Auto brightness not working as it should? - Nexus One Q&A, Help & Troubleshooting

I have been noticing that my auto brightness doesn't work like it did when I first got my phone a few months ago.
Back then it seemed like it changed brightness after a few seconds when it should.
Nowadays it doesn't seem to do that anymore.
Now if I hold my phone close to a bright light, hit the power button and unlock the phone, the screen is very bright, as it should. When I hold my phone in a dark place, it doesn't adjust the brightness. It keeps being very bright.
BUT, if I hold my phone in a dark place and hit the power button and unlock the phone, it's dark, but when I move my phone to a brighter location it does make the screen brighter.
I first thought this had to do with CM, but now on stock froyo it does the same thing.
Is this normal, and am I just mistaken? And should the phone adjust the brightness when I hold my thumb on the sensor thats just right under the power button on the front of the phone (I expect the screen to be less bright)? Because it doesn't do that.
Thanks in advance.

No it's not normal, mine reacts to changes in ambient light in a second or 2 (FRF50), just like yours used to.
When I cover the light sensor with my thumb, the screen dims right down.

Thanks for your reply.
Is there anything I can do to check why this doesn't happen on my phone?
Can I perform a check on the status of my sensor, on it's behavior?
And are there any known reasons why this could happen?
Thanks in advance.

This exact issue is happening with me ever since I updated to 2.2. It worked perfectly before but now I notice that once the screen adjusts to maximum brightness in a well lit area, it never dims....don't know what the problem is. But I hope there is a solution.

Good to hear I'm not the only one with problem, that gives me hope this might be a software issue rather than a non-working sensor.

Rusty! said:
No it's not normal, mine reacts to changes in ambient light in a second or 2 (FRF50), just like yours used to.
When I cover the light sensor with my thumb, the screen dims right down.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Actually I may have to take this back, in retrospect, the dimming actually could have been the screen timing out.
When covering the sensor with my thumb and not having the screen set to 15secs, it doesn't dim until I lock/unlock the screen.
Reading on another forum this is by design rather than a flaw, as people complained the screen would fade in and out in certain light conditions... now it can't.

Ah, okay. Good to hear.
Thanks again, Rusty.

froyo seems to fix the autobrightness for me, at least now i can see the screen brightness is changing according to lighting condition, previously i don't notice it (using cyan ROM prior to froyo).

Related

light sensor problem

i have a problem with light sensor. sipmply is not working.. when i turn it on the screen goes to lowest settings.
I installed the "water level" program an i see that there is always at 926 lumens. any idea whats wrong?
i try hard reset but the problem persists.
What I did for it to actually start working was I put the "On battery power" all the way to power save, and then selected "auto adjust backlight.
I might look stupid here, but my screen goes dimmer in a pitch black room, and brighter when there is a lot of light. Is this how it works?
Vector-SS said:
I might look stupid here, but my screen goes dimmer in a pitch black room, and brighter when there is a lot of light. Is this how it works?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
That's right - if the environment is darker you don't need that much backlight for the screen to be readable. The more light is shining at the display the brighter it has to be in order for you to see anything. It's really more of a power saving feature...
for the record:
i return my device as DOA and now i got a new one that is working fine .

Froyo FRF85B Ambient light sensor only working one way

Hi, I am new to these forums and bought my nexus one one month ago. After the recent froyo OTA my ambient light sensor only brightens my screen. If the light dims and even when there is no ambient light it fails to lower the brightness and will stay bright forever.
I have tried using wipe cache and a complete factory reset from recovery mode. After this I even reflashed the official froyo OTA which is found on these forums. I am a new user and can't post links yet.
This is an AT&T, Rogers/Fido phone and it is stock. Can someone please confirm and see if this ambient light senor problem is an actual bug and exists on other phones. If not then what can I do to fix it as it was working properly before.
Yes, I have FRF83 (T-Mobile version) and that seems to be the case for me, as well: the display will only dim when I first hit the power switch to bring it out of standby. It will increase the brightness when the ambient light becomes brighter, but not vice versa. I hadn't really noticed it until now.
My suspicion is that this is intentional. The original software on the Nexus One generated a lot of complaints that the screen brightness changed unpredictably, that very minor movement of the unit would make the brightness change repeatedly. At least this way, the screen is guaranteed not to be inappropriately dim, but you will still get most of the power-saving benefit when you turn the unit on in a low-light environment.
I too believe this is intentional, I'm sure I read about it somewhere.
Alright, thank you for your responses. It would appear that they did this intentionally. As long as it's not a problem with my hardware only, I just got worried.

Screen brightness bug under diffused sunlight (as in when put on a car mount)

I use my phone regularly for navigation with waze. One thing that is really annoys me is that when it's really sunny and bright outside, the phone display dims down to minimum brightness level. Brightness doesn't change even if I touched the screen. If I cover up the (brightness sensor?) on the top left part of the phone, the screen is bright again.. It seems like diffuse sunlight is causing some sort of weird thing with that sensor. I tried to point a flashlight directly on the sensor and the display brightens like it should. Only when there is diffuse sunlight, it does this weird behavior.
Anyone else seen this?
EDIT: I am on 5.1 leaked soak test. I am pretty sure I had the same thing happen when on stock 5.0
I've had that happen on other phones by different manufacturers as well. Very annoying, the only fix I had was to just disable auto brightness.
Such a good feature, but haphazardly implemented it seems.
Sent from my Moto X

[Q] Droid 4 backlight failure on automatic brightness.

Hello!
I wonder if anyone had this issue. Yesterday suddenly the backlight of my XT894 started to act weirdly. When i pressed the unlock button, the screen would go very bright and then shut off after 2-3 seconds, but I still could swype the unlock screen and hear the unlock click, even with the dark screen. With a little bit of external light I could see the image was there, but the backlight of the screen was not on. I went on to the power shortcuts and disabled the Automatic brightness control, and as soon as I did that the display turned on, very dimly but it turned on. When I set the brightness control to maximum, it still is very low. If i set the brightness to minimum, its almost impossible to see anything. In display settings, the automatic brightness is unchecked and the brightness fader is set to maximum.
I started suspecting the light sensor, so I went ahead and downlaoded a sensor tester app, and the light sensor appeared to be reporting the light levels correctly - low readings in the dark, and much higher readings in direct light.
Is my phone backlight dying? Any idea if this might be due to defective mainboard, or the display itself?
I already did some repairing on the phone myself, so I am comfortable dissassembling it and changing parts. Few months ago I changed the main board because my old one had a broken usb connector, and it worked fine until now.
Any advice would be greatly appreciated!
Thank you in advance!
Best regards,
Konstantin
If I remember right, by default, the maximum auto-brightness is still lower than actual maximum, so if the screen can barely be seen at manual max, it makes sense that the screen is pretty much unviewable with auto on.
Idea:
If you have it installed, boot into Safestrap and see if your brightness is normal.
If not, pull up the diagnostic menu (hold Vol - while powering on iirc, might be Vol - and +).
If your brightness is normal in those, it's probably something gone wonky in Android. If not, your screen backlight might be going and needs replaced. I don't think there's anything on the mainboard that would cause it, aside from the circuitry actually supplying power to the backlight...
Screen replacement actually isn't terrible for the D4, if it comes to that, since it's not fused to the glass (like certain single-piece phones for example...*sideways glance at the S3*).
Hello!
Thank you for your reply!
Effectively something is very wrong with the device. Today I woke up to find it completely unresponsive, had to turn it off by holding the power button for a while. When it turned on again, the whole screen was white with glitchy color lines since the very reboot, and nothing else happens, couldnt even turn it off without unscrewing the battery.
I will put the old main board to see if the other one died.
Thank you again!
Best regards,
Konstantin

Max brightness bugged, help me pls

I am experiencing automatic dimming of my screen when set to maximum. The big thing is Adaptative Brightness is Off. I also set Power Mode to High Performance to make sure power management would not dim. I even bought an app that supposedly cranck up brightness beyond system limits (did not work)
I first noticed this when taking pictures of my garden in bright daylight, the screen was dim and even going over the orange marker on the dial I still struggled to view the screen (sun was almost 90 degree angle).
However when I placed my hand over the screen I could see well but then I noticed a sensible dim. At first I thought it was some king of optical trick, so I tried to repeat the experiment in different conditions to the point that I would simply crank up brightness and have a strong light over my phone then I used a black sheet of paper just above sensors. If I take the sheet off the brightness ramp up a bit, if I put the sheet over the screen dims. And again no auto Adaptative Brightness is turned on neither Power Mode in save.
I guess this wasn't supposed to happen, if I want to ramp up brightness as much as I want I should be allowed and the system should not interfere with my preference? I don't need to justify my use to anyone but as a courtesy to those that are inclined to help me, here it is: I work a lot with gardening and construction all day, including strong daylight, and I need to take a lot of pictures for my work.
What can I do to squeeze this bit more brightness from my Note 9?
Thanks a lot.
felcas said:
I am experiencing automatic dimming of my screen when set to maximum. The big thing is Adaptative Brightness is Off. I also set Power Mode to High Performance to make sure power management would not dim. I even bought an app that supposedly cranck up brightness beyond system limits (did not work)
I first noticed this when taking pictures of my garden in bright daylight, the screen was dim and even going over the orange marker on the dial I still struggled to view the screen (sun was almost 90 degree angle).
However when I placed my hand over the screen I could see well but then I noticed a sensible dim. At first I thought it was some king of optical trick, so I tried to repeat the experiment in different conditions to the point that I would simply crank up brightness and have a strong light over my phone then I used a black sheet of paper just above sensors. If I take the sheet off the brightness ramp up a bit, if I put the sheet over the screen dims. And again no auto Adaptative Brightness is turned on neither Power Mode in save.
I guess this wasn't supposed to happen, if I want to ramp up brightness as much as I want I should be allowed and the system should not interfere with my preference? I don't need to justify my use to anyone but as a courtesy to those that are inclined to help me, here it is: I work a lot with gardening and construction all day, including strong daylight, and I need to take a lot of pictures for my work.
What can I do to squeeze this bit more brightness from my Note 9?
Thanks a lot.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Try the the twilight blue app filter. It works wonders with the bulb features on your phone
jd14771 said:
Do you have a screen protector? Could something be obstructing the sensor on top?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
no screen protection at all

Categories

Resources