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Ask HN: Monitor with physical dials for brightness/contrast?

by godot on 6/11/22, 6:19 AM with 12 comments

Back in the 90s, we used to have CRT monitors, and they almost always had physical/mechanical dials for brightness/contrast settings. I'm prone to headaches looking at bright screens, so I often need to have different brightness/contrast settings in the day time vs night time. They were really convenient.

Nowadays - laptops are OK in this case because there's usually buttons on the keyboard to quickly adjust brightness.

For desktop PCs, every LCD/LED monitor I've owned has brightness/contrast settings buried in software menus. It makes it very hard to adjust brightness/contrast on a regular basis. I rely on night light settings (bluelight filters) in software to help myself feel better without having to fiddle with the monitor's menu (which is always really cumbersome to use).

Are there LCE/LED monitors with physical dials, or at a minimum dedicated physical buttons for brightness/contrast (and not buried within menus with buttons labeled "1", "2", etc.)?

  • by solardev on 6/11/22, 7:53 AM

    I've seen monitors with physical brightness/contrast buttons, but it's a difficult feature to search for. You have to see them in person or maybe look at their manuals before buying.

    In the meantime, have you tried the DDC/CI protocol (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Display_Data_Channel)? It's a software protocol for controlling real monitor brightness/contrast (as in, it commands the hardware, not just drawing gray overlays).

    Windows: https://github.com/xanderfrangos/twinkle-tray

    Mac: https://lunar.fyi/

    Linux: https://github.com/ddccontrol/ddccontrol

    On my computer, I bound the command line stuff to keyboard shortcuts. But the GUIs these days are probably even easier. I just tried TwinkleTray and it's way faster than using my monitor's hardware buttons and obnoxious OSD interface. And I double-checked that it does indeed change the actual brightness.

    Dunno why operating systems don't just include this out of the box.

  • by alin23 on 6/11/22, 8:39 AM

    I don't know of any new monitor that has physical dials, most of them are going towards less mechanical buttons and more touch controls or a single joystick.

    If you're using a Mac, Lunar (https://lunar.fyi) can adapt the brightness of your monitor automatically so you don't even have to worry about this anymore.

    There's also the possibility of using an USB knob like this one (https://www.amazon.com/DROK-Lossless-Computer-Controller-Adj...) which can be configured to send any key event, and then map those keys to _Brightness Up/Down_ through something like Lunar (on Mac) or TwinkleTray (on Windows) or ddcctl (on Linux).

  • by justsomehnguy on 6/11/22, 11:11 PM

    You can control the color settings through the GPU drivers. nVidia, ATI/AMD, Intel provided the controls for that in their shitty, slow, cumbersome (but still easier accessed than a physical knobs on the monitor) control panels.

    I'm using "AMD Radeon Software" for this successfully enough. A couple of clicks to change the settings.