Lack of brightness on the S3?

Frank999

Well-known member
Jul 2, 2011
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One of the most frequent criticisms of this phone is the lack of brightness especially outdoors in sunlight. To the S3 owners here, what has been your experience. I'm hoping the lack of brightness criticism is overblown as this would be a deal breaker for me.
 
It's not overblown, imo. It can be hard to see sometimes, but I've found switching to Negative Colors helps. Found in Settings/Accessiblity. Still a really good phone...probably my only complaint.
 
unclick auto brightness and most important change stock browser to dolphin. this dramatically changed the brightness.

Sent from my AT100 using Android Central Forums
 
I don't see how changing the Browser will make a difference seeing the display making or receiving a call.
 
I had the Dolphin browser installed and didn't notice it making any difference at all in the brightness response of the phone when the browser isn't open. I wound up uninstalling the browser because it really used far more power than it was worth.
 
I can see my s3 screen ok outdoor in sunlight
I don't use auto brightness thats a silly setting the brightness is set way too low

my GT-I9300 quad JB :cool:
 
Turning off auto-brightness in a situation where the phone is being used in direct sunlight won't help. The whole point of auto is so that it sets it to the ideal brightness depending on the light source around the phone. At severe light conditions the auto-brightness is the same as turning off the auto function.

The slight over gloss and major lack of brightness. We tend to think the difference isn't great between competing phones, but in fact they are. One of the things I look at laptop screens when buying are brightness, color, viewing angles. For a windows laptop Mid ~300 to 400 nits are good standards, but they are average if not low for high quality/flagship phones. The iPhone 4/4s has a max brightness of around ~500nits while One X has ~550nits. The S3's is ~330nits. So it's good using in almost all indoor conditions but struggles in the sunniest times.

After Jelly Bean the stock email app also has a severe blue tint/low brightness issue like the stock browser. It is highly recommended to switch to a different browser, can't say about email app.
 
Virtually all of my problems with auto-brightness on super-amoled phones like my Nexus S and GS3 have been solved by using an app like Lux (search for it on the Android market) or by flashing a custom ROM like AOKP that lets you tweak the brightness thresholds.