(11 votes, average: 4.18 out of 5)
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As we have already discussed here, here, and here, the current de-facto standard to measure notebook battery life in consumer marketing materials is MobileMark ® 2007 (MMO7). One thing I want to help educate on are the basic facts behind the notebook brightness settings recommended by MM07 and compare that to my home electronics and what settings others are using for their notebook displays.
The facts about MM07 and notebook display brightness
MM07 requires the following (1): “The display brightness should be measured for a white screen while on battery and be set at the lowest possible setting, no lower than 60 nits.” One needs a nit meter and yes, we have a few of those in our labs. :-)
So what is a nit? Wkipedia defines a nit as a “candela per square meter.” Yes, that really helped me too. Think of a “nit” as a unit of measure of brightness.
How does 60 nits compare to brightness of other home electronics?
I pretend to be a technically-capable business, strategy and marketing guy, which according to the engineers, makes me REAL dangerous. You see, 95% is good enough for my trade, but for theirs, its 99.999% and I respect that.
So I wanted to know what 60 nits really related to, as I didn’t know nits from nuts. You should have seen the look on the engineer’s faces when I asked them to borrow their nit meter. Chad, his real name J, showed me how to use the nit meter and instructed me how to use the nit meter and to make sure to have a white background on all devices.
I literally went around my house testing many of my home electronics and tested them without changing any settings outside shutting off “auto adjustment” on the phones which I am told is best practice. I suppose I can call this my family’s “comfort setting” based on the setting my family and I actually use the devices. So there is variation in room setting, light, etc. that dictates this.
Here are the test results:
Net-net, the lowest nit measurement I observed with my “comfort setting” was still 2.58X brighter than the MM07 brightness level of 60 nits on which notebook battery life is measured.
I then wanted to see how nits related to notebook screen brightness. So I tested a few notebooks I had in my office to see what the “max nits” were when the screen was set to the highest setting.
As you can see from the figures above, the MM07 requirement was between 20-30% of the samples notebooks’ max screen brightness.
What notebook display brightness setting do consumers use?
Now, I know that a sample set of one doesn’t represent anything, and I’m far from normal, as my friends frequently tell me, but the results of my home survey were interesting – interesting enough to make me real curious about what others are doing with their screen brightness settings.
So last week I started Tweeting and Facebooking questions to real users on what is the display brightness setting on which they place their notebooks. I received qualitative and quantitative responses. Yes, I know, this isn’t a 17-country, global discrete choice, double blind methodology survey followed by focus groups, BUT there were telling, directional indicators.
Quantitative: I wasn’t expecting anything like the response I got from Neowin respondents. They actually placed a poll on their community website asking the question, “What brightness level do you run your notebook?“ Over 1,100 community members voted in a few days, and according to Shane Pitman, Editor-in-Chief, “Polls require a member account, and to be logged in to said account. Provides accountability, keeps people from voting multiple times.”
The results were overwhelming in that 75% of the Neowin community member respondents kept their notebook display brightness between 61% and 100%. Somehow, I don’t think that fits into the 60 nit range. 
Qualitative: These responses were as valuable as the quantitative as they gave insight into “why” they did this. Some comments gave insight into the folks who use their notebooks at very low display settings. I didn’t use their Twitter names to protect the innocent. :-)
Here was the response to my question, improper grammar and all, “Research question: what display brightness do you run your notebook at? (Please RT)”. Here is just a sampling of public tweet responses.
- “On the machines I see, normally I prefer to have them fully backlit with the slider up to around 75% or so.”
- “I run my laptop at maximum brightness unless the battery is really low, or I have an external screen. “
- “Now running MBP 15.4″ 3.1 at 75% brightness with auto adjust turned ; but was at 100% without auto adjust til you asked! “
- “90 – 100% brightness, 90% of the time. “
- “depends entirely on my battery level and surroundings. “
- “Research question: what display brightness do you run your notebook at? (Please RT). I run full bright 95+% of the time. “
- “oh sorry , 100% unless I’m running low on battery, where I bring it down to a minimum, I’m guessing 50%, but thats rare”
- “usually around 60-70%”
- “i don’t use them much, mainly desktop, but i either have brightness at full or minimum: latter at night and if battery low”
- “When running laptop on battery, i set brightness to 25-40%, when plugged in -100%.”
- “100% brightness. Left default setting (and I appreciate it that way… old eyes). “
- “slammed up to full when possible, monitor screens vary though”
- “mine is usually as bright as I can make it. I hate dim screens. “
- “max brightness notwithstanding battery impact. “
- “I lower my screen brightness to the lowest, usable level that’s comfortable. It’s all about the battery life.
“ - “Agreed…I think mine is usually around 30% or so. “
- “it varies by location due to lighting levels. Usually around 30% or 40%. Never > 50% when on battery. “
- “ME: 90 to 100% on AC, about 50 % on battery when I’m watching movies and about 20 to work. “
I also received some really interesting responses related to interpretation, explanations, tools and resources on brightness after asking about 60 nits. Got to love social media.
- “not all that hard. Need 800+ nits to read screens in direct sun, 30-150 for night highway signs: http://bit.ly/cjxJB“
- “60 nits = table in an office with 300 lux illumination: http://bit.ly/FvoKe BTW sRGB calibration target = 80 nits. “
- “oh and here’s a Kodak guide on how to use a digital camera and gray card as an ad-hoc nit estimator: http://bit.ly/1IMLK3“
You be the judge
I titled this blog, “MM07, 60 Nits, One Nit-picker and you” and now I ask you, am I just nitpicking? I ask you to make that decision for yourself. I have described a few things:
- First, MM07 test requires a 60 nit or higher display brightness. To maximize battery life benchmarks, systems are set at the minimum allowable 60 nit level. This setting is thereby integrated into this battery life benchmark that is then used in consumer advertisings.
- Secondly, worst case, the display brightness of many electronics inside my home at my family’s “comfort setting” is 2.58X more than the MM07 nit setting requirement. Based on the small set of notebooks I tested, MM07’s 60 nits equated to around 20-30% of the max notebook brightness. Your mileage will vary, maybe.
- Third, my unscientific querying last week says many classes of users crank their screen beyond 61% and many at max brightness. Yes, I said max. Some self-selected a lower brightness setting to conserve battery life.
Nuff said, you be the judge. Agree, disagree, I would love to hear your thoughts on this.
(1) MobileMark 2007 White Paper, March 2008, Revision 1.0. 4.2.1 “Display brightness”
Pat Moorhead is Vice President of Advanced Marketing at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.
(4.43 out of 5)
#1 by Shaun Marolf - June 10th, 2009 at 15:40
Glad to see someone taking on a more real life scenario to battery life. as I twitted my screen is at 50% when on battery. That’s usable for me but still well above MM07 levels. I think you will also find the same when you ask about CPU throttling. Yes it saves battery life but really slows down the laptop. Fortunately being a Linux user I have the automatic throttling option. During low demand states the CPU is held back. However when things start bottle necking it opens to handle the demand. I find this the best option overall. I get longer battery life but I don’t have to wait for the system to play catch up either.
#2 by Patrick Moorhead - June 11th, 2009 at 14:08
@Shaun Marolf, Shaun, thanks for the comment. Someone in the industry needs to point these things out for the sake of consumers and the industry. In the Windows world they have CPU throttling of voltage and frequency, which is built into Windows. The biggest challenge is for the mainstream users who can only rely on advertisements to educate them. They won’t know the difference. Thats where someone needs to establish a min-max battery life rating like are used in cellphones and car mileage per gallon.
#3 by Cliff Forster - June 10th, 2009 at 15:49
Patrick,
I think the fundamental issue with MM07 is the fact that the benchmark makers obviously did very little research about how people actually use products. I don’t mean to be negative, but I think its fairly obvious that MM07 is the preferred method because it returns favorable statistics for manufactures of mobile electronics.
Thanks for sticking with this issue. Hopefully consumers will stand up and say, enough is enough. We all should demand proper statistics to assist us with our buying decisions.
#4 by Patrick Moorhead - June 11th, 2009 at 14:11
@Cliff Forster, do you mean to tell me that consumers have WiFi on, have their display set beyone 30% and use their CPU more than 10% of the time?
Are you sure?
#5 by Nedjo - June 10th, 2009 at 16:11
Amazing article!
This is just a tip of the iceberg when it comes to… err “industry” of benchmarking!!
Majority of so-called “industry standard” benchmarks are completely disconnected from any reasonable end-user scenarios!
And the saddest part in this story is the fact that people who’re living out of benchmarking – IT journalists are not trying to do absolutely anything about it! Only exception is Johan De Gelas who practically invented new virtualization benchmark that reflects real-world much better than VMmark!
http://it.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.aspx?i=3567
I urge AMD tech labs to work on different new benchmarks, and to make them available for media guys and end users. Approach should be similar to Windows Movie maker, and WinRAR benchmarks – AMD provides benchmark, and users are free to use their own content for those benchmarks so that objectivity and Independence of media isn’t questioned!
#6 by Patrick Moorhead - June 11th, 2009 at 14:15
@Nedjo, thanks for the comment. As I comments to Cliff above, it sure seems like WiFi should be on, screen brightness could be higher and apps that take the system beyone 7% could be used. Particularly with more people using a notebook as their primary PC and with the rise of rich internet content with Flash. Doing our own benchmarks is a challenge too, in that everyone will question it bc we published it. We march on…..
#7 by Toby Hudon - June 10th, 2009 at 16:25
Not all that surprising. Most people are going to instinctively optimize for whatever their concern is at the time. Very few people are going to sit down and work out exactly what brightness setting lets them work X minutes with their laptop. Virtually everyone is just going to go for comfort and most displays don’t get bright enough to become uncomfortable so that means max setting. The exception will be people who’re worried about running out of power who will run min settings or as close to it as they can stand.
And once set, few people are going to change their brightness depending on what they’re doing (reading a site vs watching a movie or gaming). This is one reason ambient light sensors are popular in laptops because people just won’t bother to readjust the backlight all the time.
The thing is it’s really really hard to get an objective benchmark of something like battery life when there are subjective components like eyesight and environment involved. A user who works outside in the sun will use a brighter display than one who works in a darkened room. In the end, all reviews are subjective, but nobody wants to admit that because it means trading on their credibility as reviewers. Ironically this is where print media should be focusing its attention vs the online competition. They’ll never compete on news, what they need to do is compete on quality. I will care more about a review by someone I know, or someone who’s opinion I’ve consistently agreed with in the past. Readers don’t want objectivity, they want useful information, and a reviewer’s bias and expertise are both part of that.
Without that, everything becomes a minmax game with the benchmarks. Which we’ve seen time and again with everything from CPUs to video cards to battery life now. In the end people will just throw up their hands and stop believing anything said about battery life unless it’s someone they know personally.
#8 by Patrick Moorhead - June 11th, 2009 at 14:20
@Toby Hudon, great comments, thanks. We are recommending the min-max model, similarly that comes on all cellphones and smartphones (standby-talk time) and car gas mileage (city-highway). For now, consumers get better battery life info from a $20 cellphone than they do from a $799 laptop. The challenge on consumers getting notebook battery life reviews is that very few people are doing them and if they are they are using MM07, only 1 part of the min-max equation.
#9 by Jeffrey David Morris - June 16th, 2009 at 19:36
Listen, between you two (BOTH – AMD & Intel), I figure with a quad core board and processor, I ‘get’ there’s about roughly 7 conponment’s that make up a general desktop; aside from the board and processor, I figure I can probably get away with whatever general basic generic other part’s, thus, making a barebones system for under $600. I can always upgrade other conponment’s later, ;use my existing ram memory (I know, I know), but, I gotta get rid of this ugh – HP/Compaq sr 1810NX ’single’ processor soon. I can’t stand it. I just upgraded to 15mbps with Time Warner recently and that’s fine, but I gotta do this thing with the pc (you know). The only other componment I need is the thermal chassis/tower, which I seperately want to load up with fan’s, even if mounted to the sliding off side along where the little hole’s/grill are (I want it cool – temp). Never mind about mouse, keyboard, misc, I’ll take care of that stuff later. I just (in my mind) need to get a quad core system ‘on the board’ in my mind (exhibited). I can transfer my existing xp home/ie 6, etc stuff to the new pc, then scrap the old one (which I have now). But like I said, I ‘get’ there’s 7 that make up a whole, thus, the sole item’s I care about the most are the board and processor, nothing less than quadcore, more less, you know. All the other item’s that’ll make up the 7 – system, I can probably get away with whatever general basic generic other part’s. Please, between you two (BOTH – AMD & Intel), put aside your difference’s and kindly help me devise, misc which is better. No fighting, please, just help me a customer, so I can go to a third party seller with the info and buy the thing. Can we do that, or is ego, etc/misc gonna get in the way? Come on, it’s quite simple, we can do this, simply . . . between AMD’s Phenom 9950 Black Edition (whatever related board and processor) AND Intel’s DP965LT and QX6700/Q6700), as I’m clearly not gonna get a straight answer out of Consumer Reports, can we PLEASE just do this . . . it does not have to be this difficult; policy this, policy that, come on, please . . .
#10 by Don - June 17th, 2009 at 20:06
60 nits is just not real world testing. I would suggest at least 150 nits and while running some sort of standard DVD movie.
This would give us a more realistic idea about battery performance under real wrld conditions.