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Need a way to turn off adaptive (auto) brightness

Horgh

Dear Garmin,

The Fenix 8 43mm AMOLED is extremely hard to read in dark rooms and/or at night due to the adaptive brightness. That "feature" dims the display in dark environments to the point where older eyes can't read it. In brighter environments it is easy to read, and I can readily reproduce the problem if I turn the display on while my hand is covering the watch. It is absolutely the light sensor that's driving this behavior.

This is NOT an issue with my brightness setting, that's already set to maximum.

This is NOT an issue with night/sleep mode, the problem exists during the day.

This is NOT a problem with my watch face, I'm using one of the default faces.

This IS a problem with the firmware and the fact that there is no way to disable adaptive brightness. This oversight (or terrible design choice) is ruining an otherwise great watch for many of us.

Fix it.

  • 0 in reply to Garmin-Laurie

    Facing same problem not able to see anything 

  • 0

    For everyone having troubles with this: you could try to mitigate this by changing the data and accent color to white. This will increase the brightness of the information displayed noticeably, albeit by sacrificing color. 

  • 0 in reply to inlineskaterdanny

    Yeah, I've found this (white text) makes a HUGE difference.  Perhaps not as nifty as umpteen color accents, but nice to be able to read things when dimming kicks in.

  • 0 in reply to Garmin-Laurie

    Just one more vote...its too dark...in the dark. Like, majorly so. I'm under a light and see something I want to show my wife who is 8 ft away but with the light off in the kitchen, just in ambient light, but fairly dark. The whole watch dims walking just 8 ft and she can't see what I'm trying to show her (a graphic display of my heart rate on a ride). I have to walk her out into the light so she can see it. Not great. 

  • 0

    This is the same behavior in Tactix 8 AMOLED. I agree totally, thousands of settings. I.e. if you are in a almost dark room, the watch dimmed so much, you almost can't see anything. In the 80ies, the first digital watches had a light switch for this.

    Vote for a user setting to disable this ambient light dimm feature

  • 0

    Just received Fenix 8 Pro last night and I struggled setting it up because the display was so dim. I am coming from an Epiix Pro Gen 2 Sapphire and the display brightness of that blows the Fenix 8 Pro away. I mountain bike at night and run before the sun is up here in Phoenix and I can't imagine this adaptive display being helpful in anyway. I thought maybe the adaptive brightness would turn off when using an activity, but nope. As I'm writing this on my Google Pixel phone, I have adaptive display on and I'm easily able to brighten it with two quick swipes  Google engineers understand how thhis feature should work. Garmin thinks this is a non-issue. Not only is the adaptive display terribly developed, but the Fenix 8 pro makes it even worse when selecting menu items. It not only has a background that is not just white text on solid black, but also highlights the rows with ridiculous faded color rectangles when scrolling through menu items. The Epix simply has bright white text on sold black background with a white vertical bar indicating the active row. Maybe this is customizable on the Fenix, I haven't explored yet since I CANT READ THE MENUS IN THE DARK... Yeah my eyes are aging, but I would imagine most people who can afford these watches are of the older demographic, 35+. Hey 25 yr old Garmin engineer, guess when you eyes start to turn to ***?. Sorry, this"feature" sucks, give us the ability to kill it. There is no doubt I will have to return this watch and keep my Epix.

  • 0 in reply to Chris D

    I suspect that the real issue driving this problem isn't at all that the Garmin engineers don't understand it, or even think it not a big deal. I imagine that there are very hard margins being kept regarding battery life, because once a watch gets a "short battery life" review its probably a market death knell. People use battery life to choose between models and brands. I'm going to guess that the engineers would be more than happy to brighten the screen, or put that power in user hands, but it could really hit those very important hardline margins. A few people complaining about dark screens on a forum are likely nothing compared to an influencer knocking the watch's battery. 

  • 0 in reply to 3599408

    There was no battery issue on the Epix pro with same configuration and same type of use but brighter screen. So I don’t think it’s the issue. Should it be the case, they have to optimize their new platform to use same amount of battery than on previous models with comparable hardware. 

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