Ambient Sensor Control

Is it possible to disable or control the ambient light sensor?

the vivoactive wakes on gesture to a dimly lit screen. Its not bright enough and makes the watch too hard to use when you have less than perfect vision.

I've looked and searched and i cant find any way to control it.

I imagine its simple to add a button to disable this?

Top Replies

4576717 7 months ago in reply to Garmin-Tracy +2

Thank you. Definitely this is the watch in AOD mode, then gesture or tap to wake. Once awake, there is two modes. Bright and not as bright. It only uses the bright mode when in a bright environment. eg…
4576717 7 months ago +2

I agree, i will be returning it too. it basically doesnt work indoors, its unusable in low light.

It would be very simple to give us a button to disable this, but until they do its just too dim for me…
9854240 7 months ago in reply to 4576717 +2

I've already made a ticket with Garmin Support and after sending them a video they replied that everything is working as it should be. In other words, you have to use their brightness setting and can't…

All Replies

0 7007939 1 month ago in reply to Rob444

Same issue, returning as well.

0 Lavier 1 month ago

I had a Vivoactive 5. And you could manually adjust it to keep it whatever brightness level YOU wanted. You were able to disable that ambient stuff that is being referred to here, and just keep it to whatever brightness you wanted regardless the lighting conditions. People in this thread that are talking about that it's just fine, which is maybe one or two, they have probably settled on mediocrity and have very very young eyes. This is horrific for a watch that's close to 300 bucks and you have to deal with however Garmin designed it which is to say when in a dark environment it's going to stay looking dark, and you can't do anything about it. It is very difficult to read in low lighting conditions. I've only had it close to 2 days and I was in a restaurant for example in which the lighting was sort of low, and the screen stayed very lowly lit. It was very difficult to read. Garmin has gotten to a point where they're charging a small fortune for practically their entire lineup, and now they're making it so that you can't make adjustments that accommodate what you want. I am returning this watch immediately. You're supposed to become a better company, not worse.

0 6488555 1 month ago in reply to Lavier

I just noticed yesterday this exact same problem please fix it! Without strong light is not okay to read the watch.

0 9824184 10 days ago

Same issue here. The screen is far too dim as soon as there is anything less than very bright light in the room. Indoors in normal or low light it’s almost unusable – I have to really tilt the watch or move to a brighter spot just to read the time. Please add an option to disable auto-brightness or let us force maximum brightness all the time.