Display color

Yep. I love it without the backlight, but it is really hard to see indoors without it. 

Not if you point it to a light source :-)

Hi, it is normal with this kind of displays. The backlight is floating the whole display and not only to the pixels. In direct sunlight it is great, in rooms... just acceptable ;) I returned my first vivoactive 3 because this (came from the fitbit ionic), but turned back because the whole garmin system works better for me.

I would try to get a garmin venu! There is a great display, like in smartphones. It is the same watch as the normal vivoactive 4 but with a "better" display. The VA4 display is great for battery life and for outdoor, but i have no problems with my Venu outdoor. 5 days instead of 7 days on vivoactive 4s is also great. If you make an activity with GPS, the display is not the battery eater, so in an active way of life with much activities, the battery times are similar.

A first hike, here are comparison of the display outdoor (almost the same.. but indoor, the Venu is fantastic too .. without the blue background ;) ).

Thank you very much for your reply. The problem is this is my first, smartwatch, first sportwatch, first Garmin, first display like this. I bought it online so I didn't had a chance to look at it in reality BUT as days go on I'm starting to accept and actually LIKE the way it is. Only downside is, like everyone pointed here, indoors, but for what it was made it's fantastic. 

I guess my expectations were very high, I mean all those commercials in medias with different smartwatches which look beautiful, have vivid colors etc. Besides I read dosen of reviews about different garmin watches and right now I'm really surprised that no one actually write something like: "Hey, the display looks like *** compared to other smartwatches, but because of that it has much better battery life and is totally visible in fulll sun."

They should make the whole interface with white background. The blue tint is noticed harder on black backgrounds.

Also just use 10-20% backlight, this is more than enough for the dark. The blue tint gets worse if you crank up the brightness.

Hey! I have also come from Fitbit, and LOVED the AMOLED screens. But, as time passes, I'm starting to enjoy the VA4S's screen in the outdoor environment. 

Having a few teething problems with the VA4s at the moment, but hopefully I've made a good choice to come across to Garmin. 

I am very disappointed that I spent a lot of money on a watch with a terrible looking display!

The display is ***, but with the current technology you can't have an always-on AMOLED and anything close to 8 days of battery life at the same time. It just isn't possible. And even if it was, you would be experiencing screen burn in issues after a month or so.

I used to have two Fossils (running Wear OS) and their AMOLED screens were vastly superior in resolution and color quality. In real world use though, they could hardly last for a day, and that's if you kept the "always-on" feature disabled. You'd then hope that your wrist gestures or screen taps would wake the watch whenever you wanted to quickly check the time. More often than not, this didn't work as advertised. In the end, I sold them both.

In that regard, Garmins behave more like real watches. A quick glance is enough to know the time. No gestures, no waiting for that gorgeous screen to wake up, no fiddling of any kind. They might not have the best visuals, but they are not smartphones. They do what they were built to do, and they do it mostly well - far better than the competition IMHO.

One thing about the MIP displays like on the va4, is that they are really easy to read in bright sunlight, like if you are on an outside run (it is a fitness device).  AMOLED displays or LCD displays, not so much.  MIP is also much more battery friendly.