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Comment by lloeki | Hacker News Reader

> Light backgrounds on screens, especially white, tend to hurt my eyes more than darker ones

It was (and still is, but read on) for me until I realised that it was not light mode but backlight that was too strong. It was actually initially better with dark modes, low contrast stuff like zenburn, or (solarize light or dark) but only got worse later.

The moment I realised that was a backlight (and ambient light, including temperature) issue I moved back to light mode.

The above mentioned solutions have the nasty side effect that people usually increase backlight, which just makes things even worse!

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I usually have the brightness on all my devices very low (10-20% typically, but have to go 100% if I’m outside and it’s particularly bright).

I also use f.lux/nightmode on all devices.

I usually have my phone at 0% brightness, but that I can still see something is a clear indication it's not actually 0%. The screen is still too bright for me if it's the only light source. Same for audio; I basically only switch between mute and minimum volume because everything above is too loud for me.

I hate that there's no way to acess more fine-grained levels below the arbitrarily imposed minimum. I realize most people would think their phone is broken if they could get it into a state where it doesn't produce any perceivable output despite not being explicitly off. I just wish there were some secret handshake I could use to confirm that I'm okay with having to find the brightness control while not being able to see anything; I already do that when I'm outside in the bright sun.

On my phone running iOS, in addition to the brightness slider there is an option under Settings -> General -> Accessibility Display Accommodations to "Reduce White Point", which I can use to further dim the screen.

I think this is nearly identical to using a dark theme; it doesn't actually reduce the brightness of the backlighting.

I have been wondering for a long time what determines the backlight minimum, why can't we go darker? Surely phones can be expected to be used in pitch black?

If you're on Android, you can use Dimmer to go below minimum brightness:

https://f-droid.org/app/giraffine.dimmer

Thanks for the recommendation. Seems like it renders a partially transparent overlay to simulate a lower brightness setting. The notification bar remains unaffected, but I guess it's better than nothing.

Yes. Beware of two things:

1. It can block "Install" button when installing apks from outside of Play Store. Disable it

2. Latest commit is 4 years ago. But I've still chosen it over Red Moon because it's more than 10x smaller (336kB but still very configurable).

My biggest problem with my Surface Go is the backlight doesn't go low enough. 100% is brighter than my phone goes and 0% is still feels like looking at 75% on my phone.

My phone is currently set to 10%

I just recently took the LSAT (now administered on Surface Go) and I saw test takers use the "High Contrast" mode in the software much more frequently than I expected.

Low backlight usually implies bad contrast. I hate this, especially with the modern trend for various shades of grey being used and thus being indistinguishable.

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