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Go Gray, Not Cray: Why You Should Grayscale Your Phone

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Re: Go Gray, Not Cray: Why You Should Grayscale Your Phone

#31

Post by esperent »

et1337 wrote: post #9

I tried it for a while, it was fun explaining it to people, but didn’t actually help much. I ended up blocking all time wasters except HN, which is almost monochrome anyway.

I set grayscale in my phone's quiet hours settings. It's to help me sleep, rather than to reduce my phone usage. It means if I wake in the night and look at my phone, I'm not blasted by colors. Or if I stay up a bit later than usual. I find it beneficial although probably not revolutionary.

I did try setting my phone to grayscale during the day but didn't see much if any benefits there.

Re: Go Gray, Not Cray: Why You Should Grayscale Your Phone

#32

Post by 1123581321 »

parentheses wrote: post #14

I prefer using the same feature to have an extremely warm (almost red) tone. I think it's much more pleasing than b/w and results in less blue light for me.

I do similarly. Triple tap puts it in night mode, red and black. It’s nice for checking messages in the middle of the night.

Re: Go Gray, Not Cray: Why You Should Grayscale Your Phone

#33

Post by Dylan16807 »

musebox35 wrote: post #30
D-Machine wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They said they found themselves using their phone far less due to the grayscale, which would be the real thing extending battery life here. Or at least, this was what I assumed on reading.

That is likely. Another factor that came into my mind is the gpu using less power due to simpler computations. You can store less data for grayscale, so you need to go over less pixel data to do effects etc. Whether accessibility controls achieve this or not would be implementation dependent I guess.

Even with the best GPU optimizations, most of the data will be processed in full color and then tossed through an extra pass at the end. More likely is that all the data does that.

Re: Go Gray, Not Cray: Why You Should Grayscale Your Phone

#34

Post by dgoodell »

mistercow wrote: post #25
D-Machine wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They said they found themselves using their phone far less due to the grayscale, which would be the real thing extending battery life here. Or at least, this was what I assumed on reading.

Yeah, that’s the only explanation that makes sense. It’s just so strange to think that color pixels would use more energy.

I guess if one color pixel was significantly less efficient, and that color was also overrepresented on the display, then MAYBE changing to grayscale would require slightly less power to display the same intensity. But I don’t think that convoluted scenario probably isn’t what this person was thinking.

Re: Go Gray, Not Cray: Why You Should Grayscale Your Phone

#35

Post by bfkwlfkjf »

mistercow wrote: post #25
D-Machine wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They said they found themselves using their phone far less due to the grayscale, which would be the real thing extending battery life here. Or at least, this was what I assumed on reading.

Yeah, that’s the only explanation that makes sense. It’s just so strange to think that color pixels would use more energy.

Why is it strange? Given that you have no idea whatsoever how pixels work, whats strange is that you have any expectation at all.

Re: Go Gray, Not Cray: Why You Should Grayscale Your Phone

#36

Post by catgirlinspace »

jtbaker wrote: post #7
charlie-83 wrote: post #2

This is such an interesting idea. Might as well try it Edit: didn't last long (about an hour). Needed to show some one a photo and had to turn it off.

I was able to add it as a "Color Filters" "quick control" toggle from the top right drag-down menu (not sure what you call that) in iOS 17. We'll see how long I last with it. I'm intrigued as well.

that menu is control center

Re: Go Gray, Not Cray: Why You Should Grayscale Your Phone

#37

Post by shubhamjain »

I tried this. One week in, I got used to grayscale as well and my screen time was back to the baseline (maybe only marginally affected). After nearly a decade of trying these tricks, hacks, and gamified interventions, it’s clear to me why they rarely work: they fixate on the symptom (screen time, social media use) rather than the underlying problem. Your mind craves to feel engaged/challenged in something. So, the actual problem is finding meaningful activities to replace your empty screen time, which isn't necessarily easy.

If you want to reduce your screen time, the boring old discipline is much more sustainable approach. Put the phone down and replace it with a book, or puzzles, or hobbies, or time with people.

Re: Go Gray, Not Cray: Why You Should Grayscale Your Phone

#38

Post by ssl-3 »

mistercow wrote: post #18
ssl-3 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I questioned the same thing over a decade ago with my then-shiny Samsung Galaxy S5: At the lowest of its low-power battery-saving modes, it drained the color from the screen and made it greyscale. Perhaps it can make sense for LCDs: After all, LCDs operate by blocking backlight. Blocking less backlight (by area ) by using greyscale might make sense: It seems obvious that a higher perceived brightness can be achieved…

> It seems obvious that a higher perceived brightness can be achieved for any given pixel if using greyscale instead of using colors, just because less of the backlight's area is occluded. When converting to grayscale, you typically calculate the value of the pixel and then set all color components to that value. The point of this is to keep the luminance the same as it was in the original color pixel. If you’re doin…

> And just as a smell test: have you ever converted an image to grayscale and flinched away because it seemed twice as bright? Of course not; it just loses its color.

Of course that is the way it is normally done. But it does not have to be done that way; does it?

Guidelines and norms are meant to be bent.

To demonstrate: I may be old, but I've definitely owned monochromatic "paper white" VGA displays that only responded to one channel of RGB and ignored the remaining two; the other two pins weren't even present in the connector. (These were trash for displaying color images without special care in software-world, but they were cheap.)

> The only way you would get more perceived brightness at lower backlight intensity would be if you physically removed the color gels that overlay the LCD matrix. Which is obviously not what they’ve done here.

We can evaluate that.

Suppose we have one ideal backlit pixel displaying FF0000, and that to achieve FF0000 66.6% of the backlight's total output for that pixel are being blocked and only the remaining 33.3% gets transmitted. Two subpixels are occluded; one subpixel allows transmission.

Suppose that with a backlight intensity of 100%, this pixel has a luminous output of 1 unit. (1 of what unit, you ask? For our purposes, it doesn't matter -- it's just 1 unit.)

Now, suppose we double the area of exposed backlight by instructing our pixel to display FFFF00. Our backlight intensity remains 100%, but we have twice as many subpixels allowing that backlight to be transmitted. The backlight stays the same, but our measured luminous output for this pixel is now 2 units.

To continue: FFFFFF. All 3 subpixels allow light transmission. Our luminous output is now 3 units for the same level of backlight.

Thus: With this result of 3 units, we've got 3 times as much light as we had at the beginning -- for the same pixel, with the same backlight, and about the same energy use.

---

To get back to the same 1 unit luminous intensity as we had with FF0000 @ 100% backlight, we can run the backlight at 33.3% for FFFFFF. This saves power.

Our pixel is producing 1 unit of luminosity with FFFFFF, but with only one third of the backlight required to display FF0000 with 1 unit of output.

> The idea that color pixels drain more energy is just obviously nonsense.

That's not obvious to me at all for a backlit LCD.

FFFFFF is always going to be brighter than colors like FF0000, 00FF00 and 0000FF are for a given backlight intensity, which permits the opportunity to reduce the amount of backlight provided, use less energy, and still provide the same luminosity as a color would.

And it accomplishes this without stripping layers out of an LCD panel, or using magical thinking.

Is that what was proposed? Fucked if I know. I find that articles like this (and approximately anything else that has ever been published with the words "you" and "should" juxtaposed in the title) are meant to make people bicker about dumb shit, and I try to avoid poisoning my brain by reading them.

Re: Go Gray, Not Cray: Why You Should Grayscale Your Phone

#39

Post by bfkwlfkjf »

safety1st wrote: post #12
wizardforhire wrote: post #11

You know avoiding the pain, struggle and pseudo-science of gray pixels… you could just turn every notification off and remove any social media. Call me crazy, but I reckon this will go a lot further than any monochromatic color scheme in achieving the desired results.

I tried everything under the sun including the grayscale trick, and at the end of the day there were three things that worked. Putting the phone on silent, putting it out of sight, and simply turning it off. This resulted in 5 hours of phone time per day declining to 1 (it's my companion at the gym plus during most meals and that's OK). Everyone's approach is going to be a little different depending on the rhythm of…

FIVE hours a day? I spend one hour a day and I feel like I'm constantly battling addiction.

Re: Go Gray, Not Cray: Why You Should Grayscale Your Phone

#40

Post by skydhash »

charlie-83 wrote: post #2

This is such an interesting idea. Might as well try it Edit: didn't last long (about an hour). Needed to show some one a photo and had to turn it off.

I ser the Accessibility Shortcut to Color Filter. A triple press of the button toggle the filter.
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