phyphox Forums

So I was playing around with the light sensor experiment by shining my phones lux meter with a flashlight. The value at its best was a little over a million lux, which is to be expected at very short distances. The problem is that my phones lux sensor is only rated to 60000lux, evident by the apps device info tab and the manufacturers datasheet. The question is, how can it display higher values than what the sensor is rated for?

My phone is a Samsung galaxy S10e, SM-G970F
The lux sensor in it is a: TCS3407

These 60klx are just what we obtain by the Android API – and its documentation does not go into details. We would expect that any values outside the range should not be taken too seriously…

Do you obtain values between 1Mlx and 60klx? We are wondering if it is an error code by the sensor that is not handled by the API.

Yeah, the values are also between 1Mlx and the supposed 60klx maximum rating. So the value doesn't just jump to 1Mlx, but also shows the values in between, like would be expected. With some different placement of the flashlight and charging the batteries I could also get almost 2Mlx.

Maybe it's just calibrated to 60klx, although the datasheet doesn't really imply that.