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Disappointing Screen Brightness?
- Thread starter shadow82x
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I do, yes, to preserve battery. However even when I'm plugged in, the display doesn't seem all that bright.
The problem is that "3 clicks from the max" isn't necessarily indicative of anything. While we might expect that setting to mean 70% of maximum possible brightness, that might not in fact be the case. Comparing both displays at maximum brightness would be more useful.
Starting with iPhone 7, full screen brightness can only be achieved through the auto brightness feature in light which warrants it (as reported by Anandtech).
Perhaps the new MacBook Pros have the same thing - max brightness on the manual adjustment may not be peak brightness (or "boost" brightness as Anandtech called it). Maybe take your MacBook out into the sun to see if it seems brighter?
Perhaps the new MacBook Pros have the same thing - max brightness on the manual adjustment may not be peak brightness (or "boost" brightness as Anandtech called it). Maybe take your MacBook out into the sun to see if it seems brighter?
There isn't much you can do settings-wise besides run some calibration software and have it apply a custom ICC profile to the display. Compared to a desktop monitor, laptop calibration is extremely limited.
Can you chime in on your thoughts between these two? I don't see much written out there comparing them.
I am up in the air right now between the 13" Macbook Pro non-touchbar I7 16gb 512gb and the 12" 2016 Macbook M7 8gb 512gb. I am coming from a 2013 i7 8gb 11" air and spend my days as a software engineer
Here's what I noticed. I think the display is in fact brighter, but the controls are definitely different than previous MBP's. I feel like on my 2013 MBP I can keep the display at about 50% and see fine. Whereas to get the same screen brightness on this one, I have to be at about 70%. Yet from 70% to 100% the screen brightens like 2-3x faster. 100% is ridiculously bright. Granted, I'm comparing this now in a mildly lit room at nighttime, but.. My 02.
I got mine today and calibrated to my desired 100nits for photo editing. The max setting was 516nits. However on this new 2016 the 100 nits is a bar or two above middle. On my 2012 it is a click or two below middle. So the range is different and this new one seems to be on a log curve getting very bright in the last few clicks but really dim in the lower half of the scale.
I think it is probably a battery saving technique. iPhone had a lot of posts about the same issue as well. I have the 15, and at 75%, its very good, but not vibrant. I just tried a 4k movie on Netflix, and needed to turn it all the way up for a vibrant picture.
Update - I was at the Apple Store exchanging mine for a defect and had a perfect opportunity to compare next to the older MBP's. It turns out the new MBP's are indeed far brighter. Greatly. The brightness scale is just very, very dim at low brightness.
Here is a color calibration for the new 2016 MBP. It uses the Spyder4Express hardware calibration tool and was done in a dark room with max brightness.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/47ehoovysjr402s/rMBP13-09Nov16.icc?raw=1
ETA: To use it, place it in your user folder under: Library\ColorSync\Profiles - then select the profile in your Display - Color System Preferences.
It's definitely brighter than my 2013 13". Max brightness on the 2016 is almost painful.
Max brightness literally hurts my eyes on this thing. But it may come in handy out on my deck on a bright sunny day. The scale is a bit odd as the lower half is essentially useless unless in a very dark environment and even then the lower 1/3 is too dark.
Was able to measure the peak brightness on mine finally, it hit 500 nits exactly. At 3 bars past the halfway mark it hits 120 nits (my preferred brightness level) and at both 500 and 120 it was nearly dead-on for a 6500K white value, even before any calibration.
But keep in mind that Apple's factory calibrations are usually already very good (around or below the visibility threshold) so it will probably make a different screen worse as every panel has it's own unique deviations.
If it was this easy to improve they would do it at the factory
Indeed. I definitely wouldn't apply a profile generated from another device to your own. I've already found that mine is very accurate out of the box. So much so that I found the calibration from i1Profiler to do a little worse job actually, but I need to try a few different settings with that program still as I'm used to calibrating with NEC SpectraView.But keep in mind that Apple's factory calibrations are usually already very good (around or below the visibility threshold) so it will probably make a different screen worse as every panel has it's own unique deviations.
If it was this easy to improve they would do it at the factory