I have an odd problem I was wondering if anyone had encountered and knows what might be going on. I just bought a new 46" Sharp Aquos and am having some dimming problems. There is an 'OPC' setting that dims the picture depending on room lighting but that feature is turned off and it's still happening.

Here's what I have:
46" Sharp Aquos
Motorola HD Cable box -> HDMI
Tivo Series 2 -> Component
Philips DVD player -> Component

The dimming only appears to occur on the Philips player. If there is a night scene it gets so dark you can barely make out the characters. It doesn't appear to happen while watching cable or anything off the Tivo. Is there some kind of interference or something going on? I'm really in the dark here.

Is the dvd player plugged directly into the tv? Have you tried a different input?

Sounds like a black level problem. See this thread for more detail.

Wow, very interesting Pistol Pete, thanks for the link. Hopefully I can find a setting on the TV or DVD player that somehow got switched.

Looks like that may have been it. Knowing what to look for certainly helped. There was an 'auto contrast' option(changes black/white levels) set to 'on' in the TV menu. I watched a 45 minute episode of a show on my lunch hour and it appears to have remedied the problem. It's still odd that the cable box & tivo seemed unaffected.

Thanks again Pete.

I think the DVD player may be putting out 0 IRE black instead of 7.5 IRE black. There is commonly a setting in the DVD menu for adjusting this behavior (something like super-black, etc). This might cause the auto-contrast on the TV to adjust the brightness levels on the fly. The Tivo and cable box put out 7.5 IRE black, so you don't see it on those sources.

Anyway, I'm glad it worked out.