Oregon 650 Battery testing & personal observations

[+Psychaesthetic]

Okay so the first time I used these batteries, I got about 20 hours before the O650 started complaining they were too low.

 

The settings were set to maximize battery life, but I still used it plenty while walking around looking for caches with the dog, including some 50+ 8MP photos of the dog while we were at one of the parks where she could chase birds etc. I snapped, reviewed, and deleted photos on the device, all the while having auto-route blinking and beeping away at me to turn on whatever street was coming up.

 

This time, once their're fully charged I will leave the GPSrs screen in "Night Mode", since so far I've had it perma-set on Day because I like that better. Other than the screen colour-scheme no other settings will be changed. GLONASS: 0, Birds: 0, screen timer set to 1 minute with the backlight completely off.

 

I'm curious to see whether the LCD itself will use less energy displaying mostly dark colours instead of light, since really, the darker the colours, the less power is used. I know phones and tablets use less power with dark colourschemes - black being best since every black pixel is a pixel turned off, so I'll add the on/off and reported charge % here, for curiosities sake.

[+Kolenka]

I'm curious to see whether the LCD itself will use less energy displaying mostly dark colours instead of light, since really, the darker the colours, the less power is used. I know phones and tablets use less power with dark colourschemes - black being best since every black pixel is a pixel turned off, so I'll add the on/off and reported charge % here, for curiosities sake.

 

With LCD, this is actually not true. OLED likes dark screens, but LCD actually uses more energy this way. The reason is that the LCD, when no charge is applied, lets light from the backlight through. You apply charge to partially or fully block light through a particular R, G, or B sub pixel. So when displaying a black screen, not only are you using up energy powering the backlight, but you are also using up energy blocking the light from that backlight.

 

That said, the energy used between an all-black and all-white screen should be dwarfed by the energy required for the backlight itself. I'll admit though that it has been a few years, and they may have changed to setup where the polarizing filter blocks light when the LCD is in the "resting" state. There's also a huge difference between LED and CCFL backlighting, and I'm not too familiar with the numbers around modern displays. This is what happens when I take hardware in college, and then go into software.

 

I'd be interested in the numbers, myself, but I'd wager the difference is small if noticeable, and not in the direction you'd expect.

Edited April 21, 2014 by Kolenka

[+Psychaesthetic]

Yeah that occurred to me as I was typing the message, the fact there's no actual illumination in an LCD screen, (though I assume the Oregon utilizes something more advqnced than just LCD, OLED? .. I'm not sure Garmin state what the exact tech is, outside of "Transflective" but yeah when the unit's switched off, the screen of course is grey - not black.

 

So my suspicion is that all the colours on a transflective screen cost the same amount of power, because they're - I assume - all just liquid crystal and colour doesn't have any relevance to power used?

[+Psychaesthetic]

I'm trying to settle on the settings that'll give me the must bang per recharge cycle, really, and even on low the backlight shortens the life-span a bit, though in daylight the screen reflects so well you can't even perceive the backlight when set to 100%, so there's no reason whatsoever to use the b/light except in darkness, and wven then, a tiny wattage LED keychain light will illuminate the screen without any issues.

 

Mm. Interesting.