[Q] i9505 Screen Brightness Strange - Galaxy S 4 Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting

Hey all,
I've searched and searched and got nowhere - so though I'd ask the question.
Simply put :
My GS4, on maximum brightness, almost acts like an auto-brightness setting. I've disabled every automatic screen control I can find.
To explain as clearly as possible, it'll go at maximum brightness for some time, then reduce the screen brightness by (at a guess) 20% and stay that way. The actual brightness setting doesn't change, just the output brightness of the screen.
It's across ROMs too, which leads more confusion to it.
Anyone got any idea?
Cheers

Related

Screen brightness goes down automaticaly.

Hi,
Everytime my battery goes down 15%, my screen brightness goes to almost 0.
I cant see any setting to change this.
I dont have any app to do that.
Currently rba023 rooted.
Thank you
Sent from my X10i using XDA App
If there's a way to change it I would like to know as well. It's very hard to see for that last 15%.
Wish I could help.
The last 15% would last no time if it was at normal brightness. It's designed for, you know, if you need to use it in an emergency ;-)
To get your brightness back go to the sound and display setting and click brightness. It returns it to full brightness. When your battery drops to 10% and 5% it will do the same.
As far as I'm aware there isn't a proper solution to this.
My issue with the brightness is the "auto brightness" function seems backwards to me.
E.g. if I am in direct sunlight, auto brightness turns the brightness of the screen way down, which means I can hardly see it. If anything the brightness should be turned UP.
If I am in a dark room, auto brightness turns the brightness up, when really, turning it down would be better as it doesn't need to be as bright in a dark room. So it should be turned DOWN automatically.
It's arse-over-tit, as we say.
Yes,
But now with root, i'm sure anyone with the right knowledge can modify this 'stock setting' ! ...
Anyone to try it?
Cheers!
misterzak said:
To get your brightness back go to the sound and display setting and click brightness. It returns it to full brightness. When your battery drops to 10% and 5% it will do the same.
As far as I'm aware there isn't a proper solution to this.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Hi mine seems fine.. Yours however does, as you say, seem arse over tit.
Sent from my x10 using XDA and swype.
This doesn't really fix the query but for fast access to adjust the brightness I use an app called QuickSettings which I have on my front screen to give quick access to some basic settings. On the brightness adjuster you have to have the phone settings not on automatically adjust.

Auto or manual brightness..that is the question

I have been experimenting with brightness on my sgs and how it relates to battery life. So should I keep the brightness on auto or the lowest?
I have noticed that when my brightness is set on lowest, the phone will sometime turn the brightness up a lot for no reason. I think it should be on auto brightness.
Ideas?
on the notification bar up there if you sweep it left our right it'll adjust the brightness too, just found that or. pretty damned annoying.
my brightness is on it's lowest always, unless I need to see in the sun.
Adevem said:
on the notification bar up there if you sweep it left our right it'll adjust the brightness too, just found that or. pretty damned annoying.
my brightness is on it's lowest always, unless I need to see in the sun.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Yeah.. In Froyo they don't have that "feature" (hopefully they don't enable it either).
I keep my light down to minimum too. I've had no probs looking at the screen here, but then again, it is winter and I am an evening person..
I'd say lowest setting is the best, the screen isn't difficult to see even at it's lowest. brightest just makes everything look more vibrant and awesome. you can have a separate brightness setting for the browser too.
i set mine to manual
the auto doesn't work well, i like it bright, and in auto mode, it is not bright enough for me
fakekullu said:
I have been experimenting with brightness on my sgs and how it relates to battery life. So should I keep the brightness on auto or the lowest?
I have noticed that when my brightness is set on lowest, the phone will sometime turn the brightness up a lot for no reason. I think it should be on auto brightness.
Ideas?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
You are right. If you have your brightness set to Manual, you can adjust brightness by sliding left or right on the notification bar at the top.
It's a problem because you can by accident set it to high and therefore drain your battery fast.
I have setup Tasker to set brightness to 40 once every hour. 40 is about 16% of full brightness.
Regards,
Jkay

Beware of the Brightness Of Death

Hi all,
On a number of occasions, I've used Market apps to control the screen brightness, either manually (like a brightness widget) or scheduled (using Timeriffic - a great tool for automatic profile changes throughout the day).
Apparently, these apps are not aware of the correct minimum brightness supported by the Leo, making it too easy to go too low, which essentially disables the display completely.
Touch still works, so if I'm lucky enough to remember the location of the widget/slider/controls, I may be able to turn brightness back up to a "sane" level.
For example, Timeriffic turns the screen off with a brightness level of 10% - 15% is the lowest working setting.
If I'm unable to fix it this way, I'm basically forced to reset. The problem is that Android *remembers* this setting after a reboot, and reapplies it just when the device is vibrated slightly at the "Android" logo animation. Thus, with a black screen, it is impossible for me to unlock the SIM, hard to unlock the screen lock, and virtually impossible to correct the brightness setting. I need to remove my data.img ("hard resetting" Android) and restore what I can from backups.
The problem also seems to occur with the standard screen dimming which occurs at about half time before the "screen off" setting. I can see the display start to dim, then it suddeny turns off. In this case, however, Android of course reverts to normal brightness at the touch of the screen or press of a button.
On a related note, I have experienced (like right now) that brightness range used by Android is much dimmer then normal. That is, using the regular brightness slider in Settings, I can only vary between almost invisible (min) and quite dim (max). Curiously, in this situation, the display can get *much* dimmer than normal, without becoming disabled.
Any ideas on these issues would be most welcome!
Workarounds found later in this thread:
- Shine a bright light on the screen - the graphics are still there if you look really hard. It's not a joke!
- Use Screencast in Droid Explorer to "remote control" your Android
- adb shell "echo 255 >/sys/class/leds/lcd-backlight/brightness"
ugumba said:
Hi all,
On a number of occasions, I've used Market apps to control the screen brightness, either manually (like a brightness widget) or scheduled (using Timeriffic - a great tool for automatic profile changes throughout the day).
Apparently, these apps are not aware of the correct minimum brightness supported by the Leo, making it too easy to go too low, which essentially disables the display completely.
Touch still works, so if I'm lucky enough to remember the location of the widget/slider/controls, I may be able to turn brightness back up to a "sane" level.
For example, Timeriffic turns the screen off with a brightness level of 10% - 15% is the lowest working setting.
If I'm unable to fix it this way, I'm basically forced to reset. The problem is that Android *remembers* this setting after a reboot, and reapplies it just when the device is vibrated slightly at the "Android" logo animation. Thus, with a black screen, it is impossible for me to unlock the SIM, hard to unlock the screen lock, and virtually impossible to correct the brightness setting. I need to remove my data.img ("hard resetting" Android) and restore what I can from backups.
The problem also seems to occur with the standard screen dimming which occurs at about half time before the "screen off" setting. I can see the display start to dim, then it suddeny turns off. In this case, however, Android of course reverts to normal brightness at the touch of the screen or press of a button.
On a related note, I have experienced (like right now) that brightness range used by Android is much dimmer then normal. That is, using the regular brightness slider in Settings, I can only vary between almost invisible (min) and quite dim (max). Curiously, in this situation, the display can get *much* dimmer than normal, without becoming disabled.
Any ideas on these issues would be most welcome!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I don't know these app(s) but if they are writing their settings and configured values into a ini or settings file, than you might be able to connect via adb and change the setting by this way.
With tools like Droidexplorer or ADB magic, browsing through the files should be very comfortable and you might find the correct file.
this happens on regular android devices ...i have a couple of them
thatruth132 said:
this happens on regular android devices ...i have a couple of them
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
What happens? That brightness is set too low, essentially disabling the screen, so you're forced to hard reset or perform some root magic? How do you cope with it? Or does it happen that the permitted brightness range is just dimmer than usual?
Btw, until there is no light-sensor support in kernel, you can't use such apps for the brightness
Stills a good advice
I have had the same issue with the brightness range being too low. The max brightness is really dim and the colors don't seem right. That may just be the dimming effect though. If I restart the phone it seems to take care of this. I have not had the screen go below the minimum level and turn off though.
is there a fix for this. i just experienced this problem
I experienced the same with Multicon widgets.. had to delete Android and start over
somebully said:
I experienced the same with Multicon widgets.. had to delete Android and start over
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Oh wow, not good at all, crap...
so that means if i do that i'll lose everything huh?
Theres no way to restore the factory brightness or factory settings for the android?
aznsHD2 said:
Oh wow, not good at all, crap...
so that means if i do that i'll lose everything huh?
Theres no way to restore the factory brightness or factory settings for the android?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
As long as you have a working WinMo it should be possible to edit the values of brightness, but I have no idea where this information is stored.
Deleting Android folder and unzipping again is esentially restoring to factory settings.
yea this happens to me all the time, its a *****. it cuts off at exactly 12% for me. what i do is have aldiko(a book reader) on the home screen. if i click on it and open a book i can just swipe on the left side of the screen to adjust brightness. since i know that its on the home screeen on the right side middle, i can usually find my way back to it.
somebully said:
As long as you have a working WinMo it should be possible to edit the values of brightness, but I have no idea where this information is stored.
Deleting Android folder and unzipping again is esentially restoring to factory settings.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
which means that i'll lose everything such as data correct? new contacts etc. msgs...
any thing on this... isnt their a file in the android folder that i could maybe replace to restore to factory settings.
and could someone post a screen shot of their phone so i know where the numbers for the pin code lockscreen. tryin to get past that, then i can adjust my brightness
LOL I experienced it one time. And I must delete data.img to restore the phone. After this, I don't use any brightness tools (except ones already in the Android build).
If anyone have solution, please point us
Well i was able to get my screen back to normal. lol.
I didnt delete the data.img, i simply copied it and then removed it, started a fresh install, and then just marked on my screen where the numbers were, turned it off, put the old data.img back. Followed my marks, and was able to unlock it and then found the power control widget. And bam! screen back to bright...
This might work for you!
Erm... In similar circumstances I found this worked...
I was trying out different Android builds and I found a screen brightness widget. It had various available levels of brightness, one being 0%. As soon as I selected it I felt pretty stupid as true to it's word it gave me 0% brightness placing me in a similar position to the OP.
My Solution. I used my (very bright) led torch to light the screen. By playing around with the angle and beam width I found I could just make out the on screen graphics enough to re-adjust the brightness level.
Simples!
Just as " Justblair " said .. you can place your device under a very bright light thus you'll be able to see the screen and what it's showing .. idk what build you guys are using but in cyanogen you can adjust the lowest dim level so that any app or widget tries to set the brightness to 0% it's automatically set to your preset, 15% for instance.
I've only faced this problem once
Is it absolutely necessary to flood the main thread with all these useless noob posts?
It really has nothing to do with Android development on HD2 and should be posted in the General section IMO.
kawazaki said:
Just as " Justblair " said .. you can place your device under a very bright light thus you'll be able to see the screen and what it's showing .. idk what build you guys are using but in cyanogen you can adjust the lowest dim level so that any app or widget tries to set the brightness to 0% it's automatically set to your preset, 15% for instance.
I've only faced this problem once
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Cyanogen allows you a max dim level of 26 - which is too little on the HD2.
In Tasker, 30 is the lowest setting that still provides light. Maybe Cyanogen can be patched for the HD2 in coming builds?
Thanks for the tip on shining a bright light on the screen.
Another tip is to use Droid Explorer's "Screencast" feature, to view and control your Android's screen on your PC desktop. Of course, the brightness setting has no effect here.

Crappy Automatic Brightness Sensor?

Is it just me or does everyone's Epic's have terrible brightness sensor hardware/software? My sensor seems to have about 2-3 settings of brightness, and goes from completely dim to super bright in random situations and nothing in between.
Cyanogen just posted on his twitter that in the past he changed the sensor's abilities through coding modifications. Could we do something of the sort for the Epic's sensor?
Agreed. The sensor is horrible. Also, the transition between brightness settings when set to automatic is near instant instead of slowly transitioning, which makes it more obvious that its changing brightness.
I would agree that it is terrible. Mine also send to sometimes turn auto brightness back on if I've turned it off.
It would be great if someone found a way to mod the code for it!
Sent from my SPH-D700 using XDA App
I thought the screen was just too bright at its lowest setting. Fortunately someone came up with a fix for it that can be found in the developer section. As far as the automatic sensor I would suggest turning off "Power Saving Mode" in the Settings>Sound & Display as well. I've read somewhere that this causes the brightness level to vary on its own.
cfiblc said:
I thought the screen was just too bright at its lowest setting. Fortunately someone came up with a fix for it that can be found in the developer section.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Hehe, that was me. Stay tuned for more. I have coded up and will post, tonight, a new version that will let you modify the brightness curve (from the command line, for now)
As for automatic mode, I have figured out how to modify some aspects of it at the kernel level, such as the ambient light thresholds at which it switches to a different brightness level. By modifying the brightness curve, we can achieve at least some more control. But to make it really good may be significantly harder.
Personally, since manual brightness is always available by swiping horizontally on the status bar, I have little desire to use auto mode anyway.
- linuxuberant
The sensor is actually pretty sensitive. It's just that Samsung chose to have a really small range of brightness steps for automatic brightness.
Firon said:
The sensor is actually pretty sensitive. It's just that Samsung chose to have a really small range of brightness steps for automatic brightness.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
More like they installed an awesome dimmer switch and lights, but the fixture only does three modes; high, medium, and still pretty damn bright.

[Q] Lower the minimal brightness to be even less bright.

Is there any config file or system file where we can set minimal brightness? cause default 8-11% is to bright for me. I mean it's ok for the eyes i just worried about battery.
PLEASE don't suggest me those stupid apps for dumb people. Apps can do nothing, all apps is just replicas of stuff that is already in system.
In CM7 ROM i see custom values for brightness but those seems like don't work cause nothing changes
So is there any way to get minimal brightness to be even more minimal?
'Tasker' has an option to set brightness as any number value. It also has a warning message that says to avoid setting it to zero because it will make the device useless.
Enc0der said:
'Tasker' has an option to set brightness as any number value. It also has a warning message that says to avoid setting it to zero because it will make the device useless.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
AFAIK it doesn't actually reduce the backlight, just makes the screen darker. So its same amount of battery usage, It only decreases battery usage on a AMOLED screen.
SAD... cause brighness is good, but at night when you're in the dark it may be even more less bright and save some battery.. strange..maybe it's limited by Android API. I used CM7 options there is very nice module where you can set your own values in automatic adjustment of light but even if i set 5 it does not reduce light.
Maybe it's the lowest possible value for hardware..

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