[cocoa_coder]

Everyone says how great the pb 17" backlight keyboard is but to be honest, mine never comes on. It has to be extremely dark and even when it is, the monitor's light is so bright that it makes the sensor for the keyboard think there is more ambient light in the room therefore reducing the amount of light to very little.
does anyone get a strong light on the kb in the dark?

[nobitacu]

Originally posted by cocoa_coder:
Everyone says how great the pb 17" backlight keyboard is but to be honest, mine never comes on. It has to be extremely dark and even when it is, the monitor's light is so bright that it makes the sensor for the keyboard think there is more ambient light in the room therefore reducing the amount of light to very little.
does anyone get a strong light on the kb in the dark?

I do. Have you tried hitting F10 when it's on? it will turn the light to a brighter degree. Other wise, it's because you have your screen brightness at a very bright level, which than makes your keyboard lights look less bright, or even have it auto dim it.

Ming

[djjava]

make sure you have the option selected in your preferences

[cszar2001]

Mine works fine. The illumination only makes sense if you look at the keyboard from the right angle.

With the screen at full brightness you have to look down on your keyboard to be able to see anything; lower brightness means you can look at the keys from a 45 degree angle and still see them.

The PB17 is perfect with this piece of furniture: Stokke Gravity

Lie back-surf the web with iTunes blasting away!

[nobitacu]

Originally posted by cszar2001:
Mine works fine. The illumination only makes sense if you look at the keyboard from the right angle.

With the screen at full brightness you have to look down on your keyboard to be able to see anything; lower brightness means you can look at the keys from a 45 degree angle and still see them.

The PB17 is perfect with this piece of furniture: Stokke Gravity

Lie back-surf the web with iTunes blasting away!

hahaha! that's one freaking looking chair! "Apple, we're ready for take off!"

Ming

[moonman192]

I have messed around with the keyboard lighting and found that it is only beneficial to me if you dim your screen in low light situations. If the screen is on full brightness in a dark room the illuminated characters on the keyboard seem to be washed out by the screens glow. With the keyboard lights off the characters on the keyboard seem to have a better contrast for better visibility. I have noticed the best results with the keyboard when the screen is set to automatically adjust its brightness.

[DVD Plaza]

Personally I hate the fact that the keyboard's backlight adjusts itself - 99% of the time, at least for me, it always turned on far too dim. In fact usually it lit up about the same colour as the keys themselves, which made reading the keyboard VERY difficult. Having to manually bump the brightness up all the time was really cheesing me off, since it would eventually turn itself back down again.

After a lot of stuffing around I found the setting that controls the minimum and maximum brightness levels - so by bumping the minimum up to FULL brightness the backlight is always at full brightness (whenever it is on).

To do this punch the following into the terminal:

defaults write com.apple.bezelservices kHWMin 1

[danbrew]

I suppose everyone is different - I love th illuminated keyboard. Yes, you do have to putz around with the settings to make them work for you - but I find that F1-F2 and F9-F10 work just fine for me.

The keyboard is freaken' awesome.