Dim screen brightness... permanently? - Nexus S Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting

I currently use screen filter to take the brightness of the NS down to a comfortable viewing level but it has it's limitations. It has to be started manually and certain apps will not play nicely with it. Gmail foe Llewellyn example freezes totally while ever screen filter is working.
I'm looking for a solution to drop the brightness beyond the lowest level allowed by default on the NS and keep it that way.
Is there such an app available?

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Brightness lower limit?

I was trying to lower the brightness very low to test how it would affect battery drain and it seems that the phone won't let 3rd party apps lower the brightness lower than what you can set it to, in the phone's settings. I tried an app called timerrific that lets you schedule various settings changes, but the phone seems to be overriding it. When I set the brightness to go down to 15% via the app, it does go very dim, but then immediately bounces back up to lowest level the phone's settings let's you set it at. Also, I had auto brightness off and the power saving mode off.
Has anyone been able to get the phone to go to very low brightness?
Thats a good question and would like the answer too... to me, the lowest brightness which must still HOG the battery as sometimes it seems to drain very fast with usage (and I have it on the lowest setting)... seems overly bright. I would without a doubt use it at a lower brightness to conserve energy depending on what I was doing at the time.
hey maybe its just the screen that makes it look bright
labbu63 said:
hey maybe its just the screen that makes it look bright
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Not sure what you mean? For example, if I set the brightness to go down to 5% through the app Timeriffic, the screen will dim down to where I can barely see anything, but then it immediately raises back up to the lowest setting you can set in the phone's normal settings, which seems to me to be about 25-30%.
Yep
labbu63 said:
hey maybe its just the screen that makes it look bright
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This is actually correct, the screen is what makes the "Automatic" brightness setting on the SGS phones look brighter than their LCD brethren. As we all know, currently all AMOLED displays use some kind of Pentile Matrix. All HTC devices (The N1 included) currently use RG:BG Pentile Matrix.
Do a google search on: "RGBG Pentile" and Samsung's site details it.
The SAMOLED display Samsung has made uses a new Pentile Matrix called RGBW:
Do a google search on: "nouvoyance" and it's the first site (sorry for the odd instructions, won't let new users post links )
Using the new RGBW, a white subpixel is introduced on top of the standard RGB stripe. From my reading, this allows the screen to achieve the same resolution to the eye with 33% less subpixels and is a brighter display in the process.
Asori said:
This is actually correct, the screen is what makes the "Automatic" brightness setting on the SGS phones look brighter than their LCD brethren. As we all know, currently all AMOLED displays use some kind of Pentile Matrix. All HTC devices (The N1 included) currently use RG:BG Pentile Matrix.
Do a google search on: "RGBG Pentile" and Samsung's site details it.
The SAMOLED display Samsung has made uses a new Pentile Matrix called RGBW:
Do a google search on: "nouvoyance" and it's the first site (sorry for the odd instructions, won't let new users post links )
Using the new RGBW, a white subpixel is introduced on top of the standard RGB stripe. From my reading, this allows the screen to achieve the same resolution to the eye with 33% less subpixels and is a brighter display in the process.
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Good explanation, but are saying that no you can't dim it to low levels because it makes it look brighter than it is? If so, I don't buy it. I see it being dimmed to a low level. It just doesn't stay there.
Aldiko reader can get the screen even more dim
Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I897 using XDA App
Also since there is less air gap in the new display, it is brighter.
Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I897 using XDA App
This is just me speculating, but I'm thinking maybe the brightness setting is universal to android devices, except that it's calibrated to normal lcd. So the same voltage(or however they regulate the display brightness) on an LCD will look brighter on the Super AMOLED. For me, the dim setting on the auto-brightness seems too bright.
One thing I've noticed is I can take the brightness down to its lowest setting and it still seems bright..however on almost every phone I've used its like this.
The weird thing is on the Captivate I can open the browser, men then scroll down to settings and it has a brightness toggle there that takes it lower.
nbohmer said:
One thing I've noticed is I can take the brightness down to its lowest setting and it still seems bright..however on almost every phone I've used its like this.
The weird thing is on the Captivate I can open the browser, men then scroll down to settings and it has a brightness toggle there that takes it lower.
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Yeah that does take it down lower than the home screen by a small amount. I put the browser brightness on the lowest setting and the global brightness on the lowest. Both auto brightness and power save are off. When I switch from the browser to the home screen, it brightens up a touch. So, it does go lower, but not all that much though, and it's only for the browser.
pjs2004 said:
Good explanation, but are saying that no you can't dim it to low levels because it makes it look brighter than it is? If so, I don't buy it. I see it being dimmed to a low level. It just doesn't stay there.
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You can totally dim it more. In doing so, it will use even less power than an LCD screen at the same brightness setting.
Asori said:
You can totally dim it more. In doing so, it will use even less power than an LCD screen at the same brightness setting.
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Yeah, that's what I thought was cool about this type of screen, but I still don't know how to to dim it below the the lowest setting in the phone's control panel (which isn't very low). 3rd party apps I've tried don't really work, or they work, but the phone immediately raises it back up. Are you saying you've dimmed it down to where you can barley see the screen, like 5-10 percent? That's what I'm looking for confirmation on. If so, what app did you use?
pjs2004 said:
Yeah, that's what I thought was cool about this type of screen, but I still don't know how to to dim it below the the lowest setting in the phone's control panel (which isn't very low). 3rd party apps I've tried don't really work, or they work, but the phone immediately raises it back up. Are you saying you've dimmed it down to where you can barley see the screen, like 5-10 percent? That's what I'm looking for confirmation on. If so, what app did you use?
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I have used this app and seems to be pretty good, makes the brightness lower than system brightness.
http://www.androlib.com/android.application.com-curvefish-widgets-brightnesslevel-jDiB.aspx
i use brightness level too but the brightness goes back to the highest level when you plug the phone in and you cant use the presets on the widget anymore
sfernandez said:
I have used this app and seems to be pretty good, makes the brightness lower than system brightness.
http://www.androlib.com/android.application.com-curvefish-widgets-brightnesslevel-jDiB.aspx
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I tried this app, and while it's a good app, it still doesn't make the screen go super dim. It looks to me like the lowest level (0%) is the same as lowest setting from the control panel. Zero percent should really be totally black.
Screen Filter
Here is your 100% working solution.
It doesn't work with the bright level, it applies a shade/filter to the screen. No matter what app you're using.
Set the bright to the lowest with your default system settings, because if you use a third party that goes below normal, with some apps like explorer, it set it to minimum allowed be system or whatever you set and then you will notice a setp up, shaded but a change.
I'm using it weeks ago and I found it's the best choice to suft the web at night. Also you can turn off softkeys lights
http://www.appbrain.com/app/screen-filter/com.haxor
flash speedmods new kernel.

How can you dim the screen further?

Hey Everyone,
As has been mentioned many times in other threads:
1) The LCD is often the biggest battery drainer
2) The 'minimum' setting of the brightness setting is still needlessly bright.
It certainly can be pushed further down for dim/night/dark settings.
3) Certain apps "dim" the screen but are just changing the color, not the backlight. So while useful they still aren't helping your battery.
Following some tips from a different android phone, I found this file:
/sys/devices/platform_/nov_cabc.0/leds/lcd-backlight/brightness
Which appears to contain the current 'brightness #' of the LCD backlight.
Using the normal Brightness slider, the value changes from 30 - 255, with 255 being the brightest. So this clearly could be reduced further.
Setting 'Screen Filter' to 50% brightness has no effect on the value.
Here's something interesting:
Assume the screen is already set at lowest brightness.
When I use 'Widgetsoid' to set brightness to '1', the screen dims slightly, then brightens back up. The 'brightness' file gets set to 20.
'widgetsoid 20' feels the same as 'min brightness 30'. - I wonder if Android is enforcing minimum backlight?
Anyway, thought that would be interesting to note. I'm going to download some other screen dimmer apps and see what they do.
- Frank
I found this online which is very interesting reading:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/35972886/An-Analysis-of-Power-Consumption-in-a-Smart-Phone
At '30' they said the display consumed 7.8 mW, while at 255 it consumed 414 (!!!)
Various apps coud push the value to 20 - tasker, adjbrightness.
Tasker tries to set it lower but as with widgetsoid, you can see the screen get forced back up to 20.
adjbrightness can "set" it lower than 20, but the entire screen blacks out, even at 19. Remember where the other buttons are so you can restore brightness!
- Frank
Whoa, thanks for the information. That pretty insane but its an apparently in the Market: Screen Filter, saves a helluva lot of battery.
Edit: Nevermind, Frank shut me up LOL.
Sent from my HTC Glacier using XDA App
I read a thread that said that the stock rom just doesn't allow setting it that low.
Ah well
- Frank
ChodTheWacko said:
I read a thread that said that the stock rom just doesn't allow setting it that low.
Ah well
- Frank
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Can you set it lower in other roms - like cm7?
netter123 said:
Can you set it lower in other roms - like cm7?
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I've been playing with CM7 which has some nice features for customizing the auto-brightness settings as well as the "dim" value which seems to be the lowest value the screen will go to and what it gets set to when the screen dims before shutting off after a timeout.
For the Dim setting in CM7, the default is 20. The next highest setting in the picker is 18. I believe it goes down to 0 or 1. When set to 18 or lower the screen blanks out completely when dimmed. Depending on how you test this, you may have a problem getting the screen back, so be careful you know where your widget button is on the screen to bring it back... 20 seems to be the lowest value. However, while dim, in a very dark room it could certainly be even dimmer so I don't know why lower values don't work.
I've also found the light detector doesn't seem to detect a continuum of light levels. It seems to be quantized at particular values, so there's a pretty hard limit on how fine you can set the auto brightness levels since the lowest light reading it seems to take is not very sensitive. It can't seem to distinguish between a fully darkened room and a dimly lit room, so setting the lowest value automatically makes the screen too dark to be comfortable in many environments, but then too bright for a really dark room. I don't know if this is an issue with the ROM software or a hardware limitation of the sensor. I've set my lowest auto setting to 40 which seems to work well, then I manually switch it to the dim value (20) if I'm in the dark.

[Q] Camera forces 100% screen brightness

Does anyone know how to prevent the Camera app from forcing 100% screen brightness? It really is blinding for me especially at night.
Thanks
I can't help if you are on stock software, but I figured I would throw down a tip for CM10, since thats what I run. There is an option to allow screen dimming. I believe by default, once a screen brightness increases on android the only way to lower it is by cycling the screen. The option in CM10 allows the OS to dim the screen w/o turning the screen off.

Adaptive Brightness Does Not Work

Has anyone else had issues with their Adaptive Brightness not working. Toggling the setting has no effect on my display. For such an expensive phone I expect things like this to work.
Yes, it doesn't work that great for me either. I mean I can see it adjusts the brightness "somewhat". But it appears it is not nearly as dramatic as on my Galaxy S7 which would pretty much perfectly adjust the brightness.
I agree that a phone this expensive should do it correctly out of the box. Google please listen.
This is the intended function as I understood it, so I googled it and here confirms. This is not intended to operate the same as auto brightness many other phones use.
In Android L, Google's introduced a new feature called Adaptive Brightness that combines manual and auto brightness. You can manually adjust the brightness level to a state you like. Once it's set, your screen will adjust based on ambient light so it stays at the same brightness relative to the light around you. This way you can set the screen to your preferences without sticking to an absolute level.
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Been this way a long time. Would this be your first Nexus/Pixel phone?
Source
The problem I have is that every time the phone is rebooted, adaptive brightness is set back to Off, even though it was On when the phone was restarted. Running NDE63V and not rooted.

Override manual/auto screen brightness with root?

Hi guys,
I have a cheap Chinese Cube T8Plus that I use exclusively to read comics and books at night.
It works really well for that use, but has 2 very annoying problems with backlight brightness that makes it less than ideal for low light use:
- with manual brightness, the minimum brightness is very high, and even with root and a software like brightness tweak, it stays the same (I can actually increase the minimum brightness, but not decrease it).
- with auto brightness, surprisingly on low light the screen gets a lot dimmer than with manual brightness, it makes a huge difference. But here too there is a big problem; the brightness does increase whenever I the tablet is exposed to higher light, but doesn't decrease back on low light, no matter what I do.
The only way to reset it back is to fully reboot the tablet.
I tried different roms to try fixing the issue, they all have the same behavior sadly.
Of course I know there are screen filter solutions like the twilight app, which I actually use, but it's not always enough, and kills the contrast a little bit too much sometimes.
So is there any other way to force the manual brightness to go lower, that might work for me?
If not can I override the auto brightness in some way?
Thanks

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