Your phone has 6,000 nits of brightness — good luck finding them

I remember the early days of spec wars when we fought over megapixels. Every manufacturer claimed their sensor was a professional-grade camera because it could generate a 20-megapixel file.

We eventually learned that more megapixels don't necessarily mean better pictures, and sensor size matters more.

Now, we've found a new hill to die on. It's nits. Specifically, the peak brightness of phone screens.

The numbers have gone from impressive to absurd now. Why on earth does a phone need 6,000 nits? Well, the answer is it doesn't, and it's meaningless for your daily life.

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By  Rahul Naskar

Why 6,000 nits is mostly marketing hype

Peak HDR is the number brands love

Let's pull back the curtain on how these astronomical numbers actually make it onto the spec sheet.

Screen panels are made of millions of pixels. This gives the phone's software a lot of flexibility.

When the entire screen is white, power is shared across every pixel. Because of this, full-screen brightness is always lower and usually tops out around 1,000 to 1,600 nits, even on the best phones.

If you turn off almost all the pixels and only keep a small section — like when HDR content is on — the phone can funnel all the power into that spot. That little section is what hits 6,000 nits and makes it onto the box and ads.

The consequences of driving OLED screens to 6,000 nits

Max brightness comes at a cost

Even if you could find a way to make the entire screen hit 6,000 nits, you wouldn't want it to. Every nit of brightness needs power, and every watt of power produces heat.

OLED screens are sensitive to temperature. Driving them to 6,000 nits is essentially like redlining a car engine. If you do it for more than a few seconds, the materials will degrade and burn the screen.

The battery drain is another issue. If your screen actually stayed at peak brightness, your 5,000mAh battery would be dead before you finished a single episode of a show on Netflix.

The megapixel wars taught us that bigger isn't better

Specs don't tell the whole story

If you bought a budget smartphone in 2012, the salesperson would tell you it had an 8-megapixel camera, which was the same number as the iPhone of the time.

But the photos looked low-quality in comparison because the sensor was tiny. We're seeing the same thing with the nit wars.

High-end displays from Apple and Samsung don't claim the highest numbers, yet they are much more readable.

What really matters when choosing a phone display

Traits that make a phone enjoyable to use

If the 6,000-nit claim is mostly for show, what should you pay attention to when shopping for a phone?

As someone glued to the screen all day, I can say the features that actually make a display good usually don't make the headlines.

Anti-reflective glass

High-end phones don't need to push brightness because anti-reflective glass keeps the screen readable in sunlight. If it doesn't act like a mirror, it's already doing its job.

Don't cover your $1,000+ flagship Android phone with a cheap screen protector. That tempered glass brings back the mirror effect and ruins all the anti-reflective work your screen relies on to stay readable in sunlight.

LTPO and adaptive refresh rate

LTPO and adaptive refresh rates are another big factor in a good screen. A buttery-smooth 120Hz display is nice, but running it at full speed all the time drains the battery.

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LTPO technology fixes this by dropping the refresh rate as low as 1Hz when you're looking at static content. This preserves battery power that might otherwise go into pointless hype.

Color accuracy

A display that shows photos exactly as the camera captured them is more valuable than one that makes everything look highly saturated.

What you actually want is a low Delta E score. It's the metric used to measure true color accuracy.

Usability wins over marketing hype every time

For good sunlight readability, you generally need around 1,000 to 1,500 nits of full-screen brightness. Anything more than that isn't really necessary.

When you're shopping for a phone, skip the spec sheet. Choose the features that matter to you and go for a phone that fits those needs.