DimScreen
Simple title that sets up shortcuts for changing display brightness
- Category General
- Program license Free
- Version 1.1
- Size 431.40 kB
- Works under: Windows Vista
- Program available in English
- Program by Skrommel
Dimscreen is a smart little program that dims the brightness of your screen.
How often are you staring at a screen that's 3x brighter than room you’re working in? With the recent scientific revelations about the effects of blue light on physical and mental well-being (bright white lights emitted by electronic devices and screens), it’s more important now than ever to dim our screens.
Dimscreen requires no system installation, no reboots – all you have to do is launch the program and adjust it in your taskbar as needed. It won’t startup with Windows or slow your system down in any way, it’s the ultimate minimalist tool for controlling your screen brightness.
One of the best features of Dimscreen is that you can create your own custom hotkeys to enable and disable the program that aren’t the function keys – laptop users will know just how invaluable this can be.
This program will work with any screen, though if you’re running multiple screens you won’t have access to separate brightness levels for each screen. This can be a bit of a drawback but it also keeps the output of your screens level.
Another minor issue is the fact that you’re not able to bind certain brightness levels to hotkeys – only enable and disable brightness settings. This means you won’t be able to save different presets for different kinds of work and you’ll have to go back and manually set those each time you want to do them. Brightness also can only be set in increments of 10%, so no setting your screens at 25% or 4% brightness for example.
Aside from some minor technical issues, Dimscreen dims screens quite well and can help users on laptops and other devices without function keys better control the brightness settings on their computers.
Pros
- Create Custom Hotkey Shortcuts You can create your own custom shortcuts even if you don't have function keys, making it easy to enable and disable the program to do color sensitive work.
- Runs Quietly in the Background You won’t even notice it’s there, just click on the taskbar icon when you need to run it.
- Works with Any Screen This will work with any screen regardless of connection (VGA, DVI, HDMI) or screen type (OLED, LED, LCD, etc.)
- No Installation or Restart Required Some brightness tools like Fl.ux require you to install and restart to get certain options working, but not Dimscreen.
Cons
- Can’t Hotkey Certain Brightness Settings The hotkeys are an excellent way to get around a lack of function keys on a laptop but you’ll have to open up the setting panel in the app to perform some actions.
- Limited Brightness Options Brightness can only be adjusted in increments of 10%, so you won’t be able to run your screen at 25% or 33% brightness like you can with some programs.