I keep on pestering folks who work at Apple to add color filters to the per-app accessibility options, who knows maybe there's someone there who'll read this. (Edit: there is an internal feature request already)<p>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.
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've been in Grayscale for some time now (almost a month), and it's great. I always wanted to have a phone with an eInk display, and this is pretty close feeling (aesthetically).<p>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.<p>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.
Didn't work for me. App blocker from 9:30 PM - 5 PM. 30 mins Max a day of short form content apps.
Works great with iOS's double/triple tap on the back feature.
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 have color filters set to kick in if I double tap the back of iphone it shuts off everything but red subpixels. Good for preserving night vision.
> Color pixels drain more energy than grayscale ones. Personally found my phone lasting twice as long as before. Over time, a considerable extension of your phone’s lifespan.<p>What? Why? Why would you even entertain that as a hypothesis?
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.
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.
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.<p>Perhaps it can make sense for LCDs: After all, LCDs operate by blocking backlight.<p>Blocking less backlight (by <i>area</i>) 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.<p>And then: Usability can be maintained while also reducing backlight intensity.<p>Reduced backlight intensity definitely does have a big effect on battery life.<p>So -- for LCDs -- it might make sense.<p>(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?<p>Or, what I determined to be most-likely at that time: Samsung was simply an uncoordinated wreck that was full of shit.)
> 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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
Decades ago I had one or two tẽte à tẽte about grayscale <i>not</i> being the same as black and white. You could emulate grayscale with b&w if you had a much larger canvas. In short: Black and white is 2 bits, grayscale is 8, 16 , more? bits<p>Am I wrong?
You're not wrong, Walter.<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C6BYzLIqKB8" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C6BYzLIqKB8</a>
You are correct, grayscale is where every pixel's R = G = B, which for a 24 bit image would include 256 colors.
This is such an interesting idea. Might as well try it<p>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.
I keep it in my control panel so I can flip it on and off easily
On android this is easy you can add a button to the bottom nav bar
«Color pixels drain more energy than grayscale ones. Personally found my phone lasting twice as long as before.»<p>Is this a joke? Is there a real physical effect at play?
They said they noticed themselves looking at their phone far less. Most likely this is what saved the power, just a typical spurious correlation and a bad theory for the reason.
I can't imagine. AFAIK no phone has "grayscale" pixels. Grey or white light is achieved by blending the other colors equally.<p>A true monochrome screen is a thing, but they are for specialized applications and not used in phones.
some oled displays have white subpixels, i dont know if the power cost is a thing though
I actually just recently bought a big me hibreak pro phone. Eink, supports Google Play natively, (I can still install Instagram, Google maps, Facebook, and WhatsApp, etc). Which were my two biggest needs.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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
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.<p>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).<p>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.