I run 3 monitors in addition to my laptop display at work – two of the monitors are using DisplayLink adapters. I've always thought that all my displays were too bright (and possibly give me headaches?) – even after I reduced their brightness as far as possible using the monitor menus and the nvidia software control panel.
Recently I installed f.lux – I love it's "halogen" color profile which has improved my life considerably. The problem is that f.lux has no effect on/will not adjust the color & brightness of my two DisplayLink monitors. F.lux has a faq (#4 under troubleshooting) that addresses this – saying DisplayLink has no support for color calibration so f.lux only works with monitors "directly connected to your computer".
Does anyone know of a work around? Specifically a way to use windows color management/profiles (or some other software) to adjust the brightness/color tone of DisplayLink monitors? Thanks in advance!
Best Answer
author of f.lux here.
DisplayLink does pass through DDC/CI commands to displays. We've had an implementation to do this for a few years, but we've been cautious to support this for a few reasons:
Most displays store color settings using an EEPROM, and these typically have a finite number of write cycles. We could get away with changing things a couple times a day, but gradual fading like we do would wear out this hardware quite quickly.
We've observed some variation in how displays implement gain controls, so the colors don't always look like we expect. Similarly, some displays flash, etc.
DisplayPort-connected monitors (read again, it sounds like DisplayLink) are often omitting these color controls entirely.
The communication channels available do not usually tell us if things worked or not, so it's somewhat a crapshoot overall.
All this said, we will probably add some simple controls to push color commands to DDC/CI in a future version, but it might not be so automatic.