There’s a good reason for a suddenly bright display
In some situations, the iPhone’s display shines particularly brightly, even if the luminosity was previously set to the highest level. But how can this happen? There’s a very good reason for that, and we’re going to tell you about it now.
The typical maximum luminance (candelas per square meter or nits) of a modern iPhone is 625 or 800 nits. Yet actually, the screen can do even more. Sometimes parts of the display light up up to an incredible 1,200 nitsso almost twice as bright depending on the iPhone. But you can’t get an Apple cell phone to shine like that manually via the control center, it only happens automatically in certain situations. And when is this the case?
Extremely bright iPhone screen? Cause: HDR!
Whenever content is played back according to the HDR standard – i.e. certain photos and videos. Like the name (High dynamic range Image) says it is about High contrast images with high dynamic range. Apple writes regarding the iPhone screens on their own website:
“Super Retina and Super Retina XDR also feature High Dynamic Range (HDR), which delivers a wide range of dark and light areas in photos and videos. Deep black and brilliant white are also displayed, as are the many intermediate levels that add excitement to the image. Photos come alive – and in Dolby Vision, HDR10 or HLG, they captivate the viewer even more.”
Robert briefly explains what HDR actually is:
These iPhones master the feature
In short: Bright is then really bright and brighter than the highest level in “normal operation” of the iPhone. Just to make this clear HDR is not an Apple invention. The standard can be found also for televisions and other smartphones. Suitable content, for example certain films on Netflix, is also displayed there with corresponding brilliance. By the way, not every iPhone is compatible to said technology and shines like that. Specifically, you can use the “brightness boost” das iPhone 11 Pro, Pro Max, the entire series of iPhone 12 (from the mini to the Pro Max) and of course the new models iPhone 13 (mini) and iPhone 13 Pro (Max). However, the basic iPhone 11 and older models fail at this.
And why can one said maximum brightness of Don’t manually select 1,200 nits? There’s a good reason for this, and it’s probably because of the screen durability. They don’t shine that brightly for their entire “lifetime”. If you want to have something of it for a long time, the brightness level shouldn’t be set to “stop” all the time. In this respect, Apple also protects the customers a little bit from themselves if you want to.
