Screen Brightness too High: Any Hope for a Workaround?

I received my AAO about two weeks ago and love the thing to pieces. The only gripe I have is that the lowest setting for the screen brightness is still too high. I've upgraded to BIOS version 3307, which I believe gave me a slightly lower setting, but it's still not low enough for comfortable nighttime viewing.

Is there any possibility of someone writing a program that could bypass the BIOS brightness settings table and allow us to get lower brightness levels? That would be truly awesome.

 

I had the same problem. Easily solved if you use Firefox. You can install Greasemonkey (no real technical knowledge necessary, just install it as any other addon). Then go to userscripts.org and search for the FFFFFF to EBEBEB script. Click install and reload your page. It goes a long way in helping ones eyes and is quite subtle.

Good Luck!

 

Thanks for the reply. Good suggestion for web browsing. My main use in low-light conditions is for reading e-books using the Mobipocket reader. So I'm really looking for a way to lower the overall screen brightness. This would also help save battery life.

 

Oh, I see.

 

not unless they smarten up and remove the bios detection for the type of panel. They assume that the panel you have has the "flicker" issue so you don't get the lower brightness levels, i imagine. 3314 was the last bios for me that had nice low brightness levels but it had the black bios death issue.

 

Just lower the brightness under the color correction settings in the graphic card properties. Right click on desktop, graphic properties, brightness.

 

That does help make things less hard on the eyes. Thanks much. I'm assuming that it won't do anything to lower battery usage, though?

 

Glad to help as I was suffering the same burned out eyes syndrome. I would think it would help battery life as it is less brightness from the bulb. Did you notice any difference in battery life when you tried this yet?

 

I have had 3 aspire ones. The first one had the flicker panel, and it did actually flicker, but that didn't bother me as much as having to run with the brightness up after they locked out the lower settings in the BIOS. The machine was unusable in my workplace. I turned the brightness down a notch (very course settings) in the driver. That messes up photo viewing but did help. I ended up finding a neutral colored clear plastic report cover and cutting out a piece that covered the screen and using a small piece of double sided tape to secure it and the corners. I had to use two thicknesses, but at least I could use the machine again. The pain was having to take it off for use outdoors. My newest one lets me set the lower brightness settings with the 3307 BIOS, but it is still a bit bright at my lowly lit workplace.

I used a camera to measure the brighness between the lowest and highest settings and it is now a factor of about 3 (lock ISO and aperture, defocus and get close, set aperture priority mode (not all cameras can do this) and read the actual shutter speed out of the EXIF on the photo (on screen values are rounded on some cameras)).

 

Note that camera's are meant to try for "neutral gray", so your test may not be accurate. Brighter white sources need compensation for the camera meter to read properly and set proper shutter speed (given you locked down the other settings). I hope you did not use a white screen to test with.

Lowering the brightness using the Intel graphics properties isn't the same as having the lower brightness values from the hotkeys. At least, this is what I have noticed.

 

I haven't had a chance to try this yet. I did do some online searching on the subject, and it doesn't sound like lowering the brightness via the driver will save power, since the backlight is still drawing power at the same level. Oh well. At least it's a way to keep one's eyes from getting a sunburn... =)

 

If you have XP you can easily optimize the black level.

*right click on desktop and select Graphic Properties
- Click Color Correction
-Adj. brightness until happy [personally I went from 0 to -10 to give it a nice plasma like black level, LED LCD screens rock.