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I have brightness on automatic and I've always found the screen too bright, to be honest. I'd like to keep it at automatic but maybe have it biased down. By the way, did you know that if you turn off automatic brightness, you can slide your finger horizontally along the pull-down bar to adjust brightness?

I've hard that fluorescent lights throw proximity sensors for a bit of a loop so maybe the odd behavior you're seeing can be chalked up to varying behavior under incandescent vs. fluorescent lighting?

With regards to the proximity sensor, I have a black model and I have never had an issue with the way it works. It's exactly as you'd expect.