The paper presents an adaptive dimming technique to reduce backlight power consumption and enhance image contrast for global backlight applications. The proposed adaptive dimming technique consists of two new algorithms: backlight dimming algorithm and contrast enhancement algorithm. The backlight-dimming algorithm obtains appropriate 0% to 50% backlight power reduction depending on characteristics of the image data. The contrast enhancement algorithm not only reduces the adverse effect of backlight power saving, but also improves 20.75% enhancement of image contrast ratio on the average. Numerous simulation results are used for illustration of the effectiveness and merits of the proposed adaptive dimming technique. Experimental results are conducted to show the performance and usefulness of the proposed technique on a 2.2-inch mobile phone liquid crystal display (LCD) made by thin-film-transistor (TFT) technology.