Thursday, December 23, 2010

The Backlight Keeps Flickering!

I discovered one of the features of the Cr-48 that kind of surprised me this evening.  It's probably documented somewhere, but I discovered it through experimentation.  The webcam acts as an ambient light sensor, so it dims the backlight on the LCD as the ambient light on the webcam dims.  This is a good idea, I think.  I've often been nearly blinded using a laptop in a mostly dark room that had the backlight set for use outside; however, I didn't expect the automatic adjustment.  I have a ceiling light that is behind me in the room where I've been using the Cr-48. After sunset, I turned the room light on and started to notice that the backlight kept getting brighter and dimmer as I was typing.  It was starting to drive me crazy!  Then I noticed that the backlight dimmed when my shadow covered the webcam and got brighter if I moved back so that my shadow wasn't cast on the webcam.  I happened to be sitting in a position where just a little rocking back and forth as I typed was moving my shadow on and off of the camera.  Good thing to know, because I was about to submit a bug report about the maddening flickering of the backlight!  I'd imagine there may be a setting to disable the automatic adjustment of the backlight, but it's not readily apparent.  I'll have to look into this some more.

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