I just have to shime in here and say that my Mk II has absolutely no readability problems. I can even make it out (somewhat at least) in direct sunlight.

This is interesting... I'm seeing two ends of the spectrum being posted here on this board. On the one end, there are the folks saying that their Mk2 is totally unreadable in sunlight, and there are others, like you, who say that it's fine. Those that have readability problems are hoping that the AR panels will miraculously solve their problems.

But then we also have reports of at least two players which have hardware problems making their displays run dimmer than they should.

Is it possible that the hardware problem is more widespread than originally thought, and some of the folks screaming for AR panels actually have faulty displays? I don't want to start a run on returns for Empeg or anything, I'm just concerned that some customers on this BBS might be putting their energies into the wrong place.

Without a high-tech light level meter, how would one be able to tell if the display is running at the correct brightness? I'm sure there's some variation from panel to panel, but in general, and in layman's terms, how bright should it be?

Here's my stab at it: I have a Mk1, which has no night-dimming feature. It runs at full brightness all the time. If I park in the garage at night, with all the lights off and just the Empeg running, most of the visuals are bright enough to actually hurt my eyes, and I have to switch to a more subdued visual. If driving late at night, most of the visuals are so bright and distracting that I have to switch to the StarDust visual to keep it from bugging me too much.

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Tony Fabris