Android Central Labs
Android Central Labs is a weekly column devoted to deep dives, experiments, and a focused look into the tech you use. It covers phones, tablets, and everything in between.
When you compare OLED to nearly any other display tech available, the differences become immediately clear. OLED is renowned for its contrast ratio, deep blacks, and punchy, vibrant colors. The love for OLED’s vibrant nature is so strong that we’ve even seen “scandals” when a phone doesn’t launch with a vibrant color option.
It’s called Comfort Filters, and it combines the existing Night Light feature with a new option called Comfort View. The concept is simple: adjust the display color to accommodate a user’s comfort level. Whether this is shifting to warmer colors to promote better sleep patterns, making the display greyscale to keep you from using your phone as much, or just swapping the color palette for more soothing pastel colors, Comfort Filters are Google’s latest answer.
The science of color
Color has a deep-seated meaning in the human brain. While some colors and their meanings are cultural, many are seen as universal. Red, for instance, is often seen as a color of strength or anger, while yellow often symbolizes hope or happiness. Over the years, smartphone manufacturers have learned that the absence of color can make you less interested in using your phone, which is why monochrome mode is included in your phone’s bedtime mode.
Likewise, researchers have found that lighter, desaturated, and pastel colors often evoke a sense of calm or relaxation. TCL has baked this color palette into its NXTPAPER devices, like the NXTPAPER 70 Pro, calling it “Color Paper mode.” This mode desaturates all colors and simplifies on-screen visual elements to provide a less distracting, yet still colorized, version of your phone’s apps.
“Comfort View creates a new, more comfortable aesthetic for the content rendered when users want it,” Google says. This feature, somewhat surprisingly, was not built as an accessibility option. Rather, it’s one designed to offer users more choice in how their phone’s display looks.
“This feature is built for anyone who finds the ‘mellow aesthetic’ attractive. We have heard from users who found this experience especially helpful in a darker room, where they appreciate the more comfortable color palette while still being able to see the different colors.”
I put together a simple chart above showing standard RGB colors in Photoshop next to the pastel versions of each color. To illustrate the point, cover the regular colors with your hand and stare at the pastel colors for a few seconds, then cover the pastel colors and look at the regular colors.
The difference is incredibly jarring, and it can be even more so depending on how sensitive your brain is to light and color. Comfort View uses a color palette much closer to the right side of the chart, and I felt the difference in intensity the second I enabled the feature.
Pastel colors are also often associated with the spring season, which brings great comfort to people who live in climates with cold, snowy winters, furthering the idea that pastel colors deliver an incredibly positive feeling. It’s fitting, then, that Google introduced this feature in the spring! If you’re using a Pixel right now and are on the April build of Android 16 (or later), here’s how to enable that:
1. Open the system settings on your Pixel. Either open Settings in the app drawer or swipe down twice on the status bar, then tap the gear icon.
2. Select Display & touch from the menu.
3. Scroll down to and tap Comfort Filters.
4. Tap the toggle next to Comfort View to enable it.
5. To manually adjust the strength of Comfort View, uncheck the Dynamic box and move the slider to your preferred filter strength.
While you’re in the Comfort Filters section, you can also toggle the Night Light feature, which will tint the screen an amber color and reduce blue light output. This feature can be used at the same time as the pastel Comfort View option and is most often used at night to help keep your circadian rhythm from being interrupted by daylight spectrum blue light that normally emits from your phone’s display.
Still work to do
While Comfort View is a wonderful way to make the Pixel’s display more comfortable to look at, Google still needs to address a few other factors to ensure its displays remain comfortable for everyone.
Last year, Google introduced a new Sensitive Eyes feature for the Pixel 10 Pro family, which raised the PWM dimming rate to match that of Samsung and Apple. The problem is that all three of these companies are dreadfully behind on certain technologies, and the slow PWM rate is one of the most egregious problems.
Unfortunately, rumors suggest the Pixel 11 won’t change its PWM rate, just like Samsung’s Galaxy S26 family this year. Meanwhile, Apple gave users a way to completely disable PWM at low brightness on the iPhone 17 series last year. Apple’s Display Pulse Smoothing feature was a great start, but the company still uses 480Hz dimming (even if it’s not PWM), so it didn’t fix the problem for a lot of flicker-sensitive people.
Still, I’ve been happy to see that most companies have been working toward introducing more eye-friendly features on their phones. Smartphones are a ubiquitous part of modern life, and given how often we have to use them, companies need to prioritize eye health over nonsense specs that few people actively care about.
Despite not getting the Sensitive Eyes feature quite right, Google is putting in effort to ensure its phones have accessibility options for people who need them, and that speaks volumes. I hope that we continue to see companies like Google and Apple emphasize accessibility features, especially display-related ones, as people who are sensitive to things like flicker cannot use these devices at all. Here’s hoping the Pixel 11 continues to surprise!
It’s hard not to love the Pixel 10 Pro. It’s got all the features you want in a smaller frame than you might expect. It’s the answer to “where have all the small phones gone?”