Gadgetory

hello i'm gary sims from android authorities now you may have noticed that some smartphones have the option to enable sunlight readability or sunlight view ability now when this mode is enabled the idea is that photos and text are clearer when you're outdoors in bright sunlight so the question before us today is what is sunlight viewability and how does it work well let me explain now there are a couple of different sunlight viewability technologies out there and the one i'm going to concentrate on today is called assertive display which is from armless arm who make the cortex processors and the Mali GPUs now arm have this technology which enables video and photos and games and text to appear better when you're watching your phone outdoors now additionally when your phone is being moved around from indoors from outdoors to room with more light to route of less light the phone automatically changes the brightness of the display and you can actually override that of course in the settings but when you put it on automatic there's a photo sensor on the front of your phone that detect how much ambient light there is and then it powers the display accordingly now when you're in a darkened room you know what a bright display could is bad on the eyes and things appear to white and too sharp but when you go outdoors and there's lots of ambient like you need the phone to work harder so that it's light is able to kind of be better stronger than the light that's around it now the problem with sunlight readability is that there is a limit to how much brightness a display can make depending on the quality of display depending on the type of display the levels of the brightness will change but at the end once the photo sensor detects as bright sunlight it will push that display up to its very maximum and there it stops there's nothing more it can do but when you're using sunlight readability technology like assertive display then there's another trick that the phone has up is provoking sleeves so the solution to this problem of sunlight readability is actually to use a technology called tone mapping and what happens in tone mapping is that the picture itself is processed so that things that are darker appear to be lighter while things that are already light remain exactly the same very similar roughly to what we see with HDR displays and HDR photography now what assertive display does is in combination with the photo sensor when it senses strong amount of light it actually processes the image that's on the display so that actually the darker things have more detail and the lighter things don't get washed out by always having to pump up the brightness and there's also an interesting side effect because the image is being present and this happens in real time which means it's not just about photo it could be films and games anything that's happening on the screen because it's being processed now actually it turns out you can see lower the brightness a bit so actually you go out into bright sunlight that is the image is processed for a greater readability in sunlight and as a result the brightness can't be pushed down of course that means battery saving in fact armed record you can actually get up to 50% battery saving in some circumstances by lowering the brightness but by applying assertive display now the best way to see what I'm talking about is with a demo okay so for this first experiment here I've got the peaking light which is quite assertive display built into that and I've enabled it in the settings and here we have a picture that's a mixture of dark and light here is a some clouds and there's a road and a pathway in some bushes as you can see there's quite a lot of contrast between these two areas now I'm about 50% of the display brightness now and now only doing the maximum is going outside to the display automatically bumps up the brightness so we'll just bump up the brightness and manually now and we can see that a bit more of the picture is clearer some of the road there is clear as it was before but now that the phone bumped up its Vaught its brightness up to the highest level what else can it do to make this display more readable so what I've got here is a basically little torch and I'm going to shine this torch on the photo sensor on the display to mimic us going out into much brighter light and as you can see here now look at this how this pathway has become visible the graph there is much more visible if you start to need some detail to in the bushes but the sky area here hasn't lost haven't become all whited out bleached out because it's increased of rightness it actually only mapped tone map to the areas that needed improving so we can see this picture more clearly okay so as a comparison here I've now got the Google pixel phone here and I've got the while a p10 light here most of the same photo and you can see that actually the display on both devices is pretty good there's a deeper range of colors it appears to me here on the pixel but basically there's the same problem here I can't see the pathway very well and a lot of detail here amongst the trees in the road is lost so I take my torch here and if I shine it brighter on the pixel absolutely nothing happens once is that full brightness because it doesn't have a sunlight display or assertive display it can't do anything but again we go back to the while we P 10 which has got a certain display in it and you can see how the tone mapping is applied there so the colors come up here definition comes up here in this darker picture again the same two foes I've got the pixel and the Huawei p10 light let's set both of them now to 50% around about 50% brightness just what I can kind of charge with my eye there and let's set this one to 50% points well approximately okay so there we have both devices and as you can see again the sky is bright look match colors of blue here and the clouds are mostly all the stuff down here is kind of the detail is lost because it is too dark so let's bump up the brightness to a hundred percent as if we kind of stepped outside a bit we wanted to see a bit more okay and as you can see a bit better now some definitions come out here but again we'll use our trusty torch to mimic bright sunlight and if we go out into even brightest sunlight once the display has reached 100% brightness the backlight or the AMOLED display does nothing more it can do but from the p10 light it can apply assertive display and we can see now here little red detail coming out here in this bottom part of the picture and that's all down to local tone mapping it hasn't increased the brightness of that display now as you just saw the effects of a hooded blade can be quite dramatic so you get a better sunlight readability and you get lower back to consumption out in my books that should make a 30 display actually mandatory in every single Android smartphone however unfortunately is not in fact it's also quite strange because many OEMs don't talk about this function even when it's enabled in their phone they don't talk about it now I actually find it quite hard to kind of go through all the different SOC in all the different smartphones to find one that actually speak about assertive display or sunlight reading display now we do know a few things a couple of years ago Qualcomm announced that the Snapdragon 800 support assertive display and we are assuming that all the 800 range continued to support the xxx display and also as you saw from the video while we have included 30 display in lots of their keyring processors so really a my shout out to the OEM please tell us when you have a certain display in your phone so that we can actually see the benefit that it brings to the display and as for us consumers it come down to this if you've got a choice between two phones that are similarly matched in terms of their processing power and in memory in their storage and and other things my camera quality and you can't quite decide which one to buy always get the one that's got assertive display in it because that will improve the outdoor view ability well I'm going to inform and your authority I hope you enjoyed this video if you did please do give it a thumbs up please subscribe to Angela policies YouTube channel hit that Bell notification icon so that you always get cold when we release a new videos please follow me on twitter and last but not least do go over to hand calm because we are your source for all things Android