Center Display Panel Brightness Problem

[bobinyelm]

2003 RX300 43,000mi since new

The center display panel has recently started acting dim under certain circumstances.

Often when it's cold (35deg-45deg) the center display on our 2003 RX300 is dim, even when full brightness (7 Bars) is selected. It's too dim to be seen in full sunlight (acts maybe like it's set to "3 or 4 Bars" brightness.

Other times, even when warm, when we re-start the car during the day, the display has turned itself down by one or two bars, but we can manually select brighter, and the display will increase in brightness.

This is the first incidence of this since the car was new-

Anyone experience a similar situation, and what fixed it?

I've done a search, and found a couple of threads, but only one mentioning temperature, and that owner didn't indicate he found a fix.

Thanks-

[1990LS400]

35-45 degrees is cold? Poor baby!

Are there clock and daylight savings time settings in your navigation like there are in newer Toyota/Lexus navigation systems? Maybe your nav system thinks it is night and dims the display during the day.

Are your headlights on when the nav display dims? I think having headlights on may also put the nav brightness display into night mode.

I'm doing a bit of guessing here but I've had the nav screens in our cars go dim at inappropriate times and corrected the problems by fiddling with the settings.

[bobinyelm]

No navigation function or provision for daylight saving is present on the vehicle.

The brightness function is a manual rocker-switch, and is not connected to the instrument panel dimmer control.

The display does not dim w/ the headlights are on (though it seems logical that it would).

To be honest, I can't say if in the past it did, though IF it did, it only dimmed very slightly.

Were it only that simple. :)

And 35-45 degrees passes for cold in Arizona.

I lived in Alaska for a decade, spending plenty of time above the Arctic Circle, and yes, the standards there are different.

[eugene.s]

Try setting the correct time/time zone in the car settings -- unless this is some failure, it should really be about your car dimming the panel for the night mode

[bobinyelm]

The time is correct, and until a couple of weeks ago, not problems (and no settings were changed). We've

had the car 5 years and never even had to touch the screen settings before.

Our display is the simple bare-bones one. No navigation, or fancy stuff to program. It just shows the time

(which we must manually set), OAT, HVAC settings, the Radio settings, and MPG. No provision for anything

else I am aware of.

It is SOME kind of malfunction, and we're trying to see if it's anything we can diagnose/affect before dropping

big bucks as dealerships are typically programmed to extract.

If ours is a typical failure mode, we figured (hoped) someone may have experienced it before and have an idea.