Hello all,
I've been suspicious of the power draw of the screen on the GNex, and so decided to figure out how much a difference brightness made.
This is to test the difference extreme brightness settings make to battery run times. Including text, browsing or having radios on will dilute the results. I'm only interested in the efficiency of the screen and its supporting infrastructure people!
Here's my testing method.
1. Charge phone to 100% using a PCs USB charging (should give a more full charge than the wall adapters quick charge, I think, otherwise no harm done). Leave attached to USB cable
2. Switch the phone into Airplane mode.
3. Switch off Auto Brightness and turn brightness to Max
4. Restart Phone. Leave it to settle for a few mins
5. Fire up "Just Pictures" and the image "TotalWhite.jpg" (attached). No other photos in the folder where it sits.
6. Disconnect USB charging
7. Start Slide show. Record the start time.
8. Every now and then (about 45 mins to an hour and bit) I quickly pop into settings and take a sneak look at charge level - don't want to get caught out!
9. Resume Slide Show.
10. Wait until the phone switches off, which is less than 2% charge
Now, it's not a quick process as I'm going from 100% Batt until auto shut off. So I'll be updating this post in installments. Today is the Max Daddy Full Brightness White image!
Full Brightness, White Image:
100% 00h00m
85% 00h39m
60% 01h53m
35% 03h08m
0% 05h00m
Pretty good I think!
Battery status stated that Screen was 91% and Android System was 9%. Screen on time was the same as the run time. It never went off.
There's a heavy set of disclaimers to go with this though: The White Image isn't quite the right aspect for it to display across the full amount. Check out the image "White Full The Phone.jpg" - it's pretty close though. Just Pictures isn't so full screen that it takes over the Android buttons - Anyone know a 100% full screen picture view BTW? Between the point where it comes up with "Please connect your charger" (15%) and 6% it said that message over the White image and partly dimmed the screen - I'm at work and was in the middle of something when it happened.
Minimum Brightness, Black Image:
100% 00h00m
85% 01h26m
82% 02h05m
18% 08h54m
0% 10h47m
Battery status stated that Screen was 85% and Android System was 16%. Yes, that's 101%, but there you go... Screen on time was within a minute of the run time.
Again, some notes on the testing: From the "connect your charger" point (i think 15%) to 8 % it had the message on the screen. Just before the end I accidently touched the screen and ended the slide show for up to 15 minutes and the screen went off. Switched it back on and it was at 2%. It then lasted something like 30 mins before auto shutdown. Black isn't Black! check out my the photo "Black Dim The Phone.jpg" - ignore the strange black specs, it was 1 seconds exposure at F1.4, with the camera facing down - think there's some crap in my camera body/lens.
Minimum Brightness, White Image:
100% 00h00m
0% 10h20m
Again, Battery status stated that Screen was 85% and Android System was 16%. That's the same as when I ran it on Min Brightness, Black Image...
Maximum Brightness, Black Image:
100% 00h00m
0% 10h52m
Battery status stated that Screen was 90% and Android System was 11% (again 101% also probably due to some rounding going on). Screen was on 100% of the time, Android OS was awake for 100% of the time, CPU time 23 Seconds
Overview:
Maximum Brightness White Image: 5h00m
Maximum Brightness Black Image: 10h52m
Minimum Brightness White Image: 10h20m
Minimum Brightness Black Image: 10h47m
Well, well, what's happened here? Maximum brightness with a black image scored the longest run time - unbelievable, right? Yeah pretty much: On the minimum brightness black run I did check the battery stats a few times. The black image run had a greater Android OS drain (11% vs 9%) compared to the white image. As I switch the phone off in preparation for the test it's possible I inadvertantly bump charged the phone. In addition to this, I was trusting the phone a lot more in this, the final test and didn't check the battery status near the end, so perhaps drawing a lower current happily sitting there doing nothing other than displaying a blank image the phone managed to syphon off the last dregs of power, as opposed to spending CPU time with me rummaging through the settings screens for battery stats. Let's put it all down to being in the margin of error and consider the Black images to have the same run times, despite the Android buttons blazing away on Bright (but they aren't many pixels).
Conclusion:
Back to my original concern, that the screen was abusing the battery more than necessary. I'm mostly happy with the outcome - Black bright and dim screens draw substantially less than a very bright white screen on this phone, as it should. It's surprising to see that on dimmest setting the white screen got so close to the run time of the black screens. It's producing a lot more light than either black screen. It's drawing c5% more power than the black screens, but I would expect a lot more. I'm guessing that the circuitry to run the Screen and the small amount of power used to make the "Black" OLEDs glow dark dark grey draws only a little less than the white screen.
And that's a shame. I wanted to run an app such as "Off-Clock" to have a clock on the screen like the Nokia N8 used to do, but i'm thinking this will eat the battery in 10 hours 20 minutes. Only one way to know for sure....
My initial annoyance that Black never is actually Black whilst the screen has faded. Many of you good folks have pointed out (and after more Googling) that all OLED screens have this, although the reason for it isn't clear. It's either to ease the transition from black to lit by having the LED at the threshold already, power seeping into the circuit somewhere or something else. Who knows, maybe we'd get better run times if the screen was on full brightness but used PWM or a fast strobe to show a dimmer image!
That's all folks, discuss, and remember - continue testing...
I love you for doing this. Please don't stop.
Some tidbits: The whole phone was warm, front and back. Not scary hot, but like a nice hand warmer. The screen shots were actually done after I connected the charger and restarted the phone. You'll see the graph shows it starting to charge, but all the stats are for when it was last on the battery - in the test.
Thanks for testing this.
How do you define min brightness?
The black color, do you mean #000000 hex color code?
That will last days!
Sent from my Nexus S using XDA App
excellent thread that's it's about screen time on no idle time
gogol said:
Thanks for testing this.
How do you define min brightness?
The black color, do you mean #000000 hex color code?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Not too scientifically - I made it black in MS Paint. It's a JPG. I tried it out in portrait and landscape on full brightness and I can't see the edges of anything on the screen, so it's as black as the rest of the black in Gallery. If you have a better way, then I'd gladly take a 16x10 black image if you think it is more black.
Min brightness will be using the brightness slider in settings. I haven't rooted the phone so don't see any way to get it lower. I tried the app "Dimmer" but it's the same brightness as far as I can tell as min setting. Also I figured the min setting was relevant to more users than something they can't easily get to (or probably see on screen!).
Do you have any suggestions? I want to root, but my home PC can't see my GNex. It's being a pig about it and I haven't got Broadband ATM... Hope to root as soon as I can.
Just a quick input. If you just show a picture for 5h how does the cpu perfom in this time? Isn't it really bored?
In addition if you switch it to air plane mode it doesn't use any power for transmitting a signal. I know this point is really tricky due to the fact that not everybody receives the same signal strength.
Isn't there a more realistic way to test it? Like a combination of stability test and the white picture?
Or a slide show with specific pictures, for example a picture with lots of green, one with a lot of red, one with blue, one with white and one with black?
I really like the idea but if we could create something like a standard which tries to simulate real usage that would be great for future testings.
So that we could say something like:
Galaxy Nexus with Vanilla Android -> 5h with XDA battery benchmark
Galaxy Nexus with CyanogenMod 9 -> 5.3h with XDA battery benchmark
We could compare different settings and see how good they perform based on a "standardized" procedure.
Hmm is this probably a bit too much?
I like the idea of a standardized battery procedure for XDA.
Only thing is, i feel like just web browsing would give a better idea, mostly white website sites and it uses data and CPU/GPU still to give real world usage results.
Nebucatnetzer said:
Isn't there a more realistic way to test it? Like a combination of stability test and the white picture?
Or a slide show with specific pictures, for example a picture with lots of green, one with a lot of red, one with blue, one with white and one with black?
I really like the idea but if we could create something like a standard which tries to simulate real usage that would be great for future testings.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Hi Nebucatnetzer, I get what you're going for and think it would be a great test. My original goal was just to see how much of a drain the screen was. I used it on Airplane mode as I do not want to have any other drains diluting the result. As you say, signal strength changes, and so this becomes an uncontrollable variable. I'm only showing a white image as it's the most uniform full power test of the screen I can think of. As the display is RGBG, maybe a greenish white would draw more, but I can live without that - web pages are predominantly Plain White and Text in ICS is white.
I actually think that 9%/10% drain for Android OS may be a bit high for 5 hours. I think Just Pictures may be the cause for it as it does every minute change the image in a slide show... to itself...
pewpewbangbang said:
I like the idea of a standardized battery procedure for XDA.
Only thing is, i feel like just web browsing would give a better idea, mostly white website sites and it uses data and CPU/GPU still to give real world usage results.
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Click to collapse
It was one of the things which annoyed me the most here. Everyone says he has the ultimate tweak to save juice but you never really could measure it.
We probably have to skip the data part due to asimilar signal strengths.
And it would be really cool if we could find something which works for every phone.
pewpewbangbang said:
i feel like just web browsing would give a better idea, mostly white website sites and it uses data and CPU/GPU still to give real world usage results.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Hi! I'm not trying to do a real world test as such. I'm trying to find out how much of an impact a white screen has compared to a black screen. I have a suspicion that the Black screen will draw more than it should do. I've been using my phone on Auto Brightness and at night, min brightness and have found the screen is caning the battery. There's more to the screen than the AMOLED - there's also a MIPI Framebuffer controller, plus whatever interfaces that has to the rest of the phone.
I'm aware that ICS and the other internals of this phone seem quite efficient, so any savings I can make on the screen (which really does suck the juice) should translate into big run time gains... Surely...Right?
If it turns out that there's very little different in battery life between a Black screen and a white screen, then I'll crank up the brightness to revel in its retina destroying beauty. If there is a difference, then i'll stick with my black homescreen background....
The black screen shouldn't draw any power virtually as long as its truly black. SAMOLED functions where black doesn't turn the pixel on so no energy is used. I think the black test has been done by someone, you can probably google it.
We we aren't criticizing you specific we just hijacked the thread a bit sorry for that .
Nebucatnetzer said:
We probably have to skip the data part due to asimilar signal strengths.
And it would be really cool if we could find something which works for every phone.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
would be good if someone could make a benchmarking program which pumps out signals in a set pattern on all devices at set frequencies and at a few different power levels. It would't need to wait for a response from any cells or WiFi routers, just talk to itself and only itself. Maybe this would need too low level access to work, below root.
Then you'd have your predictable Radio part of the test. If it's even possible.
pewpewbangbang said:
The black screen shouldn't draw any power virtually as long as its truly black. SAMOLED functions where black doesn't turn the pixel on so no energy is used. I think the black test has been done by someone, you can probably google it.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Well, I hope a black screen will draw considerably less. We shall see. Or it will be a revelation... Or everyone will get to witness me finding out that my phone is defective. Hahaha... oh...god I hope not...
I may run the black test overnight. It should last the night. If it doesn't I can always hook it up and check the last "On Battery" status as I did earlier. Then I can run two tests tomorrow!
Davidsmonkeyroost said:
would be good if someone could make a benchmarking program which pumps out signals in a set pattern on all devices at set frequencies and at a few different power levels. It would't need to wait for a response from any cells or WiFi routers, just talk to itself and only itself. Maybe this would need too low level access to work, below route.
Then you'd have your predictable Radio part of the test. If it's even possible.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
This sounds more than difficult. Not a clue how one could do this.
As soon as I have my device I'll probably start a thread where we can think about a standardized (what a stupid word) battery test.
Curios how your second test goes.
Instead of the black screen test, amoled screen, you could do a white background with black text. This would give better overall real world stats.
Text generator http://www.lipsum.com/feed/html
Second test - black on lowest brightness - is underway.
Some bad news, which you may already know about: Black isn't black. It's very dark, but the phone isnt switching all the pixels off. I took a photo with my SLR in the dark but can't upload at the moment, will upload tomorrow.
Just took a sneaky look at the stats.
85% 01h26
The draw is 85% screen and 16% Android OS. Yeah, I know they don't add up, but that's what it says.
So far, the draw is higher than I expected for lowest settings with a black image. Odd. The phone isn't warm though, like when the screen was showing a white, max brightness image. It's cold.
Sure hope it doesn't start moaning about running flat whilst i'm asleep...
Last check before I go to sleep: 82% 02h05
Same split of 85% screen and 16% Android OS. Who says percentages have to add up to 100?
Davidsmonkeyroost said:
Last check before I go to sleep: 82% 02h05
Same split of 85% screen and 16% Android OS. Who says percentages have to add up to 100?
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Click to collapse
Most likely rounding bug.
Hi.
Is there a way to increase brightness of my screen pass 100%?
Ive been searching for apps on the store but nothing.
I can't see anything when I'm outside (san diego) and it's kinda annoying.
Thanks
Maz jb rom
Sent from my PC36100 using Tapatalk 2
Nothing?
Sent from my PC36100 using Tapatalk 2
Bump
Sent from my PC36100 using Tapatalk 2
Nah man.
In the instances where something like that is possible is because of inaccurate maximum brightness levels from the manufacturer in regard to the hardwares highest brightness output and it's realtion to software coded brightness level values
(for battery savings)
which is " unlocked " to allow brighter than usual levels which is still the devices 100% level.
None of this applies to the EVO because 100% brightness is already 100% brightness and not 85%
LCD is a non-emissive display technology. The backlight produces all the light you can have, each pixel's behavior is controlled by filters in front of the backlight that can only reduce the final light output from this initial maximum.
(By comparison, OLED is an emissive technology. Drive the pixel harder, more light comes out.)
So the control you are looking for is the one that controls the backlight.
If you can find a way to make it go brighter than its nominal "100%" brightness level, go for it.
This sounds like a hardware level hack.
Note that perceived brightness does not increase linearly with increased power supplied to the backlight. At the top end of the range, a 10% increase in apparent brightness could cost much, much more than a 10% increase in battery consumption. Do you really want this?
Sent from my PC36100 using xda app-developers app
Damn that's true about the battery.i dont really need it all the time just sometimes its pisses me off that i have to ignore notifications cus i cant see ha
Sent from my PC36100 using Tapatalk 2
Hi guys.....What display setting you like in our ZF2
increasing saturation little bit in customisation mode seems good in phone our phones.....
Been using Vivid since day 1, havent really messed with those settings yet.
Im using reading mode at lowest settings...since zenfone 2 has highest screen battery consumption on screen panels when at use...base on other forums i saw...i think it would lessen up the battery drainage a bit...and i block the notification of spendid too.
I also use reading mode. And I manually set brightness to 70%. If I am outside for any extended period, I will switch to vivid and 100%.
I use vivid but with the colour temp cold for whiter whites.
I use balance mode and reading mode in the evening.
Kept it on balance and never touched it.
Sent from my ASUS_Z00AD
Hello,
I've been using this device for about 5 months now and the battery life for me has been great so far, but there's so much you can do when you need the juice in your battery last longer. In order to help those who want to get the best battery life out of their phone, I've compiled a list of things I do to make my phone last longer.
We'll go from the things most effective to the least and mind you, all of these can be done without rooting of using ADB etc. So let's start
'''Turn on Gray Scale'''
As we have an AMOLED screen, turning on grey scale will give you an improvement in battery life of around 25-35 %, and it's especially noticable if you use your phone in high brightness mode.
'''Dark theme'''
Dark theme obviously saves battery on our phone, there's and awesome guide on XDA guiding you to do it without rooting or using any theme engine.
'''Set brightness to 50%'''
Our eyes don't perceive brightness linearly, so 100% brightness will take around 50-70% percent more battery than 50%, but going much lower won't help either cause increasing brightness from 0-50% results in around 20-30% extra power draw.
'''Restrict background running of less used apps'''
You can restrict an app from running in the background and this setting is baked right into the App Info settings,
Go to app info and tap on battery usage, from there, restrict the app.
'''Enable data saver'''
This can be enabled via Quick Settings menu and this can drastically save battery if you're mostly on Mobile data.
'''Turn off Auto Sync'''
It is long known that doing this can save a bit of battery.
'''Enable Battery Saver'''
Pretty self explanatory.
'''Change minimum width'''
Set minimum width to anything less than 400, this leads to less information being displayed on screen which results in lower usage of GPU, and thus better battery (somewhat)
'''Reduce animation duration scale'''
This will speed up everything and improve battery life just a bit.
And that's it from me, if I remember anything else, I'll make sure to add it, and please make sure to tell me anything that works for you, I'll happily add it.
If you want to get absolutely the best battery life out of your device, you must install a custom kernel. I'm using Fenix currently.
Also, turn off printing service. This idiotic thing is turned on by default. It keeps sucking battery for no reason at all. I'm not using stock ROM now but you can find it by going to: Settings>Bluetooth & Devices (or something similar)
Can you post the link of the thread for enabling dark mode I would like to try that.
Another tip - switch to airplane mode, mobile network is one of the biggest battery consumer..
But seriously, how does greyscale mode save the battery? Instead of glowing one of the subpixels for displaying a color, all of them must be shining to provide different shades of white color. It might even use more power.
Width change and animation duration scale have some very interesting thinking behind them, it will have absolutely no impact on the battery.
Dudes, just enjoy and use the phone. Why do you want to cripple your experience just to gain extra few percents of battery per day? If you're living of the grid, there are much better phones for such a lifestyle.
_mysiak_ said:
Another tip - switch to airplane mode, mobile network is one of the biggest battery consumer..
But seriously, how does greyscale mode save the battery? Instead of glowing one of the subpixels for displaying a color, all of them must be shining to provide different shades of white color. It might even use more power.
Width change and animation duration scale have some very interesting thinking behind them, it will have absolutely no impact on the battery.
Dudes, just enjoy and use the phone. Why do you want to cripple your experience just to gain extra few percents of battery per day? If you're living of the grid, there are much better phones for such a lifestyle.
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Click to collapse
There's an XDA article comparing battery saving with AMOLED on black and grey theme, you might want to check it out, or you can also watch a video by Mrwhosetheboss to see how it went for him. As for animation speed and DPI, they have the least effect on battery life as I've stated above. Kindly do some research before you start making claims.
FranzScarrey said:
Can you post the link of the thread for enabling dark mode I would like to try that.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
It requires you to have Magisk tho.
RizwanH20 said:
There's an XDA article comparing battery saving with AMOLED on black and grey theme, you might want to check it out, or you can also watch a video by Mrwhosetheboss to see how it went for him. As for animation speed and DPI, they have the least effect on battery life as I've stated above. Kindly do some research before you start making claims.
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Click to collapse
Where exactly in the article does it say that monochrome display saves power over colored one? Actually it's you who started with unique claims, so please provide some proof.
I am using note10+ since Sep19 with a factory screen protector. A week ago I have removed the protector.
Now when I observe the status bar area its shade is a bit different than the whole display.
It's not visible easily, you have to observe it strongly to find a difference in the shade of colour.
This difference ends just below the camera module.
So it may also be normal and I have never observed it.
Since my phone warranty is going to end next month I thought to get it repaired if its a screen burn-in.
If you guys can check and confirm from your devices it will be great.
Not normal. Use this apk to detect display anomalies:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/...est&pcampaignid=APPU_1_zkc5X73-NamAtgXx_Zj4AQ
OLEDs do not "burn in", that's a CRT phenomenon where the electron beam physically burns the phosphors.
OLEDs have a finite lifespan. As they age their light output weakens.
White puts the most wear and tear of the OLEDs as all 3 c OLED colors are active.
Blue has the shortest lifespan follow by green than red.
The green wavelength is where human vision peak sensitivity is at, so less is more so to speak.
Use black for background whenever possible to increase efficiency and OLED lifespan.
>Keep brightness below 50% when possible<
>Avoid using over 80% and only briefly if so.<
>Keep out of direct sunlight whenever possible.<
Adjusting brightness manually gives you more control, better battery life and less headaches.