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Comment by diarmuidie | Hacker News Reader

Most of Garmin's smart watches use MIP transflective displays but that's slowly being phased out for AMOLED

I hope they maintain at least a few MIP options. I have a Garmin and the fact that the display works as well in bright sunlight as it does in a dim room is a killer feature for a device that is explicitly for fitness tracking. The highly-readable, always-on display and the 28-day battery life also make it great as a watch. Obviously, the tradeoff is that it's not good for email or video calls, but if I wanted a mini-smartphone strapped to my wrist instead of a watch, I'd just get an Apple Watch. It seems like a mistake to me to sacrifice the strengths of a product that make it far superior in its niche, in order to try to compete in a market that is already dominated by Apple and Google.

Seems it's definitely showing up in fewer devices. Fenix 8 only offers it on two of the 3 sizes. It remains on the Enduro 3. For those that aren't aware, Fenix 8 blends the Epix and Fenix together. It's available in 3 sizes with two different displays (AMOLED and MIP) but the MIP option only exists on the 2 larger sizes, and AMOLED is on all 3.

There are a couple of other models but they're older, the Fenix 8 and Enduro 3 just came out earlier this month or late last month, I forget as time flies. But there's the Forerunner 955 and 255, then there's the Instinct 2 series (2S, 2, and 2X). There might be others I'm forgetting, but I'm assuming there isn't likely to be a lot of MIP options going forward.

Coros watches are MIP though, which I would probably switch to if Garmin stops making affordable MIP watches... the pricing on the Fenix 8 and Enduro 3 are nutty. $800+

That's a shame, because the transflective displays were really nice for not blinding myself at night.

Garmin has rolled out a sleep mode feature that makes the AMOLED watch face sparsely populated, and you can set the brightness to the lowest setting for sleep mode.

Compared to my watch set to the lowest sleep mode brightness, the brightness in this image is not set to the lowest level (probably for the purposes of showing the sleep mode watch face features), but this gives you some idea:

https://media.dcrainmaker.com/images/2022/01/Garmin-Epix-Sle...

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