Database Users

Backlight for touch-keys

Does anyone know how backlight is suppose to work for Home, Menu, Back and Search keys? Is it suppose to stay on as long as the screen backlight stays on or is it certain amount of time? What triggers them to come on- key press, screen touch, trackpad touch or all of the above? Mine don't seem to follow any rhyme or reason, at least I couldn't trace a pattern. I know that I was messing around with the phone last night in the dark and they would come on and go off as they pleased. Does light sensor have anything to do with it? Please sound off your findings and ideas.
Thanks!

Mine don't seem to follow any rhyme or reason either - it's a bit maddening. And the same goes for the backlight of the physical keyboard (sometimes it comes on, sometimes it doesn't - no telling why), and also the automatic adjustment of brightness (i use the phone for a minute and suddenly it gets super-bright).
Hopefully these are all just bugs that will be fixed with an OTA update, but it is weird and I'm glad to know it's not just my unit since I don't want to replace it (I got a solid hinge - good stuff!).

I think I figured it out. Backlight for touch keys is controlled by light sensor and also has a timer (few seconds), so if it's bright enough outside - they will not even come on. If it's dark - they come on and stay on for certain time then go off untill you press one of them again.
Now, the other thing that I'm noticing is that my haptic feedback is not working when pressing one of those buttons or long-pressing the screen. Anyone else has that problem?

I have used my phone primarily in the dark. All my lights are always on (when the screen is) and the auto-brightness is too bright. If I turn brightness to minimum, the always on lights are way too bright compared to the screen. I really wish the designers had tried to use this phone in the dark (laying in bed) and realized the auto-brightness and lights are too bright in pitch-dark!
Also I am getting real sick of rotation. On my G1 I could disable it completely unless the keyboard was out. I like to lay in bed or on a couch and use my phone sideways, but not rotated. This seems impossible to do on the G2. Disabling rotation doesn't do anything for 3rd party apps or even GMail for that matter. For some reason this was not the case on the G1.
It will be hard to go back to the G1's one-second+ lag after every press and the incredibly slow loading webpages now that I have experienced the G2, but there are too many really annoying problems, so I think it is getting sent back.

if you have your backlight set to automatic... it will cut on only if the room is dark... check your backlight settings

It's an issue with the way android uses the light sensor. It's very poorly coded.

Should I Switch My S4 for Another One?

I got my S4 last week and it's great. This one doesn't have any lag, or at least not anything that concerns me. However, it does have screen issues, especially with the light adjustment. Sometimes the screen will randomly go full brightness for a second and then go back to normal, I notice this when accessing messaging sometimes. I know it also does this for Instagram, but it is suppose to do that.
Now, sometimes it seems like it does a colorshift. the screen will appear less blue and more yellow. It did this when I was accessing the facebook messenger app once and maybe another one. I might be making this up, but it just seems like the color changes ever so slightly. Also, once in a blue moon when it is adjusting screen brightness, all these vertical black lines appear for a microsecond on certain parts of the screen, it seems like an even distribution of lines. Reminds me of something old game boys might do.
I am very happy with the phone though, and I don't want to switch it if I don't have too. However, if another version might not have these issues, I want to switch ASAP, I only have a week left to swap for a new one. After that, my 14 days are up and they said they would only give me refurbs. :[

Do it.
I'm stuck with a defective screen 16GB because the 32GB did not come in on launch day which was my last day to return.
My only option at this point is to get another 16GB that's refurbished from warranty.
The irony in all this is that I manage the kiosk where I purchased the phone on my personal account.
My employees' phones and demo don't have the same screen issues I have.
Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I337 using xda premium

There is a setting in accessibility that called color adjusment mess with that and see if that helps it
Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I337 using xda app-developers app

I will check out the settings. The events that this glitches happen are rare, but it has only been a week and they have happened numerous times. The auto lighting adjustment sucks, times when it should be bright it's not. Plus the black line stuff that happens sometimes. If all of them experience this I dont want to trade in for another one. I don't want to risk trading my working phone for one that won't work so well.

DuffmasterFresh said:
I will check out the settings. The events that this glitches happen are rare, but it has only been a week and they have happened numerous times. The auto lighting adjustment sucks, times when it should be bright it's not. Plus the black line stuff that happens sometimes. If all of them experience this I dont want to trade in for another one. I don't want to risk trading my working phone for one that won't work so well.
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I would swap it if I were you.. I came from the HTC one because of repeated problems and switched to the s4... I've only had it a few days now but have only experienced some lag (fixed by tweaking settings) and the auto brightness is a little slow to adjust sometimes (I've always though this about all my Samsung devices).. But no color changing or bars appearing.. Just my 2 cents..
Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I337 using xda app-developers app

that is partially due to the type of color meter and ambient light sensor type (should be a 40-something segment black and white unless my info on the sensor specs are off. i believe apple has designed a proprietary multisegment rgb meter for theirs). b/w meters get lumens correct, but not perceived brightness (human eye is not the same as a sensor).
the color changing issue you are having may be due to the display mode being set on auto (start, settings, display mode) and under lighting that the sensor cannot correctly meter for (fluorescent lights flicker at the same hertz as your AC current, and are actually pretty dim and WAY off for color balance, so that SHOULD throw the sensors off continuously, which would lead to auto brightness hunting and inaccurate selection of the 'correct' color mode).
try turning auto brightness off and color mode to professional photo or movie (i use move as its very flat and closer to real colors). there ought to be a way to trick the ambient brightness sensor to sample and average at a faster rate, and ramp up/down more smoothly, but i cant code for android otherwise i would have been working on one.
i work in tv/film industry on the sensor/lighting side btw. if the issue goes away, turn on auto brightness and check it out under NON FLUORESCENT lighting. if its gone, it was probably the display mode changing along with auto brightness.

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Slade8525 said:
that is partially due to the type of color meter and ambient light sensor type (should be a 40-something segment black and white unless my info on the sensor specs are off. i believe apple has designed a proprietary multisegment rgb meter for theirs). b/w meters get lumens correct, but not perceived brightness (human eye is not the same as a sensor).
the color changing issue you are having may be due to the display mode being set on auto (start, settings, display mode) and under lighting that the sensor cannot correctly meter for (fluorescent lights flicker at the same hertz as your AC current, and are actually pretty dim and WAY off for color balance, so that SHOULD throw the sensors off continuously, which would lead to auto brightness hunting and inaccurate selection of the 'correct' color mode).
try turning auto brightness off and color mode to professional photo or movie (i use move as its very flat and closer to real colors). there ought to be a way to trick the ambient brightness sensor to sample and average at a faster rate, and ramp up/down more smoothly, but i cant code for android otherwise i would have been working on one.
i work in tv/film industry on the sensor/lighting side btw. if the issue goes away, turn on auto brightness and check it out under NON FLUORESCENT lighting. if its gone, it was probably the display mode changing along with auto brightness.
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I had no idea the S4 had these options. I guess I am used to my Atrix which didnt do much. I went in and adjusted the settings. The auto screen brightness never really did a good job, I feel that it is way too dim in situations where it should be brighter. I will text your advice the next week and see what happens. If I still get issues, I will return it as I have one week left of my 14 days. Thank you very much for the excellent advice!

DuffmasterFresh said:
I had no idea the S4 had these options. I guess I am used to my Atrix which didnt do much. I went in and adjusted the settings. The auto screen brightness never really did a good job, I feel that it is way too dim in situations where it should be brighter. I will text your advice the next week and see what happens. If I still get issues, I will return it as I have one week left of my 14 days. Thank you very much for the excellent advice!
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Click to collapse
no problem; the auto brightness on the GS4 is only slightly better than the Atrix 4G (had one too), and same as the GS3. The color mode thing (which is awesome; closer to real life colors versus waaaay oversaturated screens on most phones. also check power saving settings.
also see this thread
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?p=41616076#post41616076

Well, I have not seen those black lines since I turned off auto brightness and turned off the screen automatically doing it's own color adjustments. I will turn these back on to see if I can duplicate the issue. I do feel that I have more lag now, but I could just be paranoid.

OK, when I am using my Facebook Messenger App, sometimes these black lines appear horizontally across the screen on low brightness. However, sometimes they dont. I dont want to call them black lines, but maybe I should say they are ghostly tv lines that are barely noticeable. Ideas?

Could someone explain the defective screen issue?, mine looks great...

The phone works great most of the time and is totally useable, the only issue is that sometimes it does these weird things as I have explained. Tomorrow is the 14 day mark, so I am having a hard time deciding if I should switch for another one just in case, or assume all of this is normal and hope the phone lasts me 2 years.

DuffmasterFresh said:
The phone works great most of the time and is totally useable, the only issue is that sometimes it does these weird things as I have explained. Tomorrow is the 14 day mark, so I am having a hard time deciding if I should switch for another one just in case, or assume all of this is normal and hope the phone lasts me 2 years.
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Could possibly be a GPU issue. Have you had any problems playing heavy duty 3d games?
Sent from my GT-N7100

No problems playing the Iron Man 3 game, everything seems fine.
It seems like any time the keyboard is pulled up, the screen shifts color to something more yellow. all of the keys go from a nice grey to a off grey yellow tint color. During this transition, I can literally see the screen transition as weird lines appear for a fraction of a second, like switching channels on an old TV. I tried recording this on my DSLR 1080P camera but it could not pick up the color change visibly. I might try again. It does this on Google Chrome, Facebook Messenger, Snap Chat even. sometimes it color shifts even when the keyboard is not involved. I have the auto adjustments on the screen off and the color set to Standard Mode.
The ATT store said I am a day out of my 14 day limit and there is nothing they can do. They said I have to talk to warranty and see if they will be nice enough to send me a new one. I dont want a refurb, last time that happened, I went through 4 of them. I talked to ATT support and they said they would extend my 14 days another 3 days but the ATT store said I was out of luck for an exchange for a new phone.

So no one elses screen color shifts to yellow when the keyboard pops up? Mine does this now all the time, mainly in low light. It might do it in all light situations but in sunlight I prolly just can't see it. It's incredibly annoying because the screen itself wacks out every time it does it.

Screen color changing? Negative effect?

Has anybody experienced any issue with their screen colors seemingly fading out to create what almost looks like a "negative" effect? It's like it gets very bright and washed out. It's fixed by turning off the screen and turning it back on, but I don't think I should have to do that. Anybody experience anything similar to this?

volrus said:
Has anybody experienced any issue with their screen colors seemingly fading out to create what almost looks like a "negative" effect? It's like it gets very bright and washed out. It's fixed by turning off the screen and turning it back on, but I don't think I should have to do that. Anybody experience anything similar to this?
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This I believe happens on Galaxy S5 Mini (I have it) where when it is set to Auto Brightness and I go outside under direct bright sunlight, the screen will boost brightness beyond the manual Maximum setting that you can set. In turn though, the colours on the screen will go psychedelic where things look very bright and washed out. When I go back inside, usually it stayed extremely bright, soI had to put it to sleep then wake it up again to put the psychedelic brightness back into sense.
On the Note 4, I tried this yesterday, colours didn't go crazy, it stayed pretty much spot on, but I still had to put it back to sleep and wake it to fix the brightness.
It's possible I wasn't patient enough to wait for it to return brightness back to normal after leaving direct sun light, but I did give it 10 seconds and it didn't go back.

I got the same experience with my note 4. At the beginning I thought that it was an issue with my screen. But it could be good to know if it is or not. If one day I will get a black broken screen... This issue appears only under the sun light.

volrus said:
Has anybody experienced any issue with their screen colors seemingly fading out to create what almost looks like a "negative" effect? It's like it gets very bright and washed out. It's fixed by turning off the screen and turning it back on, but I don't think I should have to do that. Anybody experience anything similar to this?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Have you tried disabling the "Adjust screen tone" under display settings to see if it has any effect?

volrus said:
Has anybody experienced any issue with their screen colors seemingly fading out to create what almost looks like a "negative" effect? It's like it gets very bright and washed out. It's fixed by turning off the screen and turning it back on, but I don't think I should have to do that. Anybody experience anything similar to this?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
its brightness boost happens in bright environment if you close the auto brightness it will be gone. its not an issue. but gets too bright when not needed sometimes. but in direct sunlight where manuel max brightness not enough it helps alot and it doesnt look weird in a situtation like this.

Screen brightness settings?

I came from a Nexus 5 and had to always leave my screen brightness on about 1/3 in order to preserve battery. After playing with my 6P for over a month, I feel like the battery can handle a brighter setting (with my usage). But, I have concerns about burn-in if I put the setting too high since this is an AMOLED panel.
What brightness settings are you using and have you had any issues with burn-in?

I will get this started. I first started by activating the Adaptive Brightness under the display settings.
It makes the screen dimmer - to my eyes even though it sets the overall brightness to exactly half way.
I thought my whites looked somewhat grey at that setting so I turned it off and put my screen back down to 1/3 (LOL) and I am pleased with the results - especially at night as the whites look whiter.
anything past half at night burns in my retinas much less the screen.
I have not noticed any less Screen on time. I still get about 4.5 - 5 hours until it hits 15%. This is with location turned on and email push. I don't use twitter, facebook or any of those social apps the young people are using these days.

Is there an easy way to dim the screen to the point where you can't see the picture? I stream the phone in my car, which means it will get hot with charging, screen on, and high usage simultaneously. Since it is an AMOLED screen, it would not allow for screen off like other devices. Seems like without this, burn in would be a big problem for me.

I would think that you could just do the 2 finger swipe to bring it to the default menu. Then set the slider down as low as possible until you can barely see anything. I took a 5 hour drive today with my Nexus 6P with the girlfriend and had it plugged in for at least 2 hours at a time. My phone did not get really warm while either plugged or when running on battery.
Also I have enabled the System UI Tuner and now my phone screen only stays on when plugged into the power source if I select "stay on when plugged in"

mhughes1966 said:
I would think that you could just do the 2 finger swipe to bring it to the default menu. Then set the slider down as low as possible until you can barely see anything. I took a 5 hour drive today with my Nexus 6P with the girlfriend and had it plugged in for at least 2 hours at a time. My phone did not get really warm while either plugged or when running on battery.
Also I have enabled the System UI Tuner and now my phone screen only stays on when plugged into the power source if I select "stay on when plugged in"
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No burn in issues? I would think there is a way to reduce brightness beyond stock but I don't know enough to do that at this point. Perhaps through Xposed it something.

Travillion said:
I came from a Nexus 5 and had to always leave my screen brightness on about 1/3 in order to preserve battery. After playing with my 6P for over a month, I feel like the battery can handle a brighter setting (with my usage). But, I have concerns about burn-in if I put the setting too high since this is an AMOLED panel.
What brightness settings are you using and have you had any issues with burn-in?
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I had a gnex that I kept on low brightness and refused to get another nexus until battery was straightened out. On my dmaxx, I kept the brightness high and no burn in on the amoled. The 6p isn't as good at battery, despite being huge, but it's good enough. I keep it on 60-100 brightness, using lux to adjust it as needed. No burn in so far

Nightclick & LCD vs AMOLED

Last night, I went to use my night clock app with my new LG v20. On my Note 7, the screen was totally 100% black except for the numbers.
On the v20, the entire screen was stil lit - faint, but clearly still lit up in a light light grey.
Is this just how an LCD screen works, or is there something I have to do in order to get the rest of the screen to go off.
(Note, this includes the 2nd screen which was also lit - and I had the brightness at 0%).
--
BTW, this may need to be a separate thread - on my phone I notice that the auto-brightness tends to be too dark. Any way I can adjust it to be brighter when in auto mode, or should I just go to manual ?

polstein said:
Last night, I went to use my night clock app with my new LG v20. On my Note 7, the screen was totally 100% black except for the numbers.
On the v20, the entire screen was stil lit - faint, but clearly still lit up in a light light grey.
Is this just how an LCD screen works, or is there something I have to do in order to get the rest of the screen to go off.
(Note, this includes the 2nd screen which was also lit - and I had the brightness at 0%).
--
BTW, this may need to be a separate thread - on my phone I notice that the auto-brightness tends to be too dark. Any way I can adjust it to be brighter when in auto mode, or should I just go to manual ?
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Try turning off second screen and see what your results are.. Second screen has a seperate black light that slightly bleeds out to the rest of the screen. It was horrible on the V10 but much improved on the 20..

Swizzle82 said:
Try turning off second screen and see what your results are.. Second screen has a separate black light that slightly bleeds out to the rest of the screen. It was horrible on the V10 but much improved on the 20..
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The night clock app has the option to turn off the notification, which also turns off the 2nd screen.
...oops. It did, until I followed your suggestion in the other thread about the more setting to enable time/date when in full screen or notification bar hidden. I'll have to get into the habit of turning *off* the more setting at night.
(Either way, doesn't help with the slight gray background color. I can probably just get used to it as long as I'm not damaging the screen by having it slightly on all night. I need to google if LCD screens have burn in problems I guess.)
--
Maybe I should just start pm'ing you all my questions

polstein said:
Last night, I went to use my night clock app with my new LG v20. On my Note 7, the screen was totally 100% black except for the numbers.
On the v20, the entire screen was stil lit - faint, but clearly still lit up in a light light grey.
Is this just how an LCD screen works, or is there something I have to do in order to get the rest of the screen to go off.
(Note, this includes the 2nd screen which was also lit - and I had the brightness at 0%).
--
BTW, this may need to be a separate thread - on my phone I notice that the auto-brightness tends to be too dark. Any way I can adjust it to be brighter when in auto mode, or should I just go to manual ?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I use this on all my phones since I feel stock auto is too dim. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.velis.auto.brightness
polstein said:
The night clock app has the option to turn off the notification, which also turns off the 2nd screen.
...oops. It did, until I followed your suggestion in the other thread about the more setting to enable time/date when in full screen or notification bar hidden. I'll have to get into the habit of turning *off* the more setting at night.
(Either way, doesn't help with the slight gray background color. I can probably just get used to it as long as I'm not damaging the screen by having it slightly on all night. I need to google if LCD screens have burn in problems I guess.)
--
Maybe I should just start pm'ing you all my questions
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Sent from my LG-H830 using Tapatalk

Use comfort view on low or medium. Will help lower the ~9000K color temp some and help blacks a hair. Faint glow is typical on LCDs. Higher quality LCDs and higher quality led's can help. Lg skimped here. Sucks they didn't even give us color modes to pick from. The colors are waaay off. But using comfort view dims the blue pixels and helps considerably.

polstein said:
On the v20, the entire screen was stil lit - faint, but clearly still lit up in a light light grey.
Is this just how an LCD screen works, or is there something I have to do in order to get the rest of the screen to go off.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
That's just how LCD works, they need CCFL or LED back light to lit up the screen, it's not possible for it to be completely black while turned on. With AMOLED the individual pixels can turn off itself which is why the black are blacker on them. OLED screens also have very high refresh rates which eliminates flickering, this is good for people who are concerned with eyes health.

Lcd doesn't get burn in, but it can get ghost image retention. It was f***ing horrible by the end of my V10 usage.. Never had the problem on the G2 3 or 4. Just the V10, even after factory resetting.

Swizzle82 said:
Lcd doesn't get burn in, but it can get ghost image retention. It was f***ing horrible by the end of my V10 usage.. Never had the problem on the G2 3 or 4. Just the V10, even after factory resetting.
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Had the same issue my V10, that is my biggest V20 concern. . My v10 was not even a year old.
I get the engineering and cost reasoning, but not sure I like the lcd screens.