I'd like to see a study on this issue rather than an uninformative rant. I recently made my homepage text dark grey on just off-white. It's hard to tell quickly

I'd like to see a study on this issue rather than an uninformative rant. I recently made my homepage text dark grey on just off-white. It's hard to tell quickly what I really prefer though. Conscious preference doesn't necessarily correspond to readability (measured by speed, comprehension, eye strain, ...). Reading from a monitor isn't the same as reading from paper. There was a comment on a story recently from someone who'd worked with television saying they never use pure black or white. I notice that, for example, the BBC news uses a very dark gray for the body text of its website's articles. Do they really not know what they are doing? Also Google uses large blocks of grey text in blogs, help documents, etc. Aren't they notorious for testing everything?