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Comment by treesciencebot | Hacker News Reader

backlight is now the main bottleneck for consumption heavy uses. I wonder what are the main advancements that are happening there to optimize the wattage.

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If the usecases involve working on dark terminals all day or watching movies with dark scenes or if the general theme is dark, may be the new oled display will help reduce the display power consumption too.

AMD gpus have "Adaptive Backlight Management" which reduces your screen's backlight but then tweaks the colors to compensate. For example, my laptop's backlight is set at 33% but with abm it reduces my backlight to 8%. Personally I don't even notice it is on / my screen seems just as bright as before, but when I first enabled it I did notice some slight difference in colors so its probably not suitable for designers/artists. I'd 100% recommend it for coders though.

Strangely, Apple seems to be doing the opposite for some reason (Color accuracy?), as dimming the display doesn't seem to reduce the backlight as much, and they're using a combination of software dimming, even at "max" brightness.

Evidence can be seen when opening up iOS apps, which seem to glitch out and reveals the brighter backlight [1]. Notice how #FFFFFF white isn't the same brightness as the white in the iOS app.

[1] https://imgur.com/a/cPqKivI

The max brightness of the desktop is gonna be lower than the actual max brightness of the panel, because the panel needs to support HDR content. That brightness would be too much for most cases

This was a photo of my MBA 15" which doesn't have an HDR capable screen afaik. Additionally, this artifacting happens at all brightness levels, including the lowest.

It also just doesn't seem ideal that some apps (iOS) appear much brighter than the rest of the system. HDR support in macOS is a complete mess, although I'm not sure if Windows is any better.

Please give me an external ePaper display so I can just use Spacemacs in a well-lit room!

Onyx makes a HDMI "25 eInk display [0]. It's pricey.

[0] https://onyxboox.com/boox_mirapro

edit: "25, not "27

I'm still waiting for the technology to advance. People can't reasonably spend $1500 on the world's shittiest computer monitor, even if it is on sale.

Dang, yeah, this is the opposite of what I had in mind

I was thinking, like, a couple hundred dollar Kindle the size of a big iPad I can plug into a laptop for text-editing out and about. Hell, for my purposes I'd love an integrated keyboard.

Basically a second, super-lightweight laptop form-factor I can just plug into my chonky Macbook Pro and set on top of it in high-light environments when all I need to do is edit text.

Honestly not a compelling business case now that I write it out, but I just wanna code under a tree lol

A friend bought it & I had a chance to see it in action.

It is nice for some very specific use cases. (They're in the publishing/typesetting business. It's… idk, really depends on your usage patterns.)

Other than that, yeah, the technology just isn't there yet.

I think we're getting pretty close to this. The Remarkable 2 tablet is $300, but can't take video input and software support for non-notetaking is near non-existent. There's even a keyboard available. Boox and Hisense are also making e-ink tablets/phones for reasonable prices.

If that existed as a drop-in screen replacement on the framework laptop and with a high refresh rate color gallery 3 panel, then I'd buy it at that price point in a heart beat.

I can't replace my desktop monitor with eink because I occasionally play video games. I can't use a 2nd monitor because I live in a small apartment.

I can't replace my laptop screen with greyscale because I need syntax highlighting for programming.

Maybe the $100 nano-texture screen will give you the visibility you want. Not the low power of a epaper screen though.

Hmm, emacs on an epaper screen might be great if it had all the display update optimization and "slow modem mode" that Emacs had back in the TECO days. (The SUPDUP network protocol even implemented that at the client end and interacted with Emacs directly!)

QD-oled reduces it by like 25% I think? But maybe that will never be in laptops, I'm not sure.

QD-OLED is an engineering improvement, i.e. combining existing researched technology to improve the result product. I wasn't able to find a good source on what exactly it improves in efficiency, but it's not a fundamental improvement in OLED electrical→optical energy conversion (if my understanding is correct.)

In general, OLED screens seem to have an efficiency around 20≈30%. Some research departments seem to be trying to bump that up [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-05671-x] which I'd be more hopeful on…

…but, honestly, at some point you just hit the limits of physics. It seems internal scattering is already a major problem; maybe someone can invent pixel-sized microlasers and that'd help? More than 50-60% seems like a pipe dream at this point…

…unless we can change to a technology that fundamentally doesn't emit light, i.e. e-paper and the likes. Or just LCD displays without a backlight, using ambient light instead.

Is the iPad Pro not yet on OLED? All of Samsung's flagship tablets have OLED screens for well over a decade now. It eliminates the need for backlighting, has superior contrast and pleasant to ise in low-light conditions.

I'm not sure how OLED and backlit LCD compare power-wise exactly, but OLED screens still need to put off a lot of light, they just do it directly instead of with a backlight.

The iPad that came out today finally made the switch. iPhones made the switch around 2016. It does seem odd how long it took for the iPad to switch, but Samsung definitely switched too early: my Galaxy Tab 2 suffered from screen burn in that I was never able to recover from.

LineageOS has an elegant solution for OLED burn in: imperceptibly shift persistent UI elements my a few pixels over time

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