Samsung finally adds auto brightness to their budget phones…by using the selfie camera

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Certain smartphone features have become standard. We expect a modern smartphone (in any price range) to have things like WiFi, GPS, Bluetooth, etc. One of the features you may also take for granted is automatic brightness adjustment. The days of manually adjusting the brightness throughout the day are gone…or so you may have thought.

Many Samsung budget phones have actually always lacked an ambient light sensor, which is what makes auto brightness possible. The sensor detects the light levels of your surroundings and adjusts the screen brightness to match. Samsung is finally making it possible to use auto brightness on budget devices, but they still aren’t including an ambient light sensor. Instead, they are using the front-facing camera.

A software update rolling out to the Galaxy J8 adds a toggle for auto brightness in the Settings. When the switch is toggled on, a pop-up explains how it works. The front-facing camera will take a photo every time the user unlocks the phone. The photo is then used to measure the lighting conditions and adjust the brightness. Samsung says the photo will not be stored anywhere.

This is a clever way to add auto brightness to a device without an ambient light sensor, though we wish Samsung would simply include the sensor like every other budget device. We don’t know if Samsung will be rolling this out to other budget phones.