11 ms·

Pure black is the correct color for text. Ink and paper manufacturers go to great lengths to make inks and papers with the darkest blacks and brightest whites,

by mrob 6y ago

Pure black is the correct color for text. Ink and paper manufacturers go to great lengths to make inks and papers with the darkest blacks and brightest whites, and there's no reason text on screen should be any different. Firefox's Reader View foolishly throws away contrast with gray text, but this can be fixed in chrome/userContent.css in the Firefox profile directory: @-moz-document url-prefix("about:reader") { body { background-color: #FFFFFF !important; color: #000000 !important; } } toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets needs to be set to true in about:config for recent versions of Firefox to load userContent.css Some people complain about excessive brightness being hard on their eyes. They likely have their monitor brightness set too high. Most monitors can have their brightness set using DDC/CI (this sometimes needs to be enabled from the monitor's OSD). Most Linux distributions include "ddcutil". Install it and give the user who'll run it permissions to access I2C. In Debian, this can be accomplished by adding them to the i2c group. Find out which I2C buses your monitors are attached too: ddcutil detect Now you can change brightness from the command line: ddcutil --bus=6 setvcp 10 50 The first number after setvcp is the feature value to set. "10" is the standard feature value for brightness. The second number is the percentage brightness. I suggest picking values for low/medium/high brightness for each monitor, and binding a script that sets all them at once to the otherwise rarely used PrtScn/ScrLk/Pause keys. Presumably there is some way to do the same thing on other operating systems.

0-_-0 6y ago
To find your profile directory, go to about:support To only apply the tweak to the dark theme, you can do: @-moz-document url-prefix("about:reader") { body.dark { color: #FFFFFF !important; background-color: #000000 !important; } }
limomium 6y ago
There are multiple blatantly obvious reasons why text on screen SHOULD be different. For one, IT'S NOT PAPER. Second, you should avoid blasting unnecessary light into your users' eyes. Third, bright screens consume more power than dark ones.
- tinus_hn 6y ago
  Only if they are CRTs or OLED screens, both a distant minority. No need to yell.
jhardy54 6y ago
> Pure black is the correct color for text. Ink and paper manufacturers go to great lengths to make inks and papers with the darkest blacks and brightest whites, and there's no reason text on screen should be any different. Is this your opinion or is this widely accepted as fact? I've read countless design suggestions to reduce contrast and avoid using pure black or white on an LED display. I'm curious whether there's research that supports either side.
- amelius 6y ago
  > Is this your opinion or is this widely accepted as fact? Well, in either case, perhaps nobody should hard-code the darkness of text in their CSS but instead allow the user to set it in their browser?
  - jhardy54 6y ago
    Unfortunately browsers have lots of objectively bad defaults (e.g. h1 { font-size: 200%; }) so we have to decide which defaults we should fix and which ones we should leave alone. I agree that the user should have browser defaults that they prefer, but motherfuckingwebsite.com still looks awful in most browsers.
    - httpsterio 6y ago
      it might be ugly, but it's easy to consume and the experience is way better than on "well designed" sites with user hostile design choices
- FpUser 6y ago
  >" I've read countless design suggestions to reduce contrast and avoid using pure black" >"I've read countless design suggestions to reduce contrast" I would say that modern design suggestion often the opposite of usability/ergonomics. On many sites you now often see undecipherable light grey text on white background. It sure is soothing. It also sure is useless as many people who do not have perfect vision are unable to actually read it without blowing text size out of proportion.
kps 6y ago
For monitors, http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/ http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/ is helpful for making adjustments without external calibration tools. For books, paper isn't the brightest white; it's only copy/printer paper that got in to a ‘horsepower race’ for brightness.
an_opabinia 6y ago
You'd have a really interesting conversation with an artist or designer if you asked, "What is the correct color for text?" instead of uh, just saying that the answer is whatever your computer draws as RGB #000. That's part of what this article gives you, why it's talking about art school and not technology. Miscommunication - incommensurability of how to see the world really - is the pitfall when engineers are tasked with creating a subjective thing and asked to try to do something simultaneously functional, familiar and original. Just put yourself in this guys shoes. Just like you are excited to share Linux display color control commands, this guy is excited to share a new way of thinking about black and dark shades that instantly expands your vocabulary - both for creating new things and understanding the decisions of others. Anyway, the negativity of others in this thread, it's ironic because that's exactly the point of the article, really, that the pedantry gets in the way of being creative - or at the very least, seeing things originally. I work with an artist daily. I appreciate and value his opinions that there should be no pure black in the creative product we make together. It elevates what we make above all our competitors. It's an extremely insightful perspective.
- mrob 6y ago
  I don't see why I should care about the opinion of designers when they're the ones responsible for such anti-features as vanishing scrollbars and hamburger menus. RGB #000 isn't truly black, but it's always the best approximation of black available on a computer monitor.
  - BurningFrog 6y ago
    To be fair, we engineers also have plenty of UI war crimes to answer for :)
    - kbutler 6y ago
      But do we claim to be the experts, authorities, and judges of UI design? Well, ok, sometimes we do, but...yeah.
      - 6y ago
httpsterio 6y ago
There's a huge difference in having a surface that's white reflecting your room color versus having a display blasting light directly into your eyes. Computer screens and paper are not comparable, they're physically different and they're not really even used in the same fashion. Yes, you can read off of both but you get the point. You sound like a person who uses a terminal with a black bg and neon green text and claim that as superior. Maybe to you but surely not for the majority. Most likely that's not even optimal for you but you've just convinced yourself of that. I get the frustration you seem to carry towards designers, but if you're blaming _all_ designers because some might utilize anti-patterns or you just have personal preferences that differ, you're kinda missing the woods for the trees. You do realize that the chair you're sitting on, device you're writing on and building you're (likely) in are all designed by designers.
- tzs 6y ago
  > There's a huge difference in having a surface that's white reflecting your room color versus having a display blasting light directly into your eyes. What's actually different between a photon of a given frequency that enters my eye after reflecting off a surface and a photon of the same frequency that enters my eye after being emitted from a display? > You sound like a person who uses a terminal with a black bg and neon green text and claim that as superior. Maybe to you but surely not for the majority BTW, in the CRT days green on black was actually objectively superior if you were using small fonts on most displays. That was because most displays would have slight misalignment of the red, green, and blue, especially near the edges, leading to color fringing around white things. For small text, the fringing could make text blurry and hard to read. Pure green on black had no red or blue, so no fringing. Red on black or blue on black would have worked too, but most people find those much harder to read than green on black.
  - ChuckNorris89 6y ago
    Because the light emitted from the LEDs of the display is focused towards your eyes by a very reflective film behind the panel while the light reflected off a book's page is heavily diffused due to the roughness of the paper.
im3w1l 6y ago
I think a parallel can be drawn to the loudness wars in music. The user can easily change brightness of their screen just as the user can easily change volume of their music. But producers want their creation to stand out. Make their music a little bit louder, or their website a little bit softer than the rest. In both cases the outcome is a race to the bottom and reduced dynamic range. And finally, in both cases it's fairly inconsequential. Things get worse but only a little bit.
- httpsterio 6y ago
  OP's comment sounds to me like they want to throw a compressor with a low threshold and high gain on top of their master and gave everything either clipping or gated. Screw transients, am I right?
  - mrob 6y ago
    Text is not music. Transients don't belong in text.
    - httpsterio 6y ago
      I don't enjoy staring directly at the sun as I do not enjoy sitting with my ear pressed against the speaker at a festival. Your senses are not meant to be either not stimulated at all to fully stimulated, there is such a thing as a sane middle ground. Please do some research instead of doubling down on opinions you're presenting as absolutes.
- chrismorgan 6y ago
  > The user can easily change brightness of their screen just as the user can easily change volume of their music. This is just not true. 100% (minus rounding error) of devices can easily adjust volume. Phones and laptops can adjust brightness, but dodgy automatic brightness adjustment is the rule of the day. And basically no desktop monitors can easily adjust brightness (not because they can’t, but because OSes have frustratingly ignored functionality that has been standard for a decade or two; on-screen brightness adjustment is absolutely consistently painful enough to use that I disqualify it for the word “easily”—oh for the brightness wheels of the CRTs of yesteryear!).
chrismorgan 6y ago
Windows distressingly has two completely different mechanisms and APIs for setting brightness: one that operates over DDC/CI, and another that does something else (I’ll call it Method B, not knowing a better name). External monitors use DDC/CI, internal monitors (mostly meaning laptop screens) use Method B. I have failed in any attempts to hook brightness keys in user space (like how on Linux you’d just intercept XF86BrightnessUp and XF86BrightnessDown); something steals those keys before they ever get to user space, and use Method B. And there is no user interface anywhere for DDC/CI adjustment: it’s only an API that you can call. So the end result is that Windows users can’t adjust the brightness of their non-laptop monitors without third-party software, or reaching around the side of the screen and fiddling with the infuriating controls of the frustrating OSD interface. So almost no one ever adjusts their screen’s brightness at all, and almost no one of the remainder adjust their screen’s brightness to match conditions. And manufacturers have (understandably) decided that too dim is worse than too bright. So most people’s screens are genuinely painfully bright. So then people say “don’t use actual white” and “don’t use actual black”. And those that have calibrated displays end up sad.
- FpUser 6y ago
  >"So the end result is that Windows users can’t adjust the brightness of their non-laptop monitors without third-party software" Not sure what are you talking about. I can adjust brightness (and lots of other things) of my monitors just fine using their own buttons.What on Earth does that have to do with the Windows OS?
  - chrismorgan 6y ago
    Please finish reading the sentence you’re quoting.
    - FpUser 6y ago
      Yeah, guilty. Still not sure if it practically matters. Do they really need to adjust brightness every day?
gibolt 6y ago
Looking to have easy control of monitor brightness? For Mac users, look at https://lunar.fyi/ https://lunar.fyi/. There are a bunch of other options as well. For Windows, look at https://github.com/emoacht/Monitorian https://github.com/emoacht/Monitorian
- 0134340 6y ago
  Wow, just today I learned I can control my monitor via software and it worked. All this time I've just dealt with the brightness since I game on it and use dark themes to mitigate the white flashing. Besides that it takes a while to adjust and my monitor's on a flimsy mount and so I hate to have to move touch it. I'm going to hotkey it and have a one-button solution now. Thanks to your comment and to OP's.
nabilhat 6y ago
The majority of text displayed on a monitor only uses a small number of pixels, which emphasizes the edges where it doesn't cleanly intersect all of the component colors of the white background. #000 on #FFF emphasizes the colorful artifacts. We don't control what monitors our users own. Taking a step away from the most extreme possible contrast makes our UI's look a lot less like rainbow bleeding failure on the uncalibrated 1080p 29" monitors commonly used by executives making software expense decisions.
kitsunesoba 6y ago
The frustrating thing about lowering brightness is that on a great number (probably the majority) of computer displays, lower brightness comes with lower contrast and color vibrance as a side effect of the pixels and backlight being separate layers in traditional LCDs. Because of this, for me the biggest benefit of upgrading to a phone with an OLED display was that it enabled me to adjust my phone's brightness without such dramatic loss of contrast and vibrance. Unfortunately I don't think OLED panels will ever become practical for desktop monitors… they're just now becoming somewhat available in laptops and even then sometimes come with issues similar to those seen in early OLED phone screens. We're probably going to have to wait for microLED tech to mature to get this benefit in full sized monitors.
- morsch 6y ago
  Why not? Large, high res OLED TVs are common (if expensive). Burn-in?
  - kitsunesoba 6y ago
    I'm not part of the industry or well-read on it so I can't well explain why, but if I had to guess this is due to the dramatically smaller volumes involved. There's far fewer desktop monitors and laptops being shipped than phones or TVs, and the majority of desktop and laptop panel sales are tied up in basic office-grade econoscreens and gaming monitors focused on high refresh rates and low input latency. Midrange/affordable laptop/desktop OLED panels fit neither of these categories and as such haven't received nearly as much investment and R&D.
userbinator 6y ago
Some people complain about excessive brightness being hard on their eyes. They likely have their monitor brightness set too high. This, absolutely! Monitors usually come with an eye-searingly-bright default that's meant to look good in a showroom and wear out the backlight more quickly, not at all a good brightness/contrast for normal use. I set my monitors to 0 when they were new, and that was already very bright; now, many years later, they've gone up to 20-40 to compensate for backlight degradation, but are otherwise still more than bright enough.
hellotomyrars 6y ago
I have a very high sensitivity to light as a side-effect of medication. Dark/black background with lighter text doesn’t bother me. White background with black text does. Are you really going to tell me that I’m wrong for doing what is right for me because of your opinion? The monitor only goes so low. And this works. Paper is very different to a screen. There’s a reason e-readers exist. Maybe people should just do whatever they prefer/works better for them instead of insisting that light themes or dark themes are objectively better.
dathinab 6y ago
> brightest whites I which they would not, it's annoying when reading outside. But I'm all in for the darkest blacks. And yes I agree that if the contrast is to bright it most times you monitor which is generally set to bright. Hm, maybe one exception might be OLED screens, but reducing the general screen brightness should still work. If you are still convinced that it's to bright DO NOT make the black not black but make the withe less bright, preferable some subtle bright non gray color like for example hacker news does it. That makes the contrast less strong without being a accessibility nightmare which requires people to open their web-console and modify your CSS.
hammock 6y ago
>Ink and paper manufacturers go to great lengths to make inks and papers with the darkest blacks and brightest whites That this is the top comment and yet no one has refuted it boggles me. I cannot think of anything I've read recently that uses bright white paper. Sometimes I see reams of bright white paper for sale for a few extra $. However if I'm printing a resume, it's on x% linen slightly off white. If I'm reading a book, it's on warm-colored paper. If I'm reading music, it's on even warmer colored paper- and dare I say it as a musician for decades, the stuff on bright white paper (a photocopy, or self-published octavo for example) is the HARDEST to read!
- cma 6y ago
  Even hacker news itself is black on a warm paper color
saaaaaam 6y ago
Many years back, at the cusp of consumer internet taking off I owned a magazine company - we worked purely in print. Pure black is often not the correct colour for text, unless it’s monokrome (“B&W”) printing, rather than CMYK (but more on that later, because B&W monokrome black is often not “true black” either). If you are printing CMYK you rarely use key (“K” - black) on its own, but rather use a CMYK mix to build a black shade, to give a rich black (more M) or cooler black (more C) or balanced black - neutral but not stark. The different mix can really change the way a page feels - and the right mix on the right paper (“stock”) can make the black pop or muddy, and have a huge impact on readability. This is really important when you’re designing for print. It really does make the difference between someone continuing to read and chucking your print aside after a paragraph. Good print designers know how to build different blacks for different stock. When you are printing in monokrome black you are really printing g a shade of grey, to a greater or lesser extent, determined by the absorbency of the paper you are printing on. And, indeed, different inks have different qualities so some “black” ink for monokrome print maybe be built from various pigments giving it a slight blue sheen or a brownish tint under certain lights. Plus inks - and the paper substrate - are more or less reflective meaning they will behave and appear differently depending on the light conditions. I loved working in print.

by mrob 6y ago

0-_-0 6y ago

To find your profile directory, go to about:support To only apply the tweak to the dark theme, you can do: @-moz-document url-prefix("about:reader") { body.dark { color: #FFFFFF !important; background-color: #000000 !important; } }

limomium 6y ago

There are multiple blatantly obvious reasons why text on screen SHOULD be different. For one, IT'S NOT PAPER. Second, you should avoid blasting unnecessary light into your users' eyes. Third, bright screens consume more power than dark ones.

tinus_hn 6y ago
Only if they are CRTs or OLED screens, both a distant minority. No need to yell.

jhardy54 6y ago

> Pure black is the correct color for text. Ink and paper manufacturers go to great lengths to make inks and papers with the darkest blacks and brightest whites, and there's no reason text on screen should be any different. Is this your opinion or is this widely accepted as fact? I've read countless design suggestions to reduce contrast and avoid using pure black or white on an LED display. I'm curious whether there's research that supports either side.

amelius 6y ago
> Is this your opinion or is this widely accepted as fact? Well, in either case, perhaps nobody should hard-code the darkness of text in their CSS but instead allow the user to set it in their browser?
- jhardy54 6y ago
  Unfortunately browsers have lots of objectively bad defaults (e.g. h1 { font-size: 200%; }) so we have to decide which defaults we should fix and which ones we should leave alone. I agree that the user should have browser defaults that they prefer, but motherfuckingwebsite.com still looks awful in most browsers.
  - httpsterio 6y ago
    it might be ugly, but it's easy to consume and the experience is way better than on "well designed" sites with user hostile design choices
FpUser 6y ago
>" I've read countless design suggestions to reduce contrast and avoid using pure black" >"I've read countless design suggestions to reduce contrast" I would say that modern design suggestion often the opposite of usability/ergonomics. On many sites you now often see undecipherable light grey text on white background. It sure is soothing. It also sure is useless as many people who do not have perfect vision are unable to actually read it without blowing text size out of proportion.

kps 6y ago

For monitors, http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/ http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/ is helpful for making adjustments without external calibration tools. For books, paper isn't the brightest white; it's only copy/printer paper that got in to a ‘horsepower race’ for brightness.

an_opabinia 6y ago

You'd have a really interesting conversation with an artist or designer if you asked, "What is the correct color for text?" instead of uh, just saying that the answer is whatever your computer draws as RGB #000. That's part of what this article gives you, why it's talking about art school and not technology. Miscommunication - incommensurability of how to see the world really - is the pitfall when engineers are tasked with creating a subjective thing and asked to try to do something simultaneously functional, familiar and original. Just put yourself in this guys shoes. Just like you are excited to share Linux display color control commands, this guy is excited to share a new way of thinking about black and dark shades that instantly expands your vocabulary - both for creating new things and understanding the decisions of others. Anyway, the negativity of others in this thread, it's ironic because that's exactly the point of the article, really, that the pedantry gets in the way of being creative - or at the very least, seeing things originally. I work with an artist daily. I appreciate and value his opinions that there should be no pure black in the creative product we make together. It elevates what we make above all our competitors. It's an extremely insightful perspective.

mrob 6y ago
I don't see why I should care about the opinion of designers when they're the ones responsible for such anti-features as vanishing scrollbars and hamburger menus. RGB #000 isn't truly black, but it's always the best approximation of black available on a computer monitor.
- BurningFrog 6y ago
  To be fair, we engineers also have plenty of UI war crimes to answer for :)
  - kbutler 6y ago
    But do we claim to be the experts, authorities, and judges of UI design? Well, ok, sometimes we do, but...yeah.
    - 6y ago

httpsterio 6y ago

There's a huge difference in having a surface that's white reflecting your room color versus having a display blasting light directly into your eyes. Computer screens and paper are not comparable, they're physically different and they're not really even used in the same fashion. Yes, you can read off of both but you get the point. You sound like a person who uses a terminal with a black bg and neon green text and claim that as superior. Maybe to you but surely not for the majority. Most likely that's not even optimal for you but you've just convinced yourself of that. I get the frustration you seem to carry towards designers, but if you're blaming _all_ designers because some might utilize anti-patterns or you just have personal preferences that differ, you're kinda missing the woods for the trees. You do realize that the chair you're sitting on, device you're writing on and building you're (likely) in are all designed by designers.

tzs 6y ago
> There's a huge difference in having a surface that's white reflecting your room color versus having a display blasting light directly into your eyes. What's actually different between a photon of a given frequency that enters my eye after reflecting off a surface and a photon of the same frequency that enters my eye after being emitted from a display? > You sound like a person who uses a terminal with a black bg and neon green text and claim that as superior. Maybe to you but surely not for the majority BTW, in the CRT days green on black was actually objectively superior if you were using small fonts on most displays. That was because most displays would have slight misalignment of the red, green, and blue, especially near the edges, leading to color fringing around white things. For small text, the fringing could make text blurry and hard to read. Pure green on black had no red or blue, so no fringing. Red on black or blue on black would have worked too, but most people find those much harder to read than green on black.
- ChuckNorris89 6y ago
  Because the light emitted from the LEDs of the display is focused towards your eyes by a very reflective film behind the panel while the light reflected off a book's page is heavily diffused due to the roughness of the paper.

im3w1l 6y ago

I think a parallel can be drawn to the loudness wars in music. The user can easily change brightness of their screen just as the user can easily change volume of their music. But producers want their creation to stand out. Make their music a little bit louder, or their website a little bit softer than the rest. In both cases the outcome is a race to the bottom and reduced dynamic range. And finally, in both cases it's fairly inconsequential. Things get worse but only a little bit.

httpsterio 6y ago
OP's comment sounds to me like they want to throw a compressor with a low threshold and high gain on top of their master and gave everything either clipping or gated. Screw transients, am I right?
- mrob 6y ago
  Text is not music. Transients don't belong in text.
  - httpsterio 6y ago
    I don't enjoy staring directly at the sun as I do not enjoy sitting with my ear pressed against the speaker at a festival. Your senses are not meant to be either not stimulated at all to fully stimulated, there is such a thing as a sane middle ground. Please do some research instead of doubling down on opinions you're presenting as absolutes.
chrismorgan 6y ago
> The user can easily change brightness of their screen just as the user can easily change volume of their music. This is just not true. 100% (minus rounding error) of devices can easily adjust volume. Phones and laptops can adjust brightness, but dodgy automatic brightness adjustment is the rule of the day. And basically no desktop monitors can easily adjust brightness (not because they can’t, but because OSes have frustratingly ignored functionality that has been standard for a decade or two; on-screen brightness adjustment is absolutely consistently painful enough to use that I disqualify it for the word “easily”—oh for the brightness wheels of the CRTs of yesteryear!).

chrismorgan 6y ago

Windows distressingly has two completely different mechanisms and APIs for setting brightness: one that operates over DDC/CI, and another that does something else (I’ll call it Method B, not knowing a better name). External monitors use DDC/CI, internal monitors (mostly meaning laptop screens) use Method B. I have failed in any attempts to hook brightness keys in user space (like how on Linux you’d just intercept XF86BrightnessUp and XF86BrightnessDown); something steals those keys before they ever get to user space, and use Method B. And there is no user interface anywhere for DDC/CI adjustment: it’s only an API that you can call. So the end result is that Windows users can’t adjust the brightness of their non-laptop monitors without third-party software, or reaching around the side of the screen and fiddling with the infuriating controls of the frustrating OSD interface. So almost no one ever adjusts their screen’s brightness at all, and almost no one of the remainder adjust their screen’s brightness to match conditions. And manufacturers have (understandably) decided that too dim is worse than too bright. So most people’s screens are genuinely painfully bright. So then people say “don’t use actual white” and “don’t use actual black”. And those that have calibrated displays end up sad.

FpUser 6y ago
>"So the end result is that Windows users can’t adjust the brightness of their non-laptop monitors without third-party software" Not sure what are you talking about. I can adjust brightness (and lots of other things) of my monitors just fine using their own buttons.What on Earth does that have to do with the Windows OS?
- chrismorgan 6y ago
  Please finish reading the sentence you’re quoting.
  - FpUser 6y ago
    Yeah, guilty. Still not sure if it practically matters. Do they really need to adjust brightness every day?

gibolt 6y ago

Looking to have easy control of monitor brightness? For Mac users, look at https://lunar.fyi/ https://lunar.fyi/. There are a bunch of other options as well. For Windows, look at https://github.com/emoacht/Monitorian https://github.com/emoacht/Monitorian

0134340 6y ago
Wow, just today I learned I can control my monitor via software and it worked. All this time I've just dealt with the brightness since I game on it and use dark themes to mitigate the white flashing. Besides that it takes a while to adjust and my monitor's on a flimsy mount and so I hate to have to move touch it. I'm going to hotkey it and have a one-button solution now. Thanks to your comment and to OP's.

nabilhat 6y ago

The majority of text displayed on a monitor only uses a small number of pixels, which emphasizes the edges where it doesn't cleanly intersect all of the component colors of the white background. #000 on #FFF emphasizes the colorful artifacts. We don't control what monitors our users own. Taking a step away from the most extreme possible contrast makes our UI's look a lot less like rainbow bleeding failure on the uncalibrated 1080p 29" monitors commonly used by executives making software expense decisions.

kitsunesoba 6y ago

The frustrating thing about lowering brightness is that on a great number (probably the majority) of computer displays, lower brightness comes with lower contrast and color vibrance as a side effect of the pixels and backlight being separate layers in traditional LCDs. Because of this, for me the biggest benefit of upgrading to a phone with an OLED display was that it enabled me to adjust my phone's brightness without such dramatic loss of contrast and vibrance. Unfortunately I don't think OLED panels will ever become practical for desktop monitors… they're just now becoming somewhat available in laptops and even then sometimes come with issues similar to those seen in early OLED phone screens. We're probably going to have to wait for microLED tech to mature to get this benefit in full sized monitors.

morsch 6y ago
Why not? Large, high res OLED TVs are common (if expensive). Burn-in?
- kitsunesoba 6y ago
  I'm not part of the industry or well-read on it so I can't well explain why, but if I had to guess this is due to the dramatically smaller volumes involved. There's far fewer desktop monitors and laptops being shipped than phones or TVs, and the majority of desktop and laptop panel sales are tied up in basic office-grade econoscreens and gaming monitors focused on high refresh rates and low input latency. Midrange/affordable laptop/desktop OLED panels fit neither of these categories and as such haven't received nearly as much investment and R&D.

userbinator 6y ago

Some people complain about excessive brightness being hard on their eyes. They likely have their monitor brightness set too high. This, absolutely! Monitors usually come with an eye-searingly-bright default that's meant to look good in a showroom and wear out the backlight more quickly, not at all a good brightness/contrast for normal use. I set my monitors to 0 when they were new, and that was already very bright; now, many years later, they've gone up to 20-40 to compensate for backlight degradation, but are otherwise still more than bright enough.

hellotomyrars 6y ago

I have a very high sensitivity to light as a side-effect of medication. Dark/black background with lighter text doesn’t bother me. White background with black text does. Are you really going to tell me that I’m wrong for doing what is right for me because of your opinion? The monitor only goes so low. And this works. Paper is very different to a screen. There’s a reason e-readers exist. Maybe people should just do whatever they prefer/works better for them instead of insisting that light themes or dark themes are objectively better.

dathinab 6y ago

> brightest whites I which they would not, it's annoying when reading outside. But I'm all in for the darkest blacks. And yes I agree that if the contrast is to bright it most times you monitor which is generally set to bright. Hm, maybe one exception might be OLED screens, but reducing the general screen brightness should still work. If you are still convinced that it's to bright DO NOT make the black not black but make the withe less bright, preferable some subtle bright non gray color like for example hacker news does it. That makes the contrast less strong without being a accessibility nightmare which requires people to open their web-console and modify your CSS.

hammock 6y ago

>Ink and paper manufacturers go to great lengths to make inks and papers with the darkest blacks and brightest whites That this is the top comment and yet no one has refuted it boggles me. I cannot think of anything I've read recently that uses bright white paper. Sometimes I see reams of bright white paper for sale for a few extra $. However if I'm printing a resume, it's on x% linen slightly off white. If I'm reading a book, it's on warm-colored paper. If I'm reading music, it's on even warmer colored paper- and dare I say it as a musician for decades, the stuff on bright white paper (a photocopy, or self-published octavo for example) is the HARDEST to read!

cma 6y ago
Even hacker news itself is black on a warm paper color

saaaaaam 6y ago

Many years back, at the cusp of consumer internet taking off I owned a magazine company - we worked purely in print. Pure black is often not the correct colour for text, unless it’s monokrome (“B&W”) printing, rather than CMYK (but more on that later, because B&W monokrome black is often not “true black” either). If you are printing CMYK you rarely use key (“K” - black) on its own, but rather use a CMYK mix to build a black shade, to give a rich black (more M) or cooler black (more C) or balanced black - neutral but not stark. The different mix can really change the way a page feels - and the right mix on the right paper (“stock”) can make the black pop or muddy, and have a huge impact on readability. This is really important when you’re designing for print. It really does make the difference between someone continuing to read and chucking your print aside after a paragraph. Good print designers know how to build different blacks for different stock. When you are printing in monokrome black you are really printing g a shade of grey, to a greater or lesser extent, determined by the absorbency of the paper you are printing on. And, indeed, different inks have different qualities so some “black” ink for monokrome print maybe be built from various pigments giving it a slight blue sheen or a brownish tint under certain lights. Plus inks - and the paper substrate - are more or less reflective meaning they will behave and appear differently depending on the light conditions. I loved working in print.