iPhone XS New XS - Much Dimmer than iPhone 8

Bought my wife an XS today, serial starts with G0 for whatever that's worth.

She loves it, phone is cosmetically perfect. Screen is nice and even with no bad tints. It is a bit warmer than my 8.

But the biggest thing, holy hell is it dim. Yes, max brightness, auto brightness off, true tone and nightshift off, of course. With the same settings as my 8, the brightness on a plain white page is not even comparable, my 8 is like 25% brighter? I tried to take a picture with my crappy iPad Air 2 but the picture doesn't show nearly the discrepancy seen in real life. I'm not returning the phone, because she's happy with it and couldn't care less (she is a low brightness/true tone user whereas I am a full brightness/no true tone user), but damn that is one dim display.

Don't get me wrong, on it's own it looks great, but when it's next to my 8? Ouch...

 

Right, the most important thing is that it's even and doesn't have hideous yellow/pink tint. I didn't even bother to show her the brightness comparison since she just wouldn't care being a 50% or less brightness user, but if it was mine I would've been really happy with the phone up until that point of comparison.

 

Well here's a pic anyway, crappy Air 2 camera or not. Ignore the fact the 8 looks yellow and the Xs looks pink, in reality they are both quite white, again the Xs is slightly warmer in reality. The iPad Air 2 camera never won any awards for excellence, especially in low light.

The lack of brightness on the Xs is no joke in comparison to the 8, it's more pronounced in person but you can clearly see here there's no question the 8 is brighter.

 

Well, this is embarrassing.

Turns out auto brightness was on, and apparently setting the brightness to max through control center doesn't override that setting and it still will only result in some pseudo max brightness based on ambient lighting? Was looking at the phone again and was just like there is NO way it's this dim, went to look through the settings again, found the auto brightness, turned it off and the display got brighter instantly even though I had already maxed out the control center slider just before this. I thought manually setting the slider in control center to max would actually, you know, give me max brightness regardless of if auto brightness was on or off - guess not.

In any regard, it is equally as bright as my 8 now, but just a little warmer. I feel stupid.

--- Post Merged, Oct 13, 2018 ---

That's right. I think since the 8/X they cap at 500 nits with auto brightness off, and the only way to get to the full 625 nits is to have autobrightness on.