Just out of curiosity, does anyone know if it uses more battery to have a "white" screen, or a "black" screen? I assumed it was black that was better for battery, but im also using an AMOLED screen which black means pixels are off
ShadyPossum said:
Just out of curiosity, does anyone know if it uses more battery to have a "white" screen, or a "black" screen? I assumed it was black that was better for battery, but im also using an AMOLED screen which black means pixels are off
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I was under the impression that it doesn't really matter on ePaper type screens. The pixels aren't powered in either state, and power is only consumed for switching the state. This is why it's not recommended to use watch faces with seconds counter/hand, as the pixels on the screen would be updating every second, as opposed to once every minute.
Chahk said:
I was under the impression that it doesn't really matter on ePaper type screens. The pixels aren't powered in either state, and power is only consumed for switching the state. This is why it's not recommended to use watch faces with seconds counter/hand, as the pixels on the screen would be updating every second, as opposed to once every minute.
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I thought that the type of display the Pebble uses actually takes a small amount of power to keep on so that animations are smoother.
Chahk said:
I was under the impression that it doesn't really matter on ePaper type screens. The pixels aren't powered in either state, and power is only consumed for switching the state. This is why it's not recommended to use watch faces with seconds counter/hand, as the pixels on the screen would be updating every second, as opposed to once every minute.
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Zekial said:
I thought that the type of display the Pebble uses actually takes a small amount of power to keep on so that animations are smoother.
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The display is LCD. As Sharp describes it, the display uses different amounts of power depending on how fast it needs to change the image. It's an extremely low-powered LCD, and a static image will draw slightly less power than an animated screen. However, the main drain in power is actually the chipset. That's the primary reason why a static image uses less power–it requires fewer resources and thus the chipset will run at a lower voltage.
I actually stopped using my Pebble last year and opted for an analog watch because my battery life was so bad with FWv2.0.2 (1~2 days). I was getting 4-5 days on FWv1.x. I should mention that I used Canvas to display day/date, missed calls, unread SMS, unread email, current temp (1 hr refresh), current climate (1 hr refresh), and my clock had seconds. Each of these was its own element, and I even had separate elements for the calls/SMS/email icons, but the same watch face gave me a work week of battery life on FWv1.x. I would have just downgraded the firmware, but after growing comfortable with wearing a watch all the time I decided to get a timepiece people would look at for the right reasons.
I'm strongly considering Android Wear, but the current offerings are a tad too wide and the displays too low-resolution. I find aliasing extremely off-putting. It's acceptable on the Pebble which has a retro digital feel, but the 360/G Watch R just look like they have cheap LCDs.
Hung0702 said:
The display is LCD. As Sharp describes it, the display uses different amounts of power depending on how fast it needs to change the image. It's an extremely low-powered LCD, and a static image will draw slightly less power than an animated screen. However, the main drain in power is actually the chipset. That's the primary reason why a static image uses less power–it requires fewer resources and thus the chipset will run at a lower voltage.
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Ok, but that still doesn't answer whether or not dark backgrounds draw more power than light ones.
go test it!!... on ur own
put the screen on white for x hr's (x = number of hour's your pebble could completely drain its battery)
then try the black screen:
put the screen on black for y hr's (y = hr's your pebble could completely drain its battery)
if x > y ... white screen consume less power than black screen
u should try it with bluetooth off backlight off .. = more accurate result ^_^
I tried to search a lot for this as well.. all I found was that for traditional e-paper displays it doesn't really matter. But Pebble uses Sharp's some sort of a modified version of e-paper and e-ink tech so not really sure about that. The tech used by Sharp isn't documented much and didn't find any significant info on that. I guess only the R&D department of Sharp can give an actual solid answer to this.
ShadyPossum said:
Just out of curiosity, does anyone know if it uses more battery to have a "white" screen, or a "black" screen? I assumed it was black that was better for battery, but im also using an AMOLED screen which black means pixels are off
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Click to collapse
LCD tech uses that same power no matter the color. This display uses power to hold the image, color should not play a factor in battery life. The only real factor in battery life is the number of "refresh" cycles (Not 100% true, but true enough for this purpose).
ShadyPossum said:
Just out of curiosity, does anyone know if it uses more battery to have a "white" screen, or a "black" screen? I assumed it was black that was better for battery, but im also using an AMOLED screen which black means pixels are off
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Click to collapse
The main power drains on the Pebble are waking up the processor, changing the display, and Bluetooth communications. There will be power consumed by the display but it's a lot less than the other factors (esp if the display is only changing once a minute or less without any animation). As I recall someone tested with a basic watch face and with Bluetooth off and got well over 30 days before it went flat.
http://www.reddit.com/r/pebble/comments/1zs0jg/inverted_colors_vs_battery/
Related
I've heard that a black screen will use very little energy, so I tested it myself. I put Aldiko in night mode on a blank page for an hour. My phone used 17% battery (97% from the display) in this hour. Was there some flaw in my testing? Did I misunderstand the claim? Is there some setting that I need to change? Or is this normal?
heliumhelicopter said:
I've heard that a black screen will use very little energy, so I tested it myself. I put Aldiko in night mode on a blank page for an hour. My phone used 17% battery (97% from the display) in this hour. Was there some flaw in my testing? Did I misunderstand the claim? Is there some setting that I need to change? Or is this normal?
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just run your charge to 100%, unplug your phone and put it to sleep immediately, and check after an hour.
theres a true reading.
I think he's trying to get a reading of the battery usage with the screen "running" the color black. By putting it to sleep the screen isnt really running. Try the experiment again see if you get the same results. then try it with a white and lets see the difference.
heliumhelicopter said:
I've heard that a black screen will use very little energy, so I tested it myself. I put Aldiko in night mode on a blank page for an hour. My phone used 17% battery (97% from the display) in this hour. Was there some flaw in my testing? Did I misunderstand the claim? Is there some setting that I need to change? Or is this normal?
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Click to collapse
While black uses almost no power, there is a small flaw to your logic. Even though you were displaying an all black screen, anything using CPU cycles in the background is still running (as opposed to if the screen was in sleep mode--which is where the recent bug in facebook came from). The app could also be draining battery waiting for things like touch-sensitive controls.
The claim isn't that black pixels use no power, it's that they use drastically less as opposed to a colored pixel. An AMOLED screen uses a lot of power, and an SAMOLED will at use close to (or more) than that. The idea is that you'll lose far less battery life with a black screen than you will with a screen that's all lit up, which isn't true of a standard LCD.
Kaik541 said:
[...]
An AMOLED screen uses a lot of power, and an SAMOLED will at use close to (or more) than that. The idea is that you'll lose far less battery life with a black screen than you will with a screen that's all lit up, which isn't true of a standard LCD.
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not quite. it depends on what is being displayed.
quoting wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organic_LED#Disadvantages
Power consumption: While an OLED will consume around 40% of the power of an LCD displaying an image which is primarily black, for the majority of images it will consume 60–80% of the power of an LCD - however it can use over three times as much power to display an image with a white background such as a document or website. This can lead to disappointing real-world battery life in mobile devices.
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as far as super amoled: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_AMOLED
Compared with the first-generation AMOLED, the Super AMOLED advantages are:
* 20% brighter screen
* 80% less sunlight reflection
* 20% reduced power consumption
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vizir said:
not quite. it depends on what is being displayed.
quoting wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organic_LED#Disadvantages
as far as super amoled: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_AMOLED
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I assume you're more or less commenting on general power consumption, because both of those things backed my side about how it uses even less power when displaying blacks versus whites. The only thing different than what I said is that wikipedia claims it uses less power some of the time, but more power other times, so I'm not sure which part you're disagreeing with by saying "not quite."
IIRC, black uses little to no power on the SAMOLED display.
Knowing that the screen is the largest power hog, I'm curious if anyone could explain why switching to a mostly, or all black wallpaper (on an already black theme/ROM) does not have any appreciable effect on battery life/usage?
Black = Absence of color
In an ideal scenario, the system should not be rendering those pixels and so save power.
I do understand people saying most of the time they use a black wallpaper. But, practically, how many people are on their home screen and for how long? Most of the time we are all using one app or the other. There may be widgets, etc at home screen, but don't think we spend that long staring at it. Personally I don't think I spend even 5-10% of my display time on home screen. So even if I had a black wallpaper, its hardly any battery saver.
1 hour screen on takes ~20% of my battery. So 3 hours of display ~60% of battery. Assuming 10% of this time I am on home screen with black background. That would less than 6% of my battery.
Further take off the power used for displaying home screen elements, widgets, etc, etc at say 50%. This would bring it down further to 3%. Is it worth saving this 3% battery when we could some nice pleasing wallpaper?
Reducing display brightness tends to help though since lowered brightness means lowered power needed to power up the screen.
All this is based on my understanding of the system.
Edit: U cud try applying dark color schemes to apps that support them, like say k9 mail, root explorer etc. This cud help while u r in that app.
I put quote tags around the word color for specific emphasis on black not being a color lol
I use Serendipity 5.12 w/REDROM- almost everything is already black. I decided recently to see if adding a black wallpaper would help the craptastic battery life- since fidgeting w/kernels and modems did nothing noticeable to help (some combos made it worse, yeah).
Again the post is just out of pure curiosity.
diablo009 said:
Black = Absence of color
1 hour screen on takes ~20% of my battery. So 3 hours of display ~60% of battery.
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I noticed the same power consumption also on my Samsung Galaxy S2 (GT-I9100), and I find it really unbearable, since it means that there is absolutely no way I can get more than 4 hours of continuous use without running the battery flat.
Displays, no matter what, should not drain so much power!
Looking so pretty comes at a price, it would seem.
To an artist with a clean canvas, black is a color and white is not. To a photographer, the opposite is true. It all depends on who you ask.
I couldn't find anything on this and was wondering if its possible. I know it will shorten battery life a lot but I would still like it if the display could always be on.
I think the screen will burn in, same as on the note 3
Sent from my SM-N900P using xda premium
microdot said:
I couldn't find anything on this and was wondering if its possible. I know it will shorten battery life a lot but I would still like it if the display could always be on.
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use this
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.nbondarchuk.android.keepscn
Sideloading the app above might work but I would not expected to say on more than a few hours due to battery life. It is not designed to stay on all the time. Change the screen time out to five minutes and set the wake up Motion and that will help.
highlordkram said:
Sideloading the app above might work but I would not expected to say on more than a few hours due to battery life. It is not designed to stay on all the time. Change the screen time out to five minutes and set the wake up Motion and that will help.
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It's a amoled screen, so black pixels are actually off, right ?
If i use a custom and ultra minimalist clock (2 pixels white on black font, one for hour, one for min) it will use a significant amount of battery if i keep it on ?
I know most of the drain comes from the screen but I wonder if the intensity is at 1 and you have a black background white text how long the gear would last.
At 4 my gear I charge every two days and even then there is a lot of life in the battery.
Baltyre said:
It's a amoled screen, so black pixels are actually off, right ?
If i use a custom and ultra minimalist clock (2 pixels white on black font, one for hour, one for min) it will use a significant amount of battery if i keep it on ?
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Click to collapse
while black pixels are indeed off, i believe just waking up the gear itself will consume more battery, just because it stays 'ready' the whole time.
I thought it would be nice if the watch face was visible all the time but didn't think about burn in. It's probably for the best to leave it as is. Thanks for all the replies.
So over the course of time I have used many different ROMs and also have had 5 batteries for my Note so far.
All ROMs gave me terrible battery life, except the stock android for around the first year, eventually it started giving me terrible battery life too.
So that got me wondering, is it possible that some kind of faulty hardware on my Note's motherboard is causing those battery drains?
[email protected] said:
So over the course of time I have used many different ROMs and also have had 5 batteries for my Note so far.
All ROMs gave me terrible battery life, except the stock android for around the first year, eventually it started giving me terrible battery life too.
So that got me wondering, is it possible that some kind of faulty hardware on my Note's motherboard is causing those battery drains?
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Click to collapse
I'm pretty sure that would be possible, but I'd make sure to rule out any other cause you can rule out first.
First thing to do is check on who or what is consuming the battery, so installing something like CPU Spy will let you know if the phone just keeps running at top speeds.
Because there simply isn't enough juice in these batteries to allow all parts of the phone to run full throttle for hours.
Smart phones are really at their best, when their just sitting idle and then they really shouldn't consume any power. That's what you need to check: Does it really slow down and sleep, when you're not actively using it?
And CPU Spy (or similar tools) will give you that info by telling you how much time the CPU has spent at each speed setting. If it doesn't drop to deep sleep when the phone if off the charger, screen switched off at the home screen but stays running at 100-500MHz, then you have found the reason for the miserable battery life. Now you'd just have to find what's causing it.
And that could be a long story journey...
However you could start with an empty ROM fully wiped, nothing but the ROM and the minimum set of GAPPS installed (and CPU Spy or similar for checking) empty internal SDcard, expecially no media files. If you have an external SD card, best remove that initially so you don't have to delete any data you keep on there.
If then the Note isn't guzzling battery and sleeping deeply when not used, your hardware is fine.
Then it's just a matter of adding item after item, always checking of that is causing any change to CPU states and energy consumption.
You should also try to find out of any of your five batteries has issues and use a known good one for the testing.
abufrejoval said:
I'm pretty sure that would be possible, but I'd make sure to rule out any other cause you can rule out first.
First thing to do is check on who or what is consuming the battery, so installing something like CPU Spy will let you know if the phone just keeps running at top speeds.
Because there simply isn't enough juice in these batteries to allow all parts of the phone to run full throttle for hours.
Smart phones are really at their best, when their just sitting idle and then they really shouldn't consume any power. That's what you need to check: Does it really slow down and sleep, when you're not actively using it?
And CPU Spy (or similar tools) will give you that info by telling you how much time the CPU has spent at each speed setting. If it doesn't drop to deep sleep when the phone if off the charger, screen switched off at the home screen but stays running at 100-500MHz, then you have found the reason for the miserable battery life. Now you'd just have to find what's causing it.
And that could be a long story journey...
However you could start with an empty ROM fully wiped, nothing but the ROM and the minimum set of GAPPS installed (and CPU Spy or similar for checking) empty internal SDcard, expecially no media files. If you have an external SD card, best remove that initially so you don't have to delete any data you keep on there.
If then the Note isn't guzzling battery and sleeping deeply when not used, your hardware is fine.
Then it's just a matter of adding item after item, always checking of that is causing any change to CPU states and energy consumption.
You should also try to find out of any of your five batteries has issues and use a known good one for the testing.
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Okay to begin, the phone never drains battery when idle, never. If I charge to 100% at night around 23:00 , in the morning it would be around 90%. So that seems fair enough. Because I keep my EDGE / 2G activated at all times.
The real problem is when the screen is turned on (doesn't matter what I do).
I tried to keep the screen on for one hour, idle, doing nothing. Battery drained by a whooping 25%. So basically it's my screen which is consuming my battery. I didn't try this when I made this thread, so there's no mention of this in the first post.
So I don't think any other apps are consuming anything. Besides I hardly have any apps installed.
I got the gapps from the following link and installed the 'mini' package.
http://forum.xda-developers.com/par...apps-official-to-date-pa-google-apps-t2943900
Apart from I only have WhatsApp, Notepad, Perfect AppLock, AdAway and Chrome installed. Only a few apps since I did a full wipe yesterday night. Even flashed a stock ROM first and began from scratch.
So I don't really think it's any apps consuming any CPU, only screen is eating a ****load. Could it be the damaged screen?
Holy ****! I just recalled while writing this post, I did get this screen of this phone replace once, like one and half year ago. Could that be it? I did get it replaced from a official Samsung store though.
[email protected] said:
Okay to begin, the phone never drains battery when idle, never. If I charge to 100% at night around 23:00 , in the morning it would be around 90%. So that seems fair enough. Because I keep my EDGE / 2G activated at all times.
The real problem is when the screen is turned on (doesn't matter what I do).
I tried to keep the screen on for one hour, idle, doing nothing. Battery drained by a whooping 25%. So basically it's my screen which is consuming my battery. I didn't try this when I made this thread, so there's no mention of this in the first post.
So I don't think any other apps are consuming anything. Besides I hardly have any apps installed.
I got the gapps from the following link and installed the 'mini' package.
http://forum.xda-developers.com/par...apps-official-to-date-pa-google-apps-t2943900
Apart from I only have WhatsApp, Notepad, Perfect AppLock, AdAway and Chrome installed. Only a few apps since I did a full wipe yesterday night. Even flashed a stock ROM first and began from scratch.
So I don't really think it's any apps consuming any CPU, only screen is eating a ****load. Could it be the damaged screen?
Holy ****! I just recalled while writing this post, I did get this screen of this phone replace once, like one and half year ago. Could that be it? I did get it replaced from a official Samsung store though.
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I'd consider playing with the brightness, just to see of something a little lower is good enough for daily use but I'd say that isn't impossible...
While Samsung liked to hype the fact that OLED would only use power on illuminated pixels, mine are mostly white because reading is what I do most on my Notes.
And then this screen on the Note 1 didn't use particularly less energy than a good LCD backlight screen according to the reviews I remember.
I also remember an article which said that the energy consumption on OLED wasn't linear and that the last 20% of brightness might cost 50% more power (the numbers are most likely bogus but the main point was that brightness/energy consumption wasn't linear).
And yes, there is most likely variation between individual screens on OLED and moreover OLED displays decay with use and over time. I haven't noticed it that much with my Note 1 yet, but my older Samsung Galaxy S I-9000 that I passed on to one of my sons developed a brightness issue: Everything below the first 100 lines or so is significantly darker than the top. I don't know wether that's a consequence of his usage pattern (Whatsapp) or some other reason, but I do know that he typically kept the display at top brightness and also kept it lit far longer than I ever did.
I've always been somewhat disappointed by the endurance of the Note 1 but I haven't really noticed any significant change with the different ROM versions. And since I was also somewhat disappointed by the performance of the device I couldn't resist replacing it with the Note 3 when that came out.
That device was better in pretty much every regard, except screen ratio: I really, really liked the 16:10 of the Note 1 a lot better than the 16:9 of the Note 3.
abufrejoval said:
I'd consider playing with the brightness, just to see of something a little lower is good enough for daily use but I'd say that isn't impossible...
While Samsung liked to hype the fact that OLED would only use power on illuminated pixels, mine are mostly white because reading is what I do most on my Notes.
And then this screen on the Note 1 didn't use particularly less energy than a good LCD backlight screen according to the reviews I remember.
I also remember an article which said that the energy consumption on OLED wasn't linear and that the last 20% of brightness might cost 50% more power (the numbers are most likely bogus but the main point was that brightness/energy consumption wasn't linear).
And yes, there is most likely variation between individual screens on OLED and moreover OLED displays decay with use and over time. I haven't noticed it that much with my Note 1 yet, but my older Samsung Galaxy S I-9000 that I passed on to one of my sons developed a brightness issue: Everything below the first 100 lines or so is significantly darker than the top. I don't know wether that's a consequence of his usage pattern (Whatsapp) or some other reason, but I do know that he typically kept the display at top brightness and also kept it lit far longer than I ever did.
I've always been somewhat disappointed by the endurance of the Note 1 but I haven't really noticed any significant change with the different ROM versions. And since I was also somewhat disappointed by the performance of the device I couldn't resist replacing it with the Note 3 when that came out.
That device was better in pretty much every regard, except screen ratio: I really, really liked the 16:10 of the Note 1 a lot better than the 16:9 of the Note 3.
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I see. Thank you for the time you took to write this reply.
I always have my brightness to the lowest possible and yet I am facing battery drains.
Anyways, it seems this problem is beyond repair. I have literally tried every solution possible and nothing seems to have worked. So I guess it's time to move on.
Thank you for your time and information.
It's probably my screen that's consuming the battery. It can easily last up to 20 hours with 2G turned on the entire day. But as soon as I turn the screen on and start doing something, battery drains at like 1% every 60 seconds.
How old is your battery?.. I´d say get a new one if it´s older than 1 year..
I have the S10 Exynos version unlocked, since new I noticed a dead pixel, whatever not big deal, never took it to warranty, but a few months ago I dropped my phone with case and everything so the frame wasn´t affected but the screen... the glass didn´t broke but the screen did... Appeared some white lines near the edges, some horizontal and one vertical, and the phone now sometimes the screen turns on, sometimes I have to lock and unlock it several times with the button to get the screen to turn on, green tint or flickering on high brightness, etc... Expected problems on a phone with broken oled screen.
My question here is: Does a broken OLED screen waste more energy?
Since the broken screen incident, my phone heats up more quickly when in use, I run out off battery juice in like 4 hours of normal use, and I know the white lines may consume more energy as they are also on max brightness even when I have my brightness set to 1/4, but that much energy? The lines arent even that big, just in the lower and left edges of the screen.
No settings where changed asside from using the windows phone app sometimes, no new apps, adaptive brightness off and almost always on 1/4 intensity, dark mode enabled, screen resolution set to HD+, battery mode on optimized and adaptive energy saving on, no virus according to mcafee built in, and really no changes aside for the broken screen.
Also any ideas for making my battery last at least half day? Appart from changing the screen and doing a hard reset (I can´t afford the screen repair right now as it is 200 dollars in my country) and the hard reset has already been done a month ago with same results