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Comment by whycombagator | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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