So NITS is used a pretty common metric for screen brightness. One of the things I’ve found is that this varies massively by screen size, with smaller screens like phones being much higher. To give a simple example, the Apple Studio Display is 27 inch monitor and has a brightness of 600 nits, which looks comparable to other screens of that size. Meanwile, the Apple Watch Ultra 2 has a brightness of 3,000 nits! That’s an insane difference.
You can see this trend all across product lines – eg phones being brighter than laptops and so on. It can’t all be explained by the circumstance that smaller devices are more likely to be in direct sunlight, surely? I feel like there is something inconsistent with the metric at scale. What am I not understanding here?
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cuz a lot of small screens are on your phones and watches that you take outside where its bright, whereas your tv and monitors stay in your room so they dont need to be as bright
An Apple Watch is intended to be used in varying environments, including outdoors, where it is very bright. An Apple Studio Display will almost invariably be used indoors where it is significantly dimmer, even on a sunny day. Large displays intended for outdoor use can be very bright too, over 5,000 nits for some jumbotrons.
companies will just straight up lie about their display NITS. I cant speak to the Ultra 2, but this review of the Series 2 says it only gets up to 450 NITS https://www.anandtech.com/show/10896/the-apple-watch-series-2-review/3 despite being advertised as 1000 NITS.
SOME times they will cover up the lie by reporting partial screen flashes as the “max NITS” if they can overdrive part of the screen to flash, but mostly they are just trying to make the screen sound better than it actually is.
Smaller high-intensity screens are easier to cool?
The display tech required to get that bright is very fiddly and prone to error, so the larger the intended screen the more screens they have to throw away, so smaller screens are the ones to get brighter first?
Just a couple of guesses – behind what you and others are saying about the use cases too.
If you imagine each pixel as an LED light, the answer starts to become obvious. The LEDs in smaller devices are smaller, easier to power. In larger devices, there are larger LEDs, and they’ll take more power to make them brighter. Most large screens aren’t made for being outside, so they don’t make them overly bright. Outside screens, like outdoor digital displays are very bright but they draw a lot of power.