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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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Click to collapse
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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Click to collapse
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.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
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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Click to collapse
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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Click to collapse
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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Click to collapse
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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Click to collapse
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
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
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.
OK I was going through settings like I occasionally do since I sometimes find something interesting and I did today under the screen settings and the mode selection.
There are three settings:
Dynamic
Standard
Movie
The default I'm pretty sure (since I can't remember after messing with it) was standard. I'm curious as to what dynamic is. Movie seems fairly obvious to me since it adds a slight yellow hue to the screen. Dynamic seems to brighten colors it seems but why is it referred to as dynamic.
I haven't seen the screen adjust itself or anything upon using it either.
Check this thread:
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1229470
From what I've observed, dynamic gives out brighter and better colors at the expense of battery life. Standard is pretty much "standard". Then movie mode uses the least battery and would not strain your eyes as compared to the other two.
Ah thank you for that!
Here's what I've found related to slow scrolling jitter and the touchscreen. When you first open an app, the very first couple slow scrolling swipes produce very smooth screen animation. It will then get jittery but if you exit the app, then reopen, the smoothness will return. Do this experiment in Contacts app to see what I mean.
Now I found this app called "Touch MultiTest" which reads out the touchscreen sample rate as you move your finger on the screen. When you first open it and do a swipe, you see smooth tracking and a solid sample rate reported greater than 120 Hz. However after a couple swipes the dot response becomes jittery and sample rate drops to something around 100 Hz. Closing and reopening the app gets you back to 120 Hz.
So I think this proves the hardware and software touch loop can produce smooth motion, and it's really sampling at 120 Hz. The big question is what exactly degrades after a couple swipes. In the best case it's some driver or software buffer / interrupt handling that degrades. In the worst case it's related to low level hardware issues. I'm hopeful it's software related. By the way somehow Chrome browser always scrolls smoothly with slow swipes. What is Chrome doing differently than all other apps? Just filtering?
Scrappy1 said:
Here's what I've found related to slow scrolling jitter and the touchscreen. When you first open an app, the very first couple slow scrolling swipes produce very smooth screen animation. It will then get jittery but if you exit the app, then reopen, the smoothness will return. Do this experiment in Contacts app to see what I mean.
Now I found this app called "Touch MultiTest" which reads out the touchscreen sample rate as you move your finger on the screen. When you first open it and do a swipe, you see smooth tracking and a solid sample rate reported greater than 120 Hz. However after a couple swipes the dot response becomes jittery and sample rate drops to something around 100 Hz. Closing and reopening the app gets you back to 120 Hz.
So I think this proves the hardware and software touch loop can produce smooth motion, and it's really sampling at 120 Hz. The big question is what exactly degrades after a couple swipes. In the best case it's some driver or software buffer / interrupt handling that degrades. In the worst case it's related to low level hardware issues. I'm hopeful it's software related. By the way somehow Chrome browser always scrolls smoothly with slow swipes. What is Chrome doing differently than all other apps? Just filtering?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Have you tried contacting Essential or possibly using their beta feedback form to tell them about your theory/findings?
Our screens sample at 60Hz. We already know this from the AMA's on Reddit. The test app you're using is inaccurate if it reads 120Hz or even 100Hz.
60Hz sampling in of itself shouldn't be a problem either since iPhones (except for the newest ones) sample at 60Hz and everyone knows how smooth they are.
Hopefully there's not some other hardware flaw and it's just Essential's software.
ChronoReverse said:
Our screens sample at 60Hz. We already know this from the AMA's on Reddit. The test app you're using is inaccurate if it reads 120Hz or even 100Hz.
60Hz sampling in of itself shouldn't be a problem either since iPhones (except for the newest ones) sample at 60Hz and everyone knows how smooth they are.
Hopefully there's not some other hardware flaw and it's just Essential's software.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I don't put much stock in the AMA response since its so vague and nonspecific and could be referring to screen refresh rate (60 Hz) either intentionally or accidentally.
If new iPads and iPhones sample at 120 Hz, it's entirely possible essential panel is sampling at 120 Hz.
Try using Touchscreen Benchmark to test and you'll be able to verify the actual samples per second. As a point of comparison, the Galaxy S4 samples at 90Hz and the Shield tablet does a whopping 180Hz!
In any case, it's easy to see that it's not refreshing at 100Hz or 120Hz simply by looking at the number of touch samples that actually appear on the screen. Try it on a faster phone and you can see the higher density of touch responses.
Furthermore, you can't reliably discern the sample rate in the first second so trusting the app saying it's 120Hz and dips to 100Hz is even less reliable than the AMA.
ChronoReverse said:
Try using Touchscreen Benchmark to test and you'll be able to verify the actual samples per second. As a point of comparison, the Galaxy S4 samples at 90Hz and the Shield tablet does a whopping 180Hz!
In any case, it's easy to see that it's not refreshing at 100Hz or 120Hz simply by looking at the number of touch samples that actually appear on the screen. Try it on a faster phone and you can see the higher density of touch responses.
Furthermore, you can't reliably discern the sample rate in the first second so trusting the app saying it's 120Hz and dips to 100Hz is even less reliable than the AMA.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I invite anyone to do my test and decide for themselves or measure and produce new data. That's what I'm going for here. Not regurgitation of bland statements.
Scrappy1 said:
I invite anyone to do my test and decide for themselves or measure and produce new data. That's what I'm going for here. Not regurgitation of bland statements.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I just invited you to use a different test instead of relying on one that doesn't spit out reasonable numbers.
Does it make more sense that the Essential potentially is using a 120Hz touchscreen which Essential won't confirm despite it being a feather in their caps (since even iPhones only got 120Hz recently) or does it make more sense that Essential is using a slower than average (for Android) panel which their software isn't filtering out as well as Apple's software does? Which is more likely to cause jitter and touch latency?
ChronoReverse said:
I just invited you to use a different test instead of relying on one that doesn't spit out reasonable numbers.
Does it make more sense that the Essential potentially is using a 120Hz touchscreen which Essential won't confirm despite it being a feather in their caps (since even iPhones only got 120Hz recently) or does it make more sense that Essential is using a slower than average (for Android) panel which their software isn't filtering out as well as Apple's software does? Which is more likely to cause jitter and touch latency?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
It's actually that your misunderstanding terminology...
Your mistaking sample rate and refresh rate...
Refresh rate is how many times per second? the screen is redrawn...
Sample rate is how many times per second? the screen reads touches...
No way you can tell the difference between 120hz vs 100hz.
Sent from my PH-1 using Tapatalk
rignfool said:
It's actually that your misunderstanding terminology...
Your mistaking sample rate and refresh rate...
Refresh rate is how many times per second? the screen is redrawn...
Sample rate is how many times per second? the screen reads touches...
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
No, I'm referring to the touchscreen. Obviously the Essential LCD only refreshes at 60Hz (only the Razer and iPad Pro refreshes at 120Hz) but the touchscreen also samples at 60Hz which is common for lower end Androids (90Hz and 120Hz are the other common sampling rates found in Android devices).
The new iPhone X's OLED still refreshes at 60Hz but has a 120Hz sampling touchscreen which is higher than the 60Hz it used to be in other iOS devices (except for the iPad Pro). I also mentioned the Shield tablet sampling at 180Hz and there's no mobile device with a screen refresh that fast either.
LNJ said:
No way you can tell the difference between 120hz vs 100hz.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
The drop to 100 Hz after a couple of seconds is "indicative of the problem", not that a 100 Hz rate would not be smooth in a properly designed device. Something comes unhinged at the point we see the drop to 100 Hz. Could be touch buffer / event que is not being serviced fast enough due to low level driver or hardware. Also could be some piece of software in critical path starts consuming more time than allowed, leading to non uniform response. Could be actual stuttering of hardware.
When you exit and then restart an app, the touch event pipleline is flushed, so things are fixed again for a couple of seconds.
YouTube app
Scrappy1 said:
Here's what I've found related to slow scrolling jitter and the touchscreen. When you first open an app, the very first couple slow scrolling swipes produce very smooth screen animation. It will then get jittery but if you exit the app, then reopen, the smoothness will return. Do this experiment in Contacts app to see what I mean.
Now I found this app called "Touch MultiTest" which reads out the touchscreen sample rate as you move your finger on the screen. When you first open it and do a swipe, you see smooth tracking and a solid sample rate reported greater than 120 Hz. However after a couple swipes the dot response becomes jittery and sample rate drops to something around 100 Hz. Closing and reopening the app gets you back to 120 Hz.
So I think this proves the hardware and software touch loop can produce smooth motion, and it's really sampling at 120 Hz. The big question is what exactly degrades after a couple swipes. In the best case it's some driver or software buffer / interrupt handling that degrades. In the worst case it's related to low level hardware issues. I'm hopeful it's software related. By the way somehow Chrome browser always scrolls smoothly with slow swipes. What is Chrome doing differently than all other apps? Just filtering?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I have noticed that if you launch the camera and then open the YouTube app or whatever you're using where you can see the touch scrolling jitters, the touch scrolling is nice and smooth. Then after some time it comes back. The touch scrolling in Chrome is perfect and I wish it was the same everywhere. For some reason the YouTube app performs the worst for me. Chrome must have received an update a while back since I used to get bad touch scrolling on that too. The thing that worries me is some claim touch scrolling is perfectly smooth on their device. Hopefully that's a case of them not noticing it and not a case of actual hardware differences.
mhajii210 said:
I have noticed that if you launch the camera and then open the YouTube app or whatever you're using where you can see the touch scrolling jitters, the touch scrolling is nice and smooth. Then after some time it comes back. The touch scrolling in Chrome is perfect and I wish it was the same everywhere. For some reason the YouTube app performs the worst for me. Chrome must have received an update a while back since I used to get bad touch scrolling on that too. The thing that worries me is some claim touch scrolling is perfectly smooth on their device. Hopefully that's a case of them not noticing it and not a case of actual hardware differences.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Cool tip! I hadn't noticed that. Opening camera then switching to contacts had me scrolling smooth for many minutes. However after a few rounds of tests it lost the magic. I could no longer use camera open first to produce the smooth scrolling. So there are several factors at play here and this could use more investigation. Most of all though this gives me hope the issue can be totally fixed in software.
I'm starting to think the thing that goes bad and causes choppiness is the rendering pipeline. I enabled "Profile GPU Rendering" and then did a screen capture after scrolling my battery stats in settings for both 1) good condition just after launching settings when scrolling is smooth and 2) bad condition that kicks in after a few seconds when things get choppy. The bad condition shows vastly inflated rendering time which blows the 60 FPS (green line) budget. The largest increase is in red (command issue), but EVERYTHING is inflated in the bad condition. What could cause this?
The captures of the good and bad conditions are attached.
Turns out the reason the rendering pipeline starts taking so long is due to the application thread moving from high performance CPU cluster to the low performance CPU cluster. Using the paid version of System Monitor I opened a floating window of CPU load and freq. I then again opened battery settings and scrolled around in the good and bad state. I can see the CPU load is on the high performance cluster right away (5-8) and those guys are running at 2.4 GHz. Hence everything is smooth. When the jitters set in, the load has moved to low performance cluster (1-4) and they are running much lower clock rate < 1 GHz. I do believe this is probably fairly normal android behavior, but it's obviously tied to the slow scrolling jitters for us. It could be a subtle governor or big.LITTLE thread scheduling issue somehow playing into touch screen weirdness I suppose.
The two captures attached show the issue. One was captured right after launching battery settings when things are smooth and CPUs 5-8 are screaming. Other was captured after things went jittery, and here you can see CPU load that was on 5-8 has moved to 1-4, and clock frequency is much lower. (Hovers between 300 - 1000 Mhz)
Scrappy1 said:
Turns out the reason the rendering pipeline starts taking so long is due to the application thread moving from high performance CPU cluster to the low performance CPU cluster. Using the paid version of System Monitor I opened a floating window of CPU load and freq. I then again opened battery settings and scrolled around in the good and bad state. I can see the CPU load is on the high performance cluster right away (5-8) and those guys are running at 2.4 GHz. Hence everything is smooth. When the jitters set in, the load has moved to low performance cluster (1-4) and they are running much lower clock rate < 1 GHz. I do believe this is probably fairly normal android behavior, but it's obviously tied to the slow scrolling jitters for us. It could be a subtle governor or big.LITTLE thread scheduling issue somehow playing into touch screen weirdness I suppose.
The two captures attached show the issue. One was captured right after launching battery settings when things are smooth and CPUs 5-8 are screaming. Other was captured after things went jittery, and here you can see CPU load that was on 5-8 has moved to 1-4, and clock frequency is much lower. (Hovers between 300 - 1000 Mhz)
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Let's try this
@DespairFactor
GPU governor
rignfool said:
Let's try this
@DespairFactor
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Well I can tell you it's not all because of the CPU performance since setting GPU governor to performance on Oreo beta 2 completely gets rid of the touch screen jitters for me. I'm running Oreo beta 2, Rey.R3 Kernel and Magisk 15.2. Using EX Kernel Manager to set GPU governor to performance, I have eliminated the touch scrolling microstutters. Try it out for yourself and see! I also set CPU governor to conservative to compensate for the slightly increased battery usage. Phone is blazing now. https://forum.xda-developers.com/essential-phone/development/kernel-rey-kernel-t3723601 is the link to the kernel.
mhajii210 said:
Well I can tell you it's not all because of the CPU performance since setting GPU governor to performance on Oreo beta 2 completely gets rid of the touch screen jitters for me. I'm running Oreo beta 2, Rey.R3 Kernel and Magisk 15.2. Using EX Kernel Manager to set GPU governor to performance, I have eliminated the touch scrolling microstutters. Try it out for yourself and see! I also set CPU governor to conservative to compensate for the slightly increased battery usage. Phone is blazing now. https://forum.xda-developers.com/essential-phone/development/kernel-rey-kernel-t3723601 is the link to the kernel.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thanks for your input! I would go down the root and tweaks path if I didn't have to use my phone for work with the Google device policy and all. Hoping for some jitter improvement in next official stock update.
rignfool said:
Let's try this
@DespairFactor
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I think we can move the touchscreen to it's own workqueue, but not sure if it'll handle this.
mhajii210 said:
Well I can tell you it's not all because of the CPU performance since setting GPU governor to performance on Oreo beta 2 completely gets rid of the touch screen jitters for me. I'm running Oreo beta 2, Rey.R3 Kernel and Magisk 15.2. Using EX Kernel Manager to set GPU governor to performance, I have eliminated the touch scrolling microstutters. Try it out for yourself and see! I also set CPU governor to conservative to compensate for the slightly increased battery usage. Phone is blazing now. https://forum.xda-developers.com/essential-phone/development/kernel-rey-kernel-t3723601 is the link to the kernel.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Post a video. In all likelihood, it's just placebo effect. I've heard time and time again people claiming that that the slow-scrolling stutter is gone. It's never once been proven. Here's a side-by-side comparison vs the Pixel XL.
This just a simple little thing for people that want to fix the GIANT/BLOWN UP resolution when connected to a display (TV or Monitor etc.) there is an app for that lol it's called secondscreen
(https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.farmerbb.secondscreen.free)
You can change the resolution to whatever you want for your connected display and then revert back to the phones screen resolution when you disconnect pretty much automatically. Change the dpi to around ~180 when your connected display is on also as there is a tablet like ui that looks better imo.
Activate desktop mode in secondscreen for Chrome to have it on for a better internet experience. If you don't use chrome then just turn it on in the settings of the browser of your choice (firefox for example).
All in all, playing/viewing and doing pretty much anything is alot better now I have to say personally. Try it and tell me what you think.
Hi all. I replaced the smart display module with the Chinese amoled version. Everything is fine, but with slow scrolling of pages, image jerks appear (video attached), and if you just swipe, then the image fades smoothly. Any ideas how to fix it? In developer mode, I displayed the refresh rate value on the screen, writes 60 both with slow scrolling and with fast scrolling.