How does automatic brightness work on our electronic devices?

 

What if the screens of our electronic devices do not have the "Auto-Brightness" feature? You must have been in such a situation someday. Remember with me when you went out into the daylight and could no longer see anything on your device screen, like a black screen? You then did not have the auto-brightness setting turned on! Surely you have now realized the importance of the auto-brightness feature, despite its simplicity, that our current smartphones and even laptops belonging to modern generations are so smart.

 

Generally speaking, auto brightness is a common function on smartphones of any platform that you may be familiar with. Thanks to this feature you no longer have to worry about regularly adjusting the brightness every time you go from a dark place to a very bright one. Rather, it will detect by itself the change in ambient light, no matter how simple it is, and thus the screen brightness will change automatically based on the conditions that surround you, hence the concept of automatic brightness. So, let's see how this impressive feature protects your eyes!

 

Automatic brightness mechanism

 

So how do our smart devices know how much light is around us? Hidden in the folds of our devices are tiny little gadgets called sensors that make our lives so much simpler! In fact, your phone and laptop have dozens of these sensors inside. For example, it has motion sensors, proximity sensors, accelerometers, ambient light sensors, and more. But the latter is the hidden culprit behind the automatic brightness!

 

As we know, smartphones and laptops mostly have LCD or OLED screens. Although they work in different ways, their ultimate effect is to shine a light on your eyes through the screen. Therefore, since the light may be harsh in some dark ambient conditions, or it may be non-existent to the extent of lack of visibility on the screen in strong lighting conditions; These tools offer brightness adjustments. It uses what is called an ambient light sensor.

 

Usually located on the top of the speaker, this is what you notice when your phone's screen turns off as soon as you place it to your ear during a call. The concept used is very similar to that of LDR (photo resistance). Where the current passing through the resistor depends on the intensity of the light falling on it, which reflects the brightness of the lighting on the screen.

 

In contrast, the ambient light sensor is a slightly more complex sensor that connects using appropriate software. Simply put, a light sensor measures external brightness to measure the amount of ambient light present. Depending on different environments, light sensors detect changing lighting outside and send information to the screen, which automatically adjusts its brightness.

 

The goal of the auto-brightness feature

 

When you are in a dark environment, and you want the screen to be dim so that the sharpness of the screen does not hurt your eyes, and when the sun is shining, you want the brightness of your screen to come alive. As a result, you may want to adjust the brightness to match the lighting around you. When you do this multiple times during the day, it gets really boring and stressful.

 

Here began to appear the primary goal of this feature! Simply put, the sensor can detect when you are outside in direct sunlight and when you are lying in bed with the lights around you turned off. Thus, it in turn adjusts the screen brightness accordingly. In addition to intelligent brightness, this feature also provides better visual effects in different environments to protect your eyes with good energy saving!

 

Knowing that each setting has its own lighting range that depends on the outside lighting. This technology makes your device smarter and easier to use. for example; Brightness under direct sunlight is approximately 100%, under cloudy skies 70%, in an office or room it is around 50%, in dark bedroom conditions it is less than 25%, and so on.

Generally, with the rapid development of technology these days. Auto-brightness didn't stop here but evolved along with the advancement of electronics of all kinds. Where artificial intelligence is being used even in small tools, and the so-called “Adaptive Brightness” has appeared, which is a feature that relies on artificial intelligence along with the light sensor, which understands the way you change the brightness yourself and does it on your behalf; Where this feature appeared largely on Android devices.

 

While for Apple devices; The evolution was by providing the “True Tone” feature on some of its devices, and it uses a greater number of sensors, including color temperature sensors, to change brightness in addition to adjusting the color temperature to reflect your surrounding environment.

 

After all, it's no secret and nothing new that phones and computers are very smart. But we have to delve deeper into the intelligence of these devices that constantly improve our experience and learn how their technologies work so that we are aware of all their details and not let them be smarter than us as consumers. is not it!