The Pixel 10’s new display filter is great, except for two major flaws

I left the new filter enabled all day and all night to see how well it worked in different situations, and after a few weeks, I can say I’m never going back to the normal display setting again. Well, except for two very specific settings.

The old Night Light filter setting has been replaced with a new one in the Pixel 10 series comfortable filter The screen where both Night Light and the new Comfort View setting are live. you can find them below Settings > Display & touch > Comfort filterIn addition to the existing Adaptive Tone and Color settings.

The idea behind the new Comfort View is that it applies all the time, not just at night. It softens the entire display, removes a lot of color saturation, and turns everything into a more pastel look. This doesn’t just apply to images, but it affects everything from menus to notifications and all your apps. You can also choose to have it switch on automatically with a “Dynamic” toggle that adjusts to your environment, or simply manually select the intensity of the effect.

I prefer the Dynamic setting as it makes no visible difference during the day, whether outdoors or in a well-lit environment. Then, in dark or moody environments, it kicks in and ensures my Pixel 10 Pro XL’s display looks cooler and more in tune with my current surroundings. I always find myself smiling when I look at my phone in the evening and see that it has suddenly taken on a cooler, more pleasant and more “retro” look.

Dynamic switching has worked very well in my experience. I barely notice I have Comfort View on most of the time, unless I go somewhere dark and my phone switches to the optimization. This helped me keep the saturation of my display under control on some flights, in dark pubs and restaurants, inside cathedrals, on hazy night trains and metros, etc.

But manual mode works too, especially if you want to turn down your phone’s volume at all times. Definitely a bit quieter with the Comfort View. Watching Instagram Reels or YouTube shorts is definitely less engaging or saturating for the senses when Comfort View is enabled.

Along with the change in display settings, Google has also switched the Night Light quick settings toggle to adopt these new settings. now there is a new umbrella comfortable filter Toggle that triggers a pop-up with both Comfort View and Night Light on. You can turn any of these on or tap the Settings button to adjust them.

The problem I have with this is that Night Light is schedulable while Comfort View is not schedulable. Even though the Dynamic setting adjusts well to different times of the day, I would have liked to see a way to control it further. Perhaps you want to make sure that nothing changes during the day, or perhaps you want to control the filter manually but only during certain hours of the day. A schedule option will fix this.

But my biggest complaint about the way the new Comfort View filter is implemented is the lack of an allow/block list of apps. That is useless. I would keep Instagram and YouTube on the allow list all the time, but that would prevent the filters from working in the camera app.

Right now, if I’m taking photos at night or in a dark setting, I don’t see true colors. I see filtered, pastel, desaturated colors. I don’t know what I’m shooting or whether the actual colors are properly adjusted for the photo, so I have to disable Comfort View to capture photos with proper colors and keep it disabled when I check my photos. Otherwise, I can’t know if I’ve taken a good photo or not, or will delete less interesting photos before backing them up.

I’m a little tired of having to enable/disable Comfort View every time I want to use it. This has been especially annoying during holidays in Italy. At every church or cathedral, I had to turn it off, then turn it back on when I left, and eventually I forgot to turn it back on for a few days until I got back home.

Google should have really thought about this. There’s no point in showing a permanent filter on the display when you’re doing a color-sensitive task like taking a photo or browsing your photos. Or at least make it an option for users to decide whether they want the filter always on or whether they would like to see a more realistic version of their photos. I hope an upcoming software version will fix this.