When you look at high-end phones versus low-end phone, some of the differences in hardware are obvious, such as a lower-end chipset, less RAM, a lower-resolution display, and less fancy cameras just to name a few. However one of the ways companies such as Samsung have cut costs is by ditching the use of ambient light sensors.
This means that auto brightness features that many of us have come to expect on our phones simply aren’t present for some lower-end models, but Samsung could have finally found a way around that. The company has introduced an update to the Galaxy J8 that brings auto brightness to the handset, and this is accomplished by leveraging the phone’s front-facing camera to pull double duty as an ambient light sensor.
According to Samsung’s description of the feature, how this works is that whenever you unlock your phone, a photo will be taken using the front-facing camera which is used to measure the brightness of your surroundings to adjust its brightness accordingly. Samsung also claims that the photos will not be stored anywhere (if privacy is a concern then maybe don’t look at the phone when you unlock it).
What this means is that unlike ambient light sensors which are more dynamic in adjusting brightness, this is considerably more limited. However for those who’d rather not go through the fuss of adjusting their phone’s brightness manually, we guess this is a functional alternative.
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