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Comment by alin23 | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately no, Gamma doesnt reduce the power consumption of the LED backlight of the monitor.

It may in fact increase power use a bit because rendering black pixels needs more energy to excite the crystals.

I haven't contacted Apple because I don't think they are interested in implementing such a thing really. I've written more about why I think that here: https://lobste.rs/s/2zajeu/journey_controlling_external_moni...

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One bit of speculation I've read before is that the display brightness on some displays is stored in a cheap EEPROM chip without wear leveling, and constantly writing new brightness values throughout the day will wear it out in a short time span (years)

I’ve read that in a lot of places over the years and even got afraid of it when my LG 4k flickered a bit one day.

But I’m sure I’ve went way past the 100k writes speculated limit with Lunar’s Smooth Transition and by testing Lunar 6 hours a day almost every day for the past 4 years.

It’s possible that this EEPROM issue might not be an issue anymore. Lunar has thousands of active users and there are zero claims of a monitor failing because of it.

It’s also possible that it’s just a problem waiting to happen and I’ll get sued to death in a few years, who knows.

I have a monitor that has "eco" mode, reducing the brightness. Is that a different DCC command or are they implementing a similar gamma reduction? If not could an eco mode be called, if indeed it is a industry wide standard for reducing energy usage?

Brightness is literally just a backlight power level (pretty much), so gamma and eco mode are a completely separate concept. Frankly I have no idea what eco mode means, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's just brightness * 0.75 + contrast * 1.25.

Yep, that sounds a lot like Apple. Thanks for the thorough and interesting writeup on this. I didn't even know I wanted this so badly until now... luckily I still stand a chance I guess.

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