Fenix 8 AMOLED has ambient light issues

There would be minimal change to the battery life of the watch if the ambient brightness of the watch in low light environments is changed from too dark and unreadable to slightly brighter and readable. 

I just found this thread to learn that Garmin doesn't plan to fix the Fenix 8 being too dim to read, even when the display brightness is set to the maximum value. It's an $1100 watch that I can only use in my office or the gym. Every time I've tried to use it on a trail run, or do anything outside, where lighting levels vary, it's entirely illegible. Now I learn that that's a feature, not a bug. Not funny.

I need to be able to turn off this ambient light sensor bug/feature and keep the light level fixed at a setting of my choosing. That's the fix.

This problem has the odor of a hardware decision driving software features. Amoled displays are prone to burn-in. Maybe the Fenix 8 Amoled watch face simply isn't up to the task of being legible brightness for very long, so they gate the light levels as much as possible so we don't burn the Amoled, even if it means the watch is useless for 50% of why we bought it for. Or, maybe the battery is underpowered?  There's an answer, and we're not getting it. 

The Fenix 8 does not perform as specified. You would hope Garmin, which manages to create successful software driven hardware products for safety-intensive applications worldwide could manage to solve this freakin' dimmer-on-a watch -ace problem. It's mind blowing that this is even up for discussion, of course this has to work. That's the product you sold us, but not the product we received. Make it work or dump the sensor logic. That's it.

I've sent video to the Garmin support team. 

The brightness control on the AMOLED watches is a big joke anyways. You don't really control the brightness, you just set a threshold on how soon the light sensor should brighten up the display. So even on the highest brightness setting your watch can go dark. 

Then the dimmed state is also completely unaffected by this brightness setting, sadly. 

My guess is the reason why we are not allowed to change the brightness properly is to maximaize battery life. All in all very disappointing.

I think it works more like that: so by each level, you just move max and min to work in different range. But the problem is, how to have low brightness in the middle and top brightness also in the middle.

Good point and nicely presented graph. But real question is, why on Epix 2 pro (which is previous generation watch),  this setting works flawlessly? When I bought the Epix pro 2 prior to Fenix 8, I was really impressed, how integrated light sensor intuitively sets brightness depending on lightning conditions. I had brightness set to medium setting and it is adapting PERFECTLY in every condition - in bright sun or in low light conditions, there was no need to set brightness to max and all information was clearly visible. I guess Garmin went from scratch when building new gui for Fenix 8 and feature is not yet well implemented. If I'm honest for me current bug on Fenix 8 is not life critical for me, but it is really puzzling why discard feature, that was previously extremely well implemented?

Here is comparison video with both watches. Can you spot the difference? 

Epix Pro 2 on LEFT and fenix 8 on the RIGHT, both with same brightness level: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/i_55zj4ePtQ

The video helps demonstrate the issue however it's more pronounced in darker environments. 

Nope, 1/3 brightness setting will still give 100% in the sunlight, and 3/3 setting can also give lowest possible brightness in the dark. 

Correct, it is basically useless. On my epix 2 I always used the 1/3 setting as this would give me a nice dimmed screen- which didn't glow on my wrist, but got only bright if I hold it in the sun. Sometimes it was a bit too dim, because 1/3 means it brightens the screen relatively late, you need more brightness to make the screen brighter.