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iMac 24" Brightness

N

nikuskwas

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Sep 26, 2007
24
0
Hello,

This is my second post concerning my new iMac24" two days old...

This time my problem is with the screen's brightness....ITS TOO BRIGHT! I have it almost all of the time to its minimums and I feel I'm going blind!!!

Is there a way to control this? An application like smcFanControl but for brightness? Please help!

PS: I spend 15 hours per day on my iMac and this really worries me!

Thanks,

Nick
 
nikuskwas said:
Hello,

This is my second post concerning my new iMac24" two days old...

This time my problem is with the screen's brightness....ITS TOO BRIGHT! I have it almost all of the time to its minimums and I feel I'm going blind!!!

Is there a way to control this? An application like smcFanControl but for brightness? Please help!

PS: I spend 15 hours per day on my iMac and this really worries me!

Thanks,

Nick
Click to expand...


I also have an iMac 24". DId you go into your preferences an calibrate your monitor? This will help.

Apple sends out the iMac with too much brightness. I did not like the over brightness at first. I calibrated the monitor and then I turned down the brightness a bite with the keyboard.

All is good.
 
Hello,

I tried calibrating but didn't help much. But, when I just bought my mac, I changed the Display Profile to Adobe RGB 1998 since it had better Whites than iMac's defaults (which are yellow). Still, this doesn't help me control brightness.

Nick
 
Yeah, it's hardcore. I tried to turn mine down a bit this evening and realised I had it on the lowest brightness anyway. It looks amazing, don't get me wrong, but is crazy bright, if you're relaxing of an evening in a semi-lit room.
 
Lau said:
Yeah, it's hardcore. I tried to turn mine down a bit this evening and realised I had it on the lowest brightness anyway. It looks amazing, don't get me wrong, but is crazy bright, if you're relaxing of an evening in a semi-lit room.
Click to expand...

Well...yeah...its nice...if you are not 15 hours looking at it... :)

It's night in this moment, and my room has a low ilumination, which makes the imac screen the brightest thing in the room! I will go blind by the end of the week!!!
 
nikuskwas said:
Is there a way to control this?
Click to expand...

Here's a popular app that dims the display with software. It also has
the unfortunate (but unavoidable) side-effect of reducing the display's
dynamic range and clobbering contrast -- there are some things that
software can't fix. (BTW, jerking the calibration around to decrease
brightness has the same shortcoming.)

http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/23370/shades

The real problem isn't the brightness, it's the brain-dead lack of
adjustment range on the display backlights. From max to min is
only about a 2x brightness difference (1 f-stop).

...no escapin' it fanbois -- that's BAD design,

LK
 
nikuskwas said:
Well...yeah...its nice...if you are not 15 hours looking at it... :)

It's night in this moment, and my room has a low ilumination, which makes the imac screen the brightest thing in the room! I will go blind by the end of the week!!!
Click to expand...

I've been on this since 10am yesterday and it's now 1.30am, and have eaten all meals at it (oops!) so I know where you're coming from. My point was that it is lovely and bright (looked at the iBook this afternoon and it looked awful), but it is very bright. When I've just been blathering to folk on the net (and am in a darkish room doing so), you're right, it would be nice to turn it down a bit.
 
calibrate it or choose a different color profile like (adobe rgb)

the default 'imac' profile was quite awful in my experience
 
I have a white 24" imac - and I too feel your brightness pains. It is down-right overpowering. I was hoping with time, my CFL would dim down enough to make it comfortable - but a year later - and no dice yet.

Go through the "advanced" adjustments and crank that mofo down as much as possible. (which you have)

One thing here - I differ a bit on the "software can only do so much" comment.

When in Bootcamp - via Nvidia drivers - it is MUCH better than OSX. (even with every adjustment pegged in OSX) So there is some "hard limit" within OSX for the backlight.

There are physical limits though, at least for the white 24" - the contrast ratio will be a limiting factor. (a friends Dell 24" with a 1000:1 contrast ratio looks orders of magnitude better than my imac)
 
I think there should be a good software control for brightness out there. Thinking about it, keeping the brightness low does not only help my eyes but the lifetime of the display...(and saves electricity). I was hoping for a Hardware Firmware from apple fixing this, but there is none. I opened the Universal Access and selected the White on Black option and even this brought me some relaxing moments for my eyes.

Meanwhile I will check this "shades" applicacion and will look for some other software. There must be a solution out there!

Nick

---I just installed this Shades application! What a relief! It works like sunglasses (actually has a color control filter). It's enough for night working. During day I would turn it off. The only bad thing is that it makes a tiny color-gradient on the lower portion of my screen MORE visible (I was trying to ignore it) Well...I'll have to live with it.
 
nikuskwas said:
Thinking about it, keeping the brightness low does not only help
my eyes but the lifetime of the display...(and saves electricity).
Click to expand...
Happy to hear Shades.app is helping your eyes -- but it's NOT prolonging the
lifetime of the display, and it's NOT saving any electricity.

Shades has no control over backlight brightness -- it just overlays the display
with a solid black mask and then varies the mask's opacity. The lamps behind
the LCD panel are still running at the same brightness; Shades is just "tinting"
your side of the window.

You can easily prove this to yourself with DigitalColorMeter.app -- watch what
happens to a "pure white" background as you adjust the Shades slider.

Reducing the brightness by 'calibration' does the same thing. When "white" is
turned to gray, dynamic range and contrast are hosed. No way 'round it.

...software can only do so much,

LK
 
Brightness control works well but not perfect. It's not perfect because when your screensaver comes on it knocks the Brightness Control out of settings and depending on what app you use it may have the same weird effect but otherwise it's really nice, it has a slider control which brings the brightness all the way down to a black screen. One side effect besides the above is it will change the color profile while it's on.http://www.splasm.com/products/productbrightness.html
 
nikuskwas said:
Hello,

I tried calibrating but didn't help much. But, when I just bought my mac, I changed the Display Profile to Adobe RGB 1998 since it had better Whites than iMac's defaults (which are yellow). Still, this doesn't help me control brightness.

Nick
Click to expand...




You should do your research about colour management, because you should not be doing this.

The Adobe colour space is a theoretical colour space, it is not a monitor profile.

Most displays are closest to sRGB, so the only thing you should be doing with the in built colour profiles is selecting the default monitor profile and basing a calibration on that.

If you are concerned about what should be correct on your monitor, invest in a monitor profiling hardware and software solution.

If you are using a monitor that is not calibrated correctly, if you continue to use Adobe RGB because you think it looks right to you, your images will not be displayed as the original producer intended. Conversly any photographs you produce will not be accurate when they are printed or sent to another person who does have their display correctly calibrated.

There is such a thing as a correctly calibrated display, people should get out of the habit of setting the display to their perceived preference if the end result is a distortion of the correct settings.

/rant off :)
 
one solution

have you thought of sunglasses?
:)

on a more serious note, can you increase the distance between you and the imac? ergonomics suggest that it is important to have the screen at a fair distance, as this makes it easier for the eyes to focus and reduce strain over the long term. this may also help make the brightness more acceptable.

of course, it shouldn't be so far away as to require binoculars.
 
panda said:
have you thought of sunglasses?
:)

on a more serious note, can you increase the distance between you and the imac? ergonomics suggest that it is important to have the screen at a fair distance, as this makes it easier for the eyes to focus and reduce strain over the long term. this may also help make the brightness more acceptable.

of course, it shouldn't be so far away as to require binoculars.
Click to expand...

Agreed.

Similarly, your environment should be lit properly. You shouldn't work in pitch dark room with a bright display as this will cause eye strain as well.
 
RemarkabLee said:
You should do your research about colour management, because you should not be doing this.
/rant off :)
Click to expand...

Hello RemarkabLee!

I do understand about color calibration and the importance on the printing/graphic design industry. Lucky me, I'm not interested in getting the correct colors out of my iMac. What I do is more into 3D modeling and animation. For me, it is more important to get a good - clean white (as long as I'm pleased with it) instead of the yellowish iMac's default.

As for what Panda said, I keep my iMac as far as my desk allows me to (that is about 50 cms away from my eyes).

My room at night is never pitch black. I prefer having my desk lap on (with a light bulb of 40W). But since my imac came, I also turn on my room light, which apparently is not enough to create a "neutral" lightning environment. I guess what I have to do is get a more powerful lightbulb to neutralize the imacs brightness.

Nick
 
I just tried shades 1.2b1 on Leopard.
Well, this software is amazing: it is continuously taking 4% of CPU and 24 MB of RAM (aargh) just to simulate screen dimming.
Come on, stop promoting windowzian quality softwares!

We need something that just hooks up in the built-in display settings to let the brightness go lower, not yet another (crap) "utility" that tries to solve one tiny annoyance.
 
trevor70 said:
Come on, stop promoting windowzian quality softwares!
Click to expand...
Valid criticism, sorry 'bout that. I hadn't noticed the CPU load; I was
probably still half snow-blind from staring at the display.

I only used Shades very briefly during my one month 'test drive' of
the 24" ALU. Don't need it anymore since upgrading to a white 20";
the display's less bright to begin with, and has a much wider range
of adjustment on the backlight.

LK
 
Everyone, must check out DarkAdapted X.

very good brightness adjuster.

I know this is mostly for astronomy folks, and others using mac outside at night who want to maintain night adapted vision. But, again, it works very well.

in it's main window I check both "gang sliders" and "maintain relative values"
 
Leon Kowalski said:
The real problem isn't the brightness, it's the brain-dead lack of
adjustment range on the display backlights. From max to min is
only about a 2x brightness difference (1 f-stop).
Click to expand...


Leon,

My friends and I read many, many posts on the screen issue over the weekend. To put it mildly, you caught a lot of flak for stating your well-researched perspective.

I just wanted to thank you for sharing your research and knowledge. I've learned a great deal and my friends made their buying decisions based largely on your input (other posters' contributions were also appreciated).

One friend decided on a 24" white iMac off Craigslist, and the other bought a new 24" iMac. They both had their reasons and they're both very happy with their purchases.

I think it's easy to take for granted the time and energy people so generously give to sites like this. Thank you very much.
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/3B48b Safari/419.3)

it's not enough to use the keyboard to turn it down to one notch of brightness?
 
JayLenochiniMac said:
When I first got my Dell flat panel several years ago, it was so bright it hurt my eyes. I think I got used to it as I have both my iMacs at max brightness.
Click to expand...

I run my iMac at max brightness as well and don't find it to be uncomfortably bright. Setting it to minimum brightness makes it look unnaturally dark to me.

I have no problems with my vision (20/20) and don't wear glasses.
 
What trevor70 said is sadly true... Shades does take about 4% of CPU which is very annoying. This also happens with smcFanControl. Both of these applications are a MUST for me right now since, without them, my life gets complicated. This particular new iMac is badly ventilated and too bright. Two things that Apple could easily fix with a new Firmware. Will it come some day???
 
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