Display issue - washed out colors

[omegatron]

I'm experiencing a very strange problem with the display on my Thinkpad T410. I'm not sure even how to describe it. Red, Green, and Blue still exist, as do black and white, but the brightness levels in between go all wonky. I've tried taking pictures of some color wheels to demonstrate. Most of the time, the display works as I would expect. Sometimes, however (mostly after waking form sleep?) the gray borders around things seem too bright, and the colors seem washed out. When this happens, it seems to persist. If I change the screen brightness with Fn+Home/End, the pattern of brightness will occasionally change to something even worse, showing lots of color banding, but then will switch back to the less severe but still wrong pattern. If I reboot, it goes away.

Does this seem like a driver issue or a video card issue?

These are pictures of http://www.colorjack.com/software/media/circle.png

Normal:


Weird (washed out):


Really weird (banding):


A picture of colorpicker.com


Here's a video of adjusting the brightness and the random changes that occur: http://www.flickr.com/photos/omegatron/5434819501/

[Colonel O'Neill]

Probably this:
http://forums.lenovo.com/t5/T400-T500-a ... a-p/313628

[omegatron]

It is not flickering randomly or changing contrast randomly as through the refresh rate has lowered automatically.

[Colonel O'Neill]

I presume you tried the above solution with no effect?

Try a Ubuntu LiveCD to see if it's a hardware issue. I have personally not seen that sort of banding, nor have I seen a case where it varied based on LCD brightness.

[omegatron]

It seems to happen often after waking from sleep

[Colonel O'Neill]

Try a Ubuntu LiveCD to see if it's a hardware issue.