Dell XPS 13 9370: screen brightness changes based on window contents

backlightbrightnessdell-xpslaptop

On my new Dell XPS 13 9370, it seems that the display backlight brightness is adjusted based on the brightness of whatever's on the screen.

For example, say I have Sublime Text open with a dark theme, and I click on the file menu. The menu dropdown has a light background, and this is enough to darken the entire screen. Moving the selection over to the "Selection" menu causes the screen to lighten back up again, because this menu is apparently small enough for it not to count.

You can see the effect here, as I switch between a larger and smaller menu:

I find this feature unpleasantly jarring as I navigate through menus and similar. Is it possible to turn it off?

In case it is relevant, my system specs are as follows:

Dell XPS 13 (9370)
Debian Linux (sid)
Cinnamon DE

Best Answer

According to Dell_Guy on the Dell.com community forums:

You can fix this by disabling Dynamic Brightness Control under the BIOS settings.

Original Quote from Link:

You can go into BIOS settings (hit F2 as you are restarting your computer) - and DISABLE Dynamic Brightness Control in the display options. I don't know if you need to update the laptop to the LATEST bios to have this option (I did the update).

Related Solutions

LCD – How to Disable Auto Brightening on LCD

I'm not seeing this effect myself (white/black Paint windows), and you've probably tried this already, but how about the Automatic Display Brightness setting in the Intel HD Graphics Properties (Advanced mode)?

^{Click for full size}

Especially if it's in a dark room, it sounds like what a smartphone's 'light sensor' would do: when it's darker, turn down the brightness. When it's lighter, turn up the brightness. In a dark room, the increased brightness from a white screen might cause the sensor to see the whole room became brighter, a kind of feedback loop. And when the screen is black, the whole room becomes darker, causing the screen brightness to be lowered.

Brightness control in FreeBSD 10.3 RELEASE on Dell XPS L702X

I wasn't able to use xbacklight(1) and activate the brightness control keys but I've found a couple of other ways to change the brightness:

xrandr(1)

Thanks to How to change LCD intensivity/brightness I was able to change the brightness of the external monitor using xrandr. The command looks like this:
```
xrandr --output HDMI-0 --brightness 0.9
```
The default value seems to be 1.
redshift(1)

Redshift is a software allowing you to change the temperature of your screen. It has -b, -t and -g options which might come handy (see man redshift for more details).

One way or another, I would still like to know if it is possible to use xbacklight on this machine.

It looks like the problem with colors might be caused by the fact that I connect the monitor over a VGA-HDMI adapter. HDMI seem to mess up the colors of a connected monitor this way.

I've found a solution to this problem: Yellow and gray blend with white on a remote monitor connected with a HDMI-VGA adapter

Best Answer

Related Solutions

LCD – How to Disable Auto Brightening on LCD

Brightness control in FreeBSD 10.3 RELEASE on Dell XPS L702X

xrandr(1)

redshift(1)

Related Question

`xrandr(1)`

`redshift(1)`