preferences the display brightness can be lowered with the slider. In the final third however dragging the slider further to the left not only does not reduce the brightness it actually slightly increase it, and the display start to flicker.
Any ideas what could be the cause?

That model doesn't support dimming the display brightness to zero, except through Energy Saver (which may not work with all third party USB devices), or a screen saver that has a picture that shows nothing but black. Some third party hacks dim the display, but they are not necessarily that reliable.
Only Apple's notebook displays dim to full black.

Similar Messages

Reducing brightness to zero = sleeping display?

Hello.
In the Energy Saver settings I read that "never letting the display sleep may shorten it's life". But I really don't like that timer sleep thing. However, whenever I see fit, I turn the brightness to zero, until it goes darkest. Is this in any way similar to "sleeping"?
My question is does turning the brightness to zero whenever possible help increase the display's life?
What other tips do you have in this regard?
Bye,
Mircea

No, dimming the display is not the same as sleeping the display. When you dim it manually all you turn off is the backlight while the LCD display remains on. By manually dimming the display you are extending the life of the backlight which usually fails before the LCD.
I don't understand why you don't like the display sleep timer? If you are using the machine it won't turn off. I usually set my timer to 15-20 minutes. If I don't touch a key in that amount of time I'm generally not using it.
Are you having issues with the auto display dim? That is when the display dims but still remains on but at a low level? If so you can disable that in the Energy Saver control panel. Just deselect "Automatically reduce the brightness of the display before display sleep".

Why does the display brightness surge and dim repeatedly?

Periodically, i.e. frequently (about 2-3 times per week), the display brightness surges - dims significantly, then surges to ~60% full brightness whether on battery or adapter power. As I write this note now, it is running with the power adapter and the brightness has been surging since I turned it on about 30 miins. ago.
The battery indicator is showing 98% charge.
Over the past month, as this has occured, I've tried several variations of the power parameters, but with no affect.

I'm replying to my own question above. A few minutes after I posted the Question, I noticed another question in the Community in regard to "systems preferences, display, brightness, etc."
I then opened my "System Preferences, Displays", and, as the brightness continued surging, unchecked the box "Automatically adjust brightness".
Voila! The surging and diminishing brightness issue STOPPED. Over the past several minutes it has not returned. Piece of cake? Time will tell.

Fading display brightness?

Dear everybody,
I received my new x201 4 days before.
Before the X201 I had a T61 with no LED backlit.
I just have one question: If I turn the brightness to zero in Windows 7 and then raise it again, the screen brightness sometimes goes black and then "fades" in, meaning the display does not get brighter immediately but fades in, which lasts for approx. 1-2 seconds.
The same thing happens when I have dimmed the brightness of the display to a low value, then shutdown and power on the notebook again. Then the display also fades in while showing the thinkpad logo on the screen (bios).
Is this behaviour normal? I do not have experiences with LED backlits so I do not know if this is a strange behaviour or not.
Sorry for my bad english, I'm not a native speaker.
Hope, somebody can help or confirm.
Best regards,
Chris

Hello mate,
It's an option in power manager. Under your current power plan expand Idle timers and you can define when the display dim and the intensity.
Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information on it.
ThinkPad T510 4313-CTO Windows 8 x64 - Intel Core i7-620M - NVIDIA NVS 3100M - 8GB RAM - 240GB SSD- Intel Centrino Ultimate-N 6300 - Gobi 2000.
ThinkPad Helix 3697-CTO Windows 8.1 x64 - Intel Core i7-3667U - Intel HD Graphics 4000 - 8GB RAM- 256GB SSD - Intel Centrino Advanced-N 6205 - Ericsson C5621gw

S405 dim display

Hi folks. Bought laptop new with windows 8 for use in a school district
I don't have the resources to support 8 right now, so I went to load windows 7.
Windows 8 display was bright
The setup when loading windows 7 was bright as well. All going ok.
But, after loading the AMD chipset drivers that are all bundled together, the display is half a bright as it was.
All settings I can find for brightness are maxed: In the power settings, the OSD keyboard setting (F12), the AMD display interface....
Too bad too, as there are many reviews of this latop that indicate a dim display and I'm sure that folks are getting turned away by that. After running a fresh install I know that the display and hardware are fine. It's the driver that's broken. PLEASE can Lenovo or AMD get a fix for this? It's almost unusable it's so dim.
John
Solved!
Go to Solution.

I had to reload Windows 8 from a flash drive since I couldn't get any Windows 7 displays drivers to function correctly. For Windows 8, the drivers on the website were in a self-extracting executable that didn't work properly (I don't know if they've fixed them now), and then for a while they took them down (I don't know if they're back up). At the time when I reimaged the system, I had to download the Windows 8 drivers from the Chinese site, and they worked correctly for Windows 8. This particular laptop was a gift, so I don't have it anymore. Just happy I could get it working again with Windows 8.
After I was having so much trouble with Windows 7, I called Lenovo support to alert them of their drivers not functioning. I was hung up on. I'm not happy with Lenovo support, and if I didn't do I.T. for a living, I wouldn't have been able to figure out how to get working Windows 8 drivers.

Heat, Fan, and dimming display questions

I have a hot running MacBook Pro. I've had the unit returned for service and only one of my four issues was resolved. The unit is going back again for service.
I seemed to irritate the last tech support person by asking questions about the heat issues. Maybe some people here can help answer the question that changed his tone for the worse during the remainder of the support call.
Can you easily hear the fan(s) when they operate or do you have to put your ear real close to the laptop to hear the fan(s) operate?
I asked because I couldn't tell you what a fan sounds like on this machine. I'm on my second motherboard and I cannot feel any air flow from all those vents (or anywhere else for that matter) along the back of the laptop near the display hinge.
Has anyone found a correlation between a dimming display and heat? What happens is the display dims the equivelent of bringing down the brightness down three levels and after a few seconds it brightens back up.
The laptop is going in for a second repair for the following reason:
"Problem Description: Customer sensory issues - Temperature perception: CPU/Unit"
MacBook Pro Mac OS X (10.4.6)

Hello I just wanted to give you some insight on the screen dimming. If you have not unchecked the box at the bottom of the display pane is system prefs the display will dim when ever it scences a lower light situation. I have attached a picture. HERE
MBP 1.83ghz and iBook G3 700mhz Mac OS X (10.4.6)

X230 display brightness changes automatically

Hi,
I have a problem when I'm using my X230 from battery: every know and then the display brightness changes, it gets lower (even without any user activity). Also it seems that the color profile also changes, colors look washed out. After few minutes or sometimes seconds, it goes back to normal. However, I have this issue quite often.
Is there a solution? Is it something to do with my power settings?
Thank you.
Solved!
Go to Solution.

zombyorc,
Try the following.
http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/W-Series-ThinkPad-Laptops/Disabling-Auto-Screen-brightness-on-Intel-HD-G...
or
http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/T400-T500-and-newer-T-series/T410-screen-brightness-dims-washes-out-on-b...
*Non Lenovo employee*
I have a Y2P (i5) ... Feel free to ping me if you want me to test some applications with your Y2P if you have the same model. I don't mind keep doing recovery on it if needed .... =)

T440s Turn off auto display brightness

I'm trying to turn off the auto brightness on my T440 but nothing I found so far is working.
I edited all power plans and it turned off the Auto display brightness in windows 8.1, and i also disabled the "Display Power Saving Technology" in the graphics control panel under Power.
It's dimming even with cable plugged in. If the screen consists of mostly black images, it dims.. if there is white, it brightens.
Any help how I could fix this is appreciated! I have latest everything, all drivers, etc. I have latest System Update 5 update manager which downloaded and installed everything possible.

I seem to have fixed it.. but not sure what it was, I did a few things. I did another update which downloaded a Dependency manager which was critical.. and I also did a safe mode start which failed to start and nearly bricked the machine.. only a CD was able to revive the boot process.. it would boot to a blank screen with no start options even available.

Why does MacBook display brightness keep going to the lowest brightness?

Hi! My daughter's MacBook (10,4.11)runs perfectly...except for one problem, the display brightness won't stay on the brightest setting. Every time the computer restarts the brightness goes to the lowest setting, which is too dim. We turn it up, it's fine until she does a restart. Any ideas? Thanks, Bill

I'm having a similar problem, when I wake my macbook or sometimes when I turn it on, the display is on full brightness even after I've set it to my liking. I'm having to reset the brightness on my macbook all the time because the full brightness is so bright it gives me a headache. I was just trying to figure out if there is a way for me the set my desired brightness once and not have to do it every time I turn the computer on.

Display brightness halflife?

My last DVI display got progressively dimmer over the years until I couldn't hardly see it in a well-lit room. This turns out to be caused by the "backlight halflife", which I guess is a result of the laws of the universe. Is my new Thunderbolt display subject to the same law of a backlight halflife? I am wondering if I can leave the display on indefinitely or if I should preserve its life expectancy with Energy Saver. I had heard at some point that LED technology did not need a backlight and so would not suffer the dimming halflife. Is the Thunderbolt LED or LCD? Does anyone have the full story?

that's not display brightness, that's your backlit keyboard
the display brightness is f1 and f2, the reason the see the slash through the circle is you're trying to turn on the kb light when it's not dark
*shakes head*
applecare told you that? you reinstalled the os?
oh my, I can't believe that.

Automatically adjust display brightness via Terminal / Pretty good solution

This hint is for all of you who experience any problem with the adjustment of the display brightness.
*Short version*
After a cold and/or warm start, it sometimes happens that the brightness was changed by the system itself to its dim power saver setting or maximum value and sometimes - what a big surprise - remains as it has been configured.
I had spotted plenty of articles about this phenomenon, but none of them yielded a solution. I then decided to solve this problem by going the pragmatically way and use some kind of software which dims the display to my preferred setting. And the winner is: brightness.
This tiny program works perfect and you will love its benefit by using it in terminal - yes, brightness is a command line utility. On top of this, brightness is able to control different displays, internal and external. The clou: beside using the precompiled binary you can also download the source code here, modify it to make the program fit your needs and then compile it using Xcode.
1. Installation
Download a precompiled version of the command line utility brightness here and extract the binary to your desired path (e.g. /usr/bin).
2. Usage
"brightness -l -v" dumps the current display attributes (-v for verbose mode) while "brightness 0.5" modifies the brightness of the main display to half of its max value and "brightness -m 1 1" let a second display become shiny. Just play little bit around.
3. Automatically launch
Simply create a .plist file and drop it, for example, in ~/Library/LaunchAgents. Or make use of an AppleScript or a Terminal Script to let it launch.
That's it. Comments are welcome.
*Long version*
It seems to be, that the adjustment of the display brightness of an iMac and MacBook/Pro (maybe also other models are affected) drives a life of its own. After a cold and/or warm start, it sometimes happens that the brightness was changed by the system itself to its dim power saver setting or maximum value and sometimes - what a big surprise - remains as it has been configured.
I had spotted plenty of articles about this phenomenon, but only found terms like "Did you already disabled the ambient light sensor", "Did you already reset the PRAM?", "Did you already reset the NVRAM?", "Did you already…BLAH". Far from it, all of these tips have one thing in common: none of them yielded a solution. As a last resort, I thought, it was a good idea to install 10.6 from the scratch just to find out that the above mentioned phenomenon occurs right after a few days of using OS X.
I then decided to solve this problem by going the pragmatically way and use some kind of software which dims the display to my preferred setting. There are a few applications to do this, but always it was necessary to drag a slider or type in a value to dim the display, so none of them allowed an automatic configuration. No, I am not a very sophisticated person, I only prefer to use software which is simply well-thought-out. And the winner is: brightness.
This tiny program works perfect and you will love its benefit by using it in terminal - yes, brightness is a command line utility. On top of this, brightness is able to control different displays, internal and external. The clou: beside using the precompiled binary you can also download the source code here, modify it to make the program fit your needs and then compile it using Xcode.
1. Installation
Download a precompiled version of the command line utility brightness here and extract the binary to your desired path (e.g. /usr/bin).
2. Usage
"brightness -l -v" dumps the current display attributes (-v for verbose mode) while "brightness 0.5" modifies the brightness of the main display to half of its max value and "brightness -m 1 1" let a second display become shiny. Just play little bit around.
3. Automatically launch
Sure, OS X provides different ways to launch a program automatically. If you are an enthusiast, feel free to use the one you prefer and stop reading, because you are already finished. If you are not that familiar to OS X take the next step as an advice.
An easy way to trigger OS X launching a program automatically is to add the desired program to your Login Items. But, in this case, it will not work the easy way, because we have to launch a so called classic command line utility with a given option. It is not like starting Mail or iCal, which appears as typical applications to OS X. You must start brightness via Terminal by typing "brightness 0.5" (without quotes) to modify the main display brightness to half of its max.
We now use a Launch Agent. Just create a .plist file, e.g. com.brightness.plist, with your favorite text editor. For the lazy ones here comes the template (simply copy and paste):
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
<key>Disabled</key>
<false/>
<key>Label</key>
<string>com.brightness</string>
<key>ProgramArguments</key>
<array>
<string>/usr/bin/brightness</string>
<string>.5</string>
</array>
<key>RunAtLoad</key>
<true/>
</dict>
</plist>
Save the file in ~/Library/LaunchAgents, if you want brightness to be executed everytime you log in.
You could also use an AppleScript. Copy and paste this code "do shell script "brightness 0.5"" (without the leading and closing quotes) to a new Script. Then choose Save As and enable the Option to make it Execute only. Now add the Script to your Login Items.
Another option is to use a Terminal Script. Copy and paste this code
#!/bin/bash
/usr/bin/brightness 0.5
exit 0
and save it as, for example, brightness.sh. Make the Script executeable and add it to your Login Items.
That's it. Comments are welcome.

Thanks. Works great. I made a ScriptBundle and a User Agent (launchd) . So if someone sets the display brightness to maximum, it automaticaly corrects it at next login.
The ScriptBundle contains your mentoined command line utility and the following applescript:
do shell script quoted form of (POSIX path of (path to resource "brightness")) & " 0.7"
Be aware of the space in " 0.7" or whatever value you have set.

Tip: Display brightness affects iMac temperature

Not a question, just a useful tip for anyone concerned about the temperature of their iMac G5. The brightness of the LCD display can signnificantly affect temperatures inside the machine. So if you are reading high temperatures in your iMac, or the fans are running at higher speeds than you'd like, try going into System Preferences/Displays and adjusting the screen brightness down to the dimmest you can handle. It will take a while to take effect (as the machine needs to cool) but there will be a noticable difference over time.
This may also reduce eye-fatigue (provided you don't set it too low.
I was told by an Apple Tech that the reason for this is that the LCD is lit by powerful neon bulbs that output a lot of heat directly next to all of the other components in the machine, so dimming the brightness reduces this heat-output somewhat.

I have to say, nice tip! I dimmed my iMac's brightness down to the lowest it would go. In about a minute the CPU temp dropped a good seven degrees Celsius.
Now I'll test it at 50% brightness.

Dimming display

I am having a problem with my G5 iMac.
I allow my display to sleep after 5 minutes and do not have it set to "Automatically reduce the brightness of the display before display sleep."
Unfortunately, the display dims after about 5 minutes of use (5 minutes after I wake the display up).
Right before it dims, it gets brighter twice (even though I operate at maximum brightness), then it dims and I cannot increase the brightness.
The only way to get the screen to come back to full brightness is to let it go to sleep.
I tried a Archive and Install a while back in hopes of fixing this problem, but it persists.
Does anyone know how I can fix this problem?

Yes, read your user manual.
The screen is designed to dim in different lighting conditions. If you don't want it to do that, go to your system preferences and change it.
System Preferences>Displays>Automatically dim display as ambient light changes

PCM-M10 Display Brightness

I got a PCM-M10 recorder, and it's great.
My only complaint is that the display is too dim. As far as I can tell, there is no way to adjust the brightness. I've seen photos of the PCM-M10 on the web, and the display appears MUCH brighter than mine. But the photos could have been maniuplated, of course.
Does anyone else have this problem? I'm thinking I may have a defective device.

I got another one, and the display is exactly the same. Lesson learned: Don't trust the photos that you see online. It's not at all bright. But I'm convinced that this recorder is the best of all that are available. Too bad Sony had to fake the display brightness in their ads.

Dim display - CQ40

Hi everyone.
First, I want to express my disappointment. Argentina (I am not from USA) IS NOT in the list of available countries in the registration process. That's really bad and insulting. The whole planet is there, except we don't.
Having said that, I have a CQ 40 that starts with the classic dim display problem. Only when starts, a few seconds looks ok, the dim. The same thing, when close de lid, and open again.
So replaced the inverter with a new one after try with 2 displays (the one from the notebook and another one, using the inverter with the signal from the notebook) same thing.
So started to see the magnetic lid switch. When pass over a magnet near, the screen come back. After doing that several times the image stay and the display work flawless until shut down the computer. Also, with the rule of "sleeps when lid close" could probe that isn't the lid switch that causes the problem, because when the display goes dim, it ins't go to sleep mode. But when make work the switch with de magnet, goes to sleep like it should do.
The last thing is a backlight issue, a bad lamp or bad wires that works when goes ON several times maybe?
Thak you in advance for the replies.

Please try the troubleshooting steps shown below to resolve the issue:
1. Please Press Fn + F7 or Fn + F10 Keys on the Notebook Keyboard to increase the Brightness
2. Disable ambient light sensor in BIOS if its available
3. Update the latest BIOS, Chipset and Video Drivers
4. If the display works fine on External Desktop Monitor, Reseat Display Connector to Motherboard
[If you are comfortable]
5. Replace the Display Panel
Note: If external monitor has dim display we need to re-install the operating system and if that doesn't resolve the issue we need to replace system board & Display Panel
Hope this helps, for any further queries reply to the post and feel free to join us again
**Click the KUDOS star on left to say Thanks**
Make it easier for other people to find solutions by marking a Reply 'Accept as Solution' if it solves your problem.
Thank You,
K N R K
I work on behalf of HP

Dimming Display Brightness to Zero

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