After returning a new 24 inch iMac two times and getting the replacements I figured out that the problem is not related to the particular machine, but rather to all of them. I read tons of forums and the issue is so widespread that it leaves no doubt it’s a design fault. A design fault that Apple is leading us to believe they are not aware of, despite hundreds and thousands of calls to their customer support asking for help.
The problem is essentially this, the display is brighter on the left than it is on the right. Much brighter. Below is an illustration of how the brightness is distributed across the screen.
There are three areas of interest here:
1 – The display gets darker closer to the left edge of the screen
2 – The display brightness is constant
3 – The display gets darker towards the right side of the screen
Apple tries to compensate for this with ridiculously high level of brightness, which to be honest masks the problem rather well. The screen is simply so bright by default that any normal human being either needs to have sunglasses while using the iMac or turn the screen brightness down. The problem is, you can turn the brightness down only so far. And that is very little. Even the lowest setting is still way way too bright for most of us.
Here is the drill – the lower the brightness, the lower the panel temperature. The lower the temperature, the darker the edges of screen, hence the gradient. I am sure Apple is aware of this and this is exactly the reason why they keep the thing so bright.
I tested a few free utilities that will let you darken the screen further, and the one that best suits my needs is (or are) Shades. Shades actually doesn’t darken the screen by reducing the brightness, but rather applies a transparent overlay of specific colour. The default colour is black but you can change it to any other colour in the preferences window (not that I could imagine someone using a pink overlay).
The slider, that you can have either in the menu bar or on the desktop, doesn’t really change the brightness but the transparency of the overlay, which in turn makes your screen to appear darker.
What I did was to reduce iMac brightness to the minimum, then apply Shades to darken it a bit further. This made my display reasonably dark, but also produced even heavier gradient.
My wife, having heard me talking loudly to myself about the panel temperature and being frustrated with the gradient, came up with a brilliant idea… and not so brilliant solution. She laughed and said “If you need the temperature, why don’t you put the blow heater next to the screen, on the right end”.
This actually made me thinking and, of course ,brought up the answer to the problem. Turn up the iMac’s brightness control all the way up to generate enough temperature, then darken up the display with the Shades overlay.
The display brightness is now flat across the screen. When I wake up the computer in the morning there is a little of gradient along the right edge, about 2 inches, but within a few minutes this is gone.
One thing that may work against this is the screen calibration. I have noticed that some custom calibrations I have made have resulted in an unusual pink-ish tint towards the right edge, but Adobe RGB and sRGB work perfectly fine.
Are you talking about the new iMacs (released a couple of weeks ago)? This is not the first hardware problem you have with Apple products (especifically the iMac, right?), and you’re getting me really worried about quality from Apple lately.
I figure those of us who got the 3 year warranty will be getting new 24in iMacs in about 2 years. These Macs get really hot and in the small iMac casing heat will eventually kill the HD, CPU, and board capacitors. Basically I feel this is going to coat A$$ple some $$$$ in the near future because these units will be replaced. I use my iMac a lot and I hope it dies in about 2 years so I will get a new one!
Normally I don’t feel this way about a company but A$$ple is screwing it’s customers in so many ways today.
I have a 24″ iMac from oct 07 which is bleeding a little and creating dark areas in 3 areas near centre of screen. I have applecare..Should I live with it for now or get it replaced – ie will I set myself up for more probs ?
Up to you. If it’s not too bad I would wait as log as possible simple because you might end up with a better quality screen. I figure Apple will be forced to pay $$$$ and hopefully replace these crappy monitors.
Hi
I’m an amateur of photography and computer graphics and when I bought first iMac in December 2007 I couldn’t stand it so gave it back to reseler and they gave another one with the same problem ofcourse. I already had a background of that problems from all kind of forums and that they’re people on all over the world with the same issue.
I said OK let’s try the third one in the shop and what? The same problem.
Now I uderstand why the gradient was deeper and deeper along with time of iMac being turned on, cause the temperature of the panel was increasing.
In March 2008 I’ve called apple care and after serious of conversations they have admited that: “such a problem existed but it has been adressed” and that “if I’ll order from them directly I’ll have an iMac from the newest batch without issues” So I gave it a go and I’ve played in this apple lottery ones again. First one was bad as hell. The second one was so bright that I couldn’t use it but the gradient was almost invisible. Now I understand this cover up from apple. I gave it back. They send the third one and ofcourse you know what was the outcome. Now I’m still using my PC. Looks like apple doesn’t want any “switchers” anymore. They have enough money from ipod’s and iphones that imac’s are just 15% of their profit so they just don’t care.
But the most anoying thing is that they niether fix the problem or admit it and give resolution time.
Oh and there is one more thing. 2 of my friends bought new silver 24″ iMac just when they have been released ( with Tiger ) and they screen is much diferent like it would come from diferent manufacturer and gradient.
And about software fix using “Shades” or other app. I’m afraid this fix comes with another problem which is “depth of colors”. With software shading of all colors you decreasing numbers of all colors that can be displayed. So one way or the other we loose something. Spending that amount of money for and iMac we geting great operating system, nice hardware all boxed in marvelous brushed aluminium box and crappy screen comes with along. Some things never change and computers are so strong as their weakest part. So I’ve been forced to stay with my Sony VAIO.
Sorry mistake.
Oh and there is one more thing. 2 of my friends bought new silver 24″ iMac just when they have been released ( with Tiger ) and they screen is much diferent like it would come from diferent manufacturer and _no_ gradient.
I have the most recent 24″ iMac which I purchased on 7/16 of this year. After reading through this post and comments, I proceeded to test my screen against various colors of background to look for any evidence of irregular patterns between illumination and darkness. Sure enough; the screen still follows the 1-2-3 pattern as provided on the illustration above. As an individual who works with colors, graphics, photos, and such all the time; I DO NOT like how the screen doesn’t evenly provide an accurate display of color and brightness. I keep my brightness settings at the minimum setting, and it’s still too bright for my taste. It burdens me that Apple has taken the route they’ve so chosen to “fix” this problem. It seems that customer service and quality of product is continually declining the larger a company gets- Apple now showing examples of this.
I have now considered returning my iMac for not just a replacement, but perhaps moving to a Mac Pro with an external 23″ Monitor. Has anyone heard of similar problems with the Apple display line of external monitors? Furthermore, has there been any known problems with the new Mac Pro 8-cores?
Thanks – A fellow Macintosh advocate & enthusiast.
i have both a 24″ iMac and a 23″ ACD; the 23″ ACD is far superior to the iMac screen. I wanted to buy a Mac Pro, but the combined costs were too high, but if i had the money, I would absolutely opt for the 23″ ACD instead of the iMac
I agree with everything I have read here but never noticed the 1,2,3 brightness degradation since I was likely already too blinded by the brightness. I found that I had to put the screen brigtness to one step up from minimum in order to have the display come back to that setting with a restart or shutdown. Apparently the machine does not store a zero setting but does recall any other higher brightness setting. I did reduce the blinding effect in the display settings by going to the “display profile” and changing it to a D50 profile which is far less blinding. I have been able to adjust to the brightness with the D50 profile. I’ve had this machine one year and have had no significiant issues but did have a couple kernel panics which always make my hair stand up. I fortunately always recovered from them without any noted impact. I also asked Apple associates at the local Apple Store during “One to One” sessions about this issue and they acted as if they never heard of it. The Mac’s in the store did have more brightness range and could run their displays down to black which made me jealous. There are apparently a certain run of Macs which have this blinding brightness problem.
Thank you so much for posting this comment about Shades. I am trying it now-black works best. I have terrible dry eye problems and I am a graphic artist. Grant it this is an older post but I was happy to find it! My new imac was driving me mad for the past year and a half-not because of gradients or brighter on one side (which must have been resolved as I see here) but because it was too bright. Cheers.