THE Best Option for Screen Brightness

[syrnett]

Download "Screen Filter"

Its not actually a bightness control... it basically acts like a screen gamma control... fantantic!!! Lets me get WAY dimmer than any brightness app I have tried... perfect for bedtime work without bugging my wife at all.

Only downside is no widget (yet).

Erik

 

[Nightwind Hawk]

Thank you! I was wondering why the lowest setting is SO incredibly bright... Will check this out!

 

[Nightwind Hawk]

Oh.. I see, it doesn't change the brightness, only overlays a transparent black image onto the screen. Interesting

 

[lexluthor]

I've been using screen filter too recently. It's the best way to dim the screen lower than the stock minimum.

The update last week also enabled the top bar to be dimmed. Prior to that, it probably wasn't worth using, at least for me.

 

[BookLover]

+1 for screen filter. Wish it weren't a toggle, so that I can control it better with Tasker.

 

[dnalloheoj]

Oh.. I see, it doesn't change the brightness, only overlays a transparent black image onto the screen. Interesting

Because of this, I assume it doesn't help with battery life at all does it?

 

[Nightwind Hawk]

Because of this, I assume it doesn't help with battery life at all does it?

Doubt it, but I've given it a try and it work wonderful. Now I can finally use my Droid in places that are dark...!

 

[Rob.G]

Some htc phones have a built-in safe guard to only lower the brightness down to 20 (255 is brightest). You can lower the screen display brightness even further through Tasker. When setting up the Display Brightness task, it asks if you want to disable the safeguard on the phone, just check it.

Htc put the safeguard on there because if you lower it too far the screen is too dark to see to turn it back up. So if doing this with Tasker, be sure to have a way to turn it back up. Something like > when closing the reading app, turn brightness back up.

 

[Hrethgir]

I love this app! Now I can actually have the screen on in my car at night without it being irritating! First time I set it up, I was driving and didn't notice the text about how bright/dim it is, and I turned it down so low that I was barely able to see anything to reset it! Had to hold the phone at just the right angle in just the right light to be able to barely see where icons were, and even then, I had to hit several different icons before I found the right one. Got it all set now, though!

 

[coachpete]

great app..thanks

 

[adammsu]

Because of this, I assume it doesn't help with battery life at all does it?

i dont see why not, while its not a traditional brightness reduction, the screen will still not produce the same lumens as before, and therefore require less battery
(i assume anyway)

 

[firetruck41]

i dont see why not, while its not a traditional brightness reduction, the screen will still not produce the same lumens as before, and therefore require less battery
(i assume anyway)

Actually, it sounds like the same lumens are being produced, the LCD is just putting up more black, which is blocking more lumens from being visible. If that is the case, it will not use any less battery.

 

[SiXiam]

I use AdjBrightness, it can go as low as 2% screen brightness, which is great for looking at the screen in a pitch black room.

 

[BookLover]

I use AdjBrightness, it can go as low as 2% screen brightness, which is great for looking at the screen in a pitch black room.

Tasker can take screen brightness all the way down to 0%. Then I set screen filter to about 25%. It's really good for reading if you were up in the middle of the night. My screen doesn't blind me at night anymore.

 

[izomiac]

Actually, it sounds like the same lumens are being produced, the LCD is just putting up more black, which is blocking more lumens from being visible. If that is the case, it will not use any less battery.

It probably uses slightly more really. There's the CPU/GPU usage associated with the filter, and the trait of LCDs to use the most power showing black.

Here's a quick explanation. "Brightness" normally controls the LCD backlight, which is generally either a lamp (more common with laptop sized screens) or an electolumenescent material (glows when ~1000 volts AC is passed through it, the transformer for such sometimes creates near-ultrasonic noise that young folk can hear if the engineers aren't careful with the design). This light passes through the liquid crystal grid. Liquid crystals are polarizing light filters that have the interesting property of changing the direction of polarization when an electric current is passed through them. Next is a color filter (red, green, blue), then another polarizing filter (normal type that doesn't change orientation).

The backlight is one unit, so it's on to whatever power your settings dictate. To show full brightness red, green, or blue (depending on the color filter) the liquid crystal's polarization orientation matches that of the second filter, so no light is filtered out. To show black, a current is passed through the liquid crystal, which shifts the polarization 90 degrees so it filters out nearly all of the light from the backlight. Darker colors are achieved by not quite rotating the polarization all the way. Technically, one could make an LCD that used the least amount of power when showing black, but that'd use more power overall (webpages & documents tend to be white), and it'd look weird when it was off.

Of course, OLEDs work completely differently. They have a tiny LED for each subpixel (generally four per pixel, which is also different), so black is the most energy efficient color for them.

TLDR: Brightness controls the backlight, LCDs just use power to block that light if you want black.