Brightness of odometer display to 25%
 

Hello, the brightness of the odometer of my 4.4 model 2000 suddenly has decreased to 25%. It is only the odometer display. Other displays work fine.
Changing the brightness from 0 to 100% and back does not have any influence on this situation. Nor is there any difference with lights on or off.
Can this error be related to the pixel-problems or is it something else?

May be just the bulb that lights up that portion of the display. The pixel problem is different, that is when parts of the numbers/letters is missing.

Or the light sensor has gone bad.

The light sensor would affect more than just the odometer though... he says the rest of the gauges and lights all work correctly.

On a low OBC (those without messages), there's a light sensor that only control the odometer area (odometer, outside temp, ave. fuel consumption, etc) without affecting the rest of the instrument cluster. The backlight for that display changes as you drive through an underpass. The rest of the instrument cluster brightness is control by the rheostat. I've noticed that the radio MID also has its own light sensor. I'm just saying that a bad light sensor (can no longer detect light) could just make the system think that it's always night time, thus dimming the display to 25% :dunno:

Does the backlight uses standard bulbs or LEDs?

So I'm not the only one. I have a 2002, 3.0 with 107k and mine started doing the same thing last week. I got up in the morning and by noon it had started fading, out of no where. Mine affects the odmeter and a small portion of the tripometer. I am looking around for a solution and will keep everyone posted. Willing to bet it is a light though.

So the question to the OP would be is the light off and what light you see caused by other surrounding lights in the cluster, or is it actually have a low light output... but the light is still technically there.

I'm giving educated guesses as I have not yet dealt with this problem directly, but from the sound of it dkl has personal experience. :thumbup:

Just learnt something today after many years of ownership and participation to this forum:thumbup:

Backlight Bulb
 

Anyone know what bulb I need and how to get to it?

RealOEM.com BMW E53 X5 3.0i Instrument cluster

Is number 2 the bulb that is needed? took a quick look at Real OEM and thats the only thing that i turned up.