Census of disk brightness. (a) trend with FIR excess for the seven most represented regions. The dashed line is the fit to all points except Orion, which is outlying due to the larger distance. (b) trend with age for all unflagged, nearby sources. The median value of all regions (including Orion) is shown with colored diamonds as in (a). The dashed line is the median in different age beams. (c) trend with NIR excess. Sources with local shadows are marked with vertical bars. The shaded region indicates the exclusion area, since disks detected in low-NIR sources are always bright. (d) trend with scaled millimeter flux. The shaded region is what we define the regime of heavily self-shadowed disks. The top x-axis gives a coarse indication of the dust mass corresponding to the measured flux under standard assumptions. The bottom panels are the NIR images of the peculiar targets labeled in the diagrams. Underlined names indicate images with no prior publications. The colored diamonds to the corner of each image indicate the respective region as in (a), with the addition of a blue c indicating Centaurus.