Go Gray, Not Cray: Why You Should Grayscale Your Phone(sami.eljabali.org) |
Go Gray, Not Cray: Why You Should Grayscale Your Phone(sami.eljabali.org) |
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: back to baseline. Are you sure you actually have a problem with your screen use? I feel like grayscale is mostly for people who can't stop Instagram scrolling/YouTube habits.
In my experience, I hated looking at a gray screen, so I just stop using my phone when it's in grayscale.
They said “spend effort ensuring other meaningful time-draws are around that are more fulfilling/less damaging”.
Relevant excerpt:
> the actual problem is finding meaningful activities to replace your empty screen time, which isn't necessarily easy.
Since iOS of a couple of versions ago, you can trigger color filters on and off from shortcuts, and get a similar behaviour, but it isn't perfect and sometimes glitches. I do this so my photos app and a few others are in color, but the rest are in grey scale.
Scrolling is no longer interesting, and food looks un-appetizing. Making the digital reality look boring is a good deal to make the real world look more exciting.
Thanks to comments from @jtbaker and @SkyPuncher I just added a shortcut to the "pull out" menu so I can now turn off when I need to work with pictures where colors are important.
They can just follow through with the self-imposed restrictions on the actual problem.
If you want to limit social media time, then limit your social media time. Can't? BW screen won't help you.
I did try setting my phone to grayscale during the day but didn't see much if any benefits there.
It has been pretty great to use. The whole paradigm changes, because it also has the slow refresh, and the screen is physically different, single level brightness.
Funnily enough, I now catch myself with increased short term anxiety and FOMO. I've just acknowledged it as withdrawal syndrome from the dopamine of short form videos. That and I misplace the phone a bit more now because it's no longer a crack pipe.
It's taking effort to stick with it, but I increasingly love it. And I still get to partake in "society" and social media, just on my own terms.
You also realise just how many ads there are, because they don't draw you in so you can see them more critically. What I thought was one in 20, is actually something more like one in 4
I am also wondering if simply having the filter showing in between colour and grayscale would improve battery life as well?
Edit: didn't last long (about an hour). Needed to show some one a photo and had to turn it off.
I’ve tried this, and it is a hindrance to some of the critical apps I use regularly, such as Camera, Maps, Messages, and occasionally the Phone App.[1] Of course, you can set shortcuts in the Control Center, double-tap the back of your phone, and all of that jazz, but it is slower, and the UX is a hindrance when you need it.
Instead, have the minimal App on your HomeScreen to avoid distractions as much as possible and/or remove the usual suspects — Social Media Apps, Games, etc. The idea is to make your Phone boring but just works when you need it. You can continue to use them on your desktop/laptop, which prevents that easy reach when you are not at your desk. Read[2] or write[3] if you are serious about avoiding distractions. If you already use a Smartwatch,[4] you can reduce your phone usage a lot more.
And the eyes work much harder in the Grayscale than in well-contrast colors. I prefer most things minimal; no labels, no text where not needed, learn shortcuts, etc. However, my phone is set to show labels and has higher contrast in the evening/night, while it shows no labels during the day. If I have to glance at it at night while driving or wake up to VIP/critical calls at night, I can see way faster and easier than squinting my eyes or fumbling for the glass. Grayscale is horribly in this situation.
And shooting photos in Grayscale, even if the actual photos are in color, is another blunder. I want to see the shades while shooting to compensate for any errors. Again, especially in the dark (however good phone AIs have become), it will always be either too bright and saturated (compensated by the AI) or too dark with a chance in lens at the last moment, trying to focus elsewhere.
1. https://brajeshwar.com/2024/phone/
2. https://brajeshwar.com/books/
It really is a great fit for this feature.
Maybe the memes about growing up in the 70 and 80s have some truthiness to them.
"Psychology of people thar grew up in the 80s"
I plan to put an NFC tag in my car, so that (while I’m home or working at my desk) I have to physically go outside if I really want to unlock my blocked apps before the end of the preset schedule. Meaning…. in reality…. I’m not likely to.
Some time ago I bought myself eink tablet to try something new and my disappointed with its screen was severe.
Am I wrong?
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 their life. For me the phone usually stays turned off for most of the morning now. It's in a drawer for most of the afternoon/evening. If I'm out and about it's in my pocket or bag on silent. It briefly gets unmuted at times when I'm expecting a delivery, appointment etc. and that's about it. The bar is high because the peace of mind is too great to lose.
What? Why? Why would you even entertain that as a hypothesis?
Thanks to whoever added this
Is this a joke? Is there a real physical effect at play?
A true monochrome screen is a thing, but they are for specialized applications and not used in phones.
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 for any given pixel if using greyscale instead of using colors, just because less of the backlight's area is occluded.
And then: Usability can be maintained while also reducing backlight intensity.
Reduced backlight intensity definitely does have a big effect on battery life.
So -- for LCDs -- it might make sense.
(But even if it makes sense for LCD, the S5 happened to use one OLED variation or another, not LCD. Perhaps there's a non-linear relationship between subpixel brightness and power consumption, and keeping 3 subpixels (RGB) barely-illuminated is more efficient than keeping 1 subpixel (G, say) more-illuminated is?
Or, what I determined to be most-likely at that time: Samsung was simply an uncoordinated wreck that was full of shit.)
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 doing this correctly, the perceived brightness stays the same.
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.
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.
I’m pretty sure the increase in battery life they observed is simply because they’re using their phone less, which is very much the main upshot of the other benefits they listed. The idea that color pixels drain more energy is just obviously nonsense.
> it’s clear to me why they rarely work: ...
and
> boring old discipline is much more sustainable approach
I like the idea of trying a more holistic approach, but grayscale doesn't have to contradict with that. Some people (myself included) can use grayscale as a tool alongside other things.
This is precisely wrong.
To maintain perceived brightness, you want to set the color channels to the original value weighted by a scale factor that accounts for the eyes’ sensitivity to each color channel.
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.
So in terms of practicality: It has none.
And at best, all that these hypotheticals can do is stretch out a battery a little longer by reducing the intensity of backlight that is necessary in order to succeed at using the device in a given level of ambient light.
It has never been my intent to demonstrate "twice the battery life" ["with this one simple trick!"]. That's the path of nonsense, and of chemtrails. :)