Why is it always 60 or 120 or 144? Why can’t I input the value I want (for example, 90 or 100 or even 87)?
Edit: FYI, my phone is a Motorola Edge 40.
In: Technology
I know this isn’t a helpful answer but I’m curious as to why you would want to?
I feel like for the manufacturer to allow a custom refresh rate, they’d have to give you a pretty deep level of access to the device.
60, 120 and 144 hz are standardized and I’m interested to see what others have to add because I’m not sure why. Personally my phone is 90hz and I’m pretty happy with how responsive it is
It wouldn’t matter for growing the web (mostly), but it would matter for video.
Videos (in the US) are usually 24fps, 30fps, and 60fps. To show 30fps on a 60Hz display you just show each frame 2x, if you wanted to show a 24fps video you have to do something called a 3:2 pulldown where one frame played 3x and the next 2x and the next 3x, etc.
> for example, 90
For a 60fps video you then would have to play a frame 2x and the next 1x and the next 2x, etc. Doubling the duration of 1/2 of the frame can be noticeable.
It’s an artificial limitation, and so the reason for it can only be speculated. Which I’d reckon goes something like why expose a configuration option that isn’t meant to be reconfigured.
There’s no particular technical reason why this couldn’t be done, they just don’t provide an option, because it doesn’t really make much sense. It’s either 60 for battery life, which has been a standard in displays for a long time, or the smoother one, which is usually adaptive, to give a balance between visual experience and battery life.
Motorola Edge 40 in particular supports 3 modes – power saving 60Hz, adaptive up to 120Hz, and high performance 144Hz.
Adaptive mode will automatically lower refresh rate to 60 or even less (24 while watching a movie, looking at photos or a static page for example) for power saving, but will immediately switch to 120 when there’s any motion displayed for smooth visual experience. Manually setting refresh rate to 90 or 87 would get you overall worse experience, it’s not as smooth as 120, and uses more power than 60 (24), so there simply isn’t any point in giving the user an option. But if you care about visuals much more than battery life, you can set it to constant 144Hz for absolutely best visual experience (on your phone at least, mine only supports up to 120).
You can actually check how the phone is adapting the refresh rate, and you’ll notice how quickly it switches between 24, 60 and 120, to do that you need to enable Developer Options and then toggle Show Refresh Rate.
I think some phones with high refresh rate panels let you drop the frame rate down to 60 to save battery, but there’s no real need to select some custom refresh rate between 60 and whatever the maximum is so they just don’t go to the trouble of implementing it as a feature either in the actual chip driving the screen or the OS software.
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