TE
TechEcho
Home24h TopNewestBestAskShowJobs
GitHubTwitter
Home

TechEcho

A tech news platform built with Next.js, providing global tech news and discussions.

GitHubTwitter

Home

HomeNewestBestAskShowJobs

Resources

HackerNews APIOriginal HackerNewsNext.js

© 2025 TechEcho. All rights reserved.

Ask HN: Is there a way to find the max brightness (nits) of a monitor?

2 pointsby alin23over 2 years ago
I develop Lunar (https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lunar.fyi&#x2F;), a macOS app for controlling the hardware brightness of monitors.<p>One of its hallmark features is Sync Mode: an adaptive brightness algorithm that can keep the brightness synced between multiple monitors.<p>Because people usually have different monitor models in the same setup, their luminance curves vary a lot, so 100% on one can have the same perceived brightness as 80% on another. Users can account for this variance by adjusting the curve slope manually in Lunar’s settings, or by fine tuning each monitor until all look the same and have Lunar learn from these adjustments.<p>I’d like to make this automatic, so that people get already synced curves for each monitor. For that I would need the max brightness value measured in nits or cd&#x2F;m2 for each monitor but my research hasn’t turned up much.<p>Is there a database containing this type of information that I don’t know of? Or maybe a way to read&#x2F;extrapolate this data from monitor memory?<p>Things I have tried:<p><pre><code> - looking in the EDID - sifting through macOS I&#x2F;O Registry data using “ioreg -l -c AppleCLCD2” (on arm64) - searching for databases on Google</code></pre>

2 comments

brudgersover 2 years ago
Because monitors are hardware -- not software--. without monitor calibration hardware you&#x27;re just guessing.<p>A Datacolor Spyder is the typical consumer level start point for profiling monitors.<p>Good luck.
yellow_leadover 2 years ago
Although this isn&#x27;t exactly what you&#x27;re asking - if you have a sufficient user base you could see about crowdsourcing this data.