Dieter,
thanks for confirming what I have suspected that P3D was actually too dark (for my tastes) from what I observed in many screen shots and videos. I though perhaps it might have been the ENB thingy that was developed for FSX, it has always seemed like everything was in night lighting to me. I just do not like 90% of the stuff people are posting due to the darkness exhibited.
Maybe I'm just jaded but I have yet to see any video that makes the ORBX scenery look any better on my system than plain old FSX.
When P3D was first available and they announced that V2 was being worked on I made the decision of not even following the threads on V1 on the ORBX site as I was going to wait. Of course screen shots were posted on other forum threads with P3D running and I was never impressed, and then P3D v2 was released and I began to follow the forum for that software. Slowly it became apparent to me that from what has been posted, picture wise, there just is not enough improvment to warrent the time, money, effort and grief involved for me to switch. I seems that most users laud the smoothness of P3D which, in my case, is a non-issue.
I know that sometime in the future the switch will probably be made even by GOF's like me but for now if I did anything different I might consider "trying DX10" but from screen shots of that I still do not see enough difference to tempt me at this time.