Tried a pure black background (#000000) for a week and my eyes are paying for it

I switched my portfolio site to a true black background thinking it'd look cleaner and save battery on OLED screens. After 4 days of editing code and reading text on that thing, I started getting these weird ghosting headaches every evening. Switched back to a dark gray like #1a1a1a and the strain went away completely within 2 days. Has anyone else found that pure black just doesn't work for text-heavy interfaces?

2 comments

2 Comments

kai_stone9913d ago

Headaches from a background color? That sounds a bit much. Plenty of people run pure black themes for years without any issues. Maybe you were just staring at the screen too long without breaks and needed an excuse to blame the color. Could also be your monitor's brightness was cranked up way too high with that true black. Did you try messing with your display settings at all before switching back, or was it straight to changing the color code?

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lucas97213d ago

Whoa, hold on there. I gotta say, that's a pretty direct way of putting it, but you do raise a good point about the brightness. In my experience, a lot of folks just crank their monitor to max and don't even think about adjusting it for different content types. Did you ever try lowering the brightness or the contrast specifically for that pure black theme, or was it just a straight swap back? Cause I've heard some people say that true black on an OLED can be rough if your room lights aren't balanced, not necessarily because of the color itself.