MBP: is the light sensor supposed to do this?

[bagelche]

I recently purchased a refurb 2.2 Santa Rosa MBP. The light sensor is driving me nuts and I need to know if a) this is normal and b) what can I do about it.

When I use the computer in a dark or fairly dim room the light sensor kicks in, brightens my keyboard and dims my screen. Fine and thank you. But what I've noticed is that when I'm looking at a program or webpage that is mostly bright and white the screen brightens and when I switch to a program or webpage with a dark background, say dark text on grey, the screen dims.

This is totally counterintuitive to me and actually makes reading the screen more difficult. When the page is bright I want the screen to dim and when the screen is dark I want it to brighten. Not the other way around. When the dark pages dim it's actually hard to read and I have to turn up the backlight and when I switch to google or such I have to turn down the brightness.

Any ideas?

 

[zakatov]

well yeah, the light sensors are in both grills and if the angle of the display is low, the backlight hits the sensors and brightening the screen, so a white webpage will produce more light than a dark one. Try getting a light background (not necessarily white, but not black either) and place the safari window in the middle of the screen, so the wallpaper peeks thru on both sides of the safari window right above the light sensors. That's how I have mine set up and the light sensors don't act up the way yours do.

 

[rendezvouscp]

The problem is that the ambient light sensor is picking up the light from the bright screen; thinking that the room is lit, the screens gets brighter (which in turn makes the ambient light sensor think the room is getting brighter, making it a vicious cycle until your screen is fully lit). Of course, the reverse also applies.

I don't think that there's any particular way to fix this on our end (except for changes like zakatov's described); the only way Apple could fix it is move the light sensors or make it intelligent enough to detect the above problem.
-Chasen

 

[Crash-n-Burn]

This seems to be a pretty common.

You always have the option of turning off the screen dimming. I just adjust it manually, takes a few seconds to do.

 

[tibi08]

This seems to be a pretty common.

You always have the option of turning off the screen dimming. I just adjust it manually, takes a few seconds to do.

Same here

 

[bagelche]

Thanks, zakatov and rendezvouscp; those descriptions make sense. I don't know that I want to give up such a significant portion of my screen real estate for this. I'll experiment a bit, but may end up doing as Crash-n-Burn and tibi08 do, though it's a shame to lose this feature. Not that it's any different from my previous laptop where I did it manually, but aren't Macs supposed to just work?