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I have a Samsung 226BW running in Windows Vista. It was running absolutely fine, but like some sort of masochistic moron I decided to install the drivers for it from the CD. This included something called MagicTune and something called LCDGammaTray (or similar). I almost immediately noticed a problem: when I'm not displaying much that's bright, the overall monitor brightness drops. For example, if I'm looking at a forum with a black background and only a small amount of white text, the whole display goes a little darker most noticeably including the Opera screen around it. If I switch to a page on that forum with lots of white text, it all goes brighter. To try and get rid of this (I couldn't run MagicTune anyway, it always told me I had to reboot) I got the latest version from the Samsung site and installed that. Same issues, couldn't load MagicTune. So I uninstalled MagicTune ... same brightness issue. I uninstalled the monitor driver so I was left with only the default Windows driver ... still messed up. I deleted everything I could find that was related to it ... the same. There are no processes running that I associate with the display. I've been into the nVidia control panel (latest drivers for my NX8600GTS) but I can't see anything that would be causing it there.

I'm stumped. I'm getting really annoyed. I don't think I'm running Aero (it doesn't say I am, it says Windows Basic if I go to Theme), and I don't think it's Opera because it happens on IE.

Please help :/

Edit:
If it helps, I can say it also seems to have disabled my ability to use the menu options for MagicColor, Color Tone, Color Control and Gamma that are (or were) available using the buttons on the monitor itself.

This is the dynamic contrast ratio of the monitor coming into play. if I remember correctly in the lcd menu there should be an option for turning it off, although I don't actually own this monitor, I just swear I read that somewhere.

Hope it helps.

Hdfisise wrote:

This is the dynamic contrast ratio of the monitor coming into play. if I remember correctly in the lcd menu there should be an option for turning it off, although I don't actually own this monitor, I just swear I read that somewhere.

Hope it helps.

I love you. It turns out that was exactly it, I had somehow set a Custom Contrast level and not realised. Internet babies for you.

No problem, my brother's Samsung TV does it all the time and I just find it the most annoying thing ever when trying to watch a program.

Oh my gosh oh my gosh.

I almost never contribute any thing to these fantastic tech forums - because i find almost every problem has already been solved. Except for this one - which i've been searching for for way too long now. You guys are the best.

There's just one issue which made my life even more hellish. The latest nvidia drivers (178.24) - disable all the monitor controls on my samsung monitor. It also *TURNED ON THE DYNAMIC CONTRAST CONTROL*. I thought for the longest time it was some kind of "power saving" mode that was getting triggered.

Anyway, i rolled back my drivers and found that i could access my monitor controls again, and disable that option. I have to throw in the obligatory WTF NVIDIA!!!! at this point. And i'm going to include all the search terms i spent the last 3 hours trying in the hopes it will help someone else:

monitor dims when screen goes dark
smartdimmer
vista
forceware

Hqjrt wrote:

I love you. It turns out that was exactly it, I had somehow set a Custom Contrast level and not realised. Internet babies for you.

A custom contrast shouldn't be a problem, it's the contrast you set manually in the menus. Just make sure the contrast profile isn't set to 'Dynamic Contrast' (the second-from-left button)..

Bought Samsung T220 a couple of weeks back, replacement of View sonic 22" VX2235wm-5 both of them had the same issue.
Thanks for the tip.