this helps contrast, but does not help brightness. everything is still far too dim. an electrical engineer friend of mine says it is likely that apple mistakenly used the wrong resistors for the vga output levels. VESA peak level is supposed to be 700mv and the mac mini maxxes out at around 530. it may be possible to track down the resistors on the motherboard and replace them with the proper values but the fundamental cause would appear to be an engineering error on behalf of apple.