Crimson Screen
Fill your whole display with crimson in one click. Nothing to install, nothing uploaded.
Crimson wallpaper
What a crimson screen is for
Crimson is a deep red pushed slightly toward blue, which is why it reads as richer and less alarming than pure red. On a display it drives the red subpixel hard while adding a little blue, so it is a good check of whether darker reds stay clean or drift toward brown.
A colour named after an insect
Crimson originally came from kermes, a dye made from scale insects, and later from cochineal, another insect harvested in the Americas and imported to Europe in enormous quantities after the sixteenth century. Cochineal produced a red far stronger and more permanent than European dyes could manage and became one of the most valuable goods shipped out of the Spanish Americas. Cochineal is still used as a food and cosmetic colouring today, listed as carmine or E120.
Deeper and cooler than pure red
Crimson is red with a slight lean toward blue, produced by red high with a little blue and almost no green. That small amount of blue is what makes it read as deep and slightly cool where pure red reads as bright and hot. It is dark enough that light text sits on it, which is not true of full red, and it retains more of its apparent colour at low brightness than a pure red does.
On a panel
Because crimson uses two channels at very different levels, it is a more demanding thing for a display to render than a primary, and a screen with a colour cast pushes it visibly toward pink or toward brown. It is also a colour where oversaturation processing shows: a display that boosts saturation renders crimson as pure red and loses the distinction between this page and the red one, which is a quick way to tell whether a panel is being faithful.
Click the panel above to go fullscreen and press Esc to come back. The color is drawn by your browser, so nothing is installed and nothing is uploaded.
Crimson color values
The exact values for this shade, if you need to match it somewhere else.
| Hex | #DC143C |
|---|---|
| RGB | 220, 20, 60 |
| HSL | 348°, 83%, 47% |
| CMYK | 0%, 91%, 73%, 14% |
| Contrast on white | 4.99:1 |
| Contrast on black | 4.21:1 |
Contrast ratios follow the WCAG formula. Anything at or above 4.5:1 is readable as body text against that background, and 3:1 is the floor for large headings. Crimson reaches that bar on white.
Colors close to crimson
Measured as perceived difference, not by name, so these are the shades that genuinely sit nearest crimson to the eye.
Questions
Does this work on a phone?
Yes. On mobile the page fills the screen when you tap the panel. Some browsers keep a thin status bar visible, which is a browser limit rather than something the page controls.
Will a crimson screen fix a stuck pixel?
Sometimes. A stuck pixel is lit in one color and can occasionally be freed by cycling colors rapidly for a few minutes. A dead pixel receives no power at all and cannot be recovered in software.
What is the hex code for this crimson screen?
This page uses #DC143C. The same value is shown in RGB, HSL and CMYK further down, so you can match this exact shade somewhere else.
Does a crimson screen save battery?
Not meaningfully. Only black saves power, and only on OLED and AMOLED panels where an unlit pixel is genuinely off. Any lit color, including a dark one, draws power.
Can I download this crimson as a wallpaper?
Yes. There is a ready-made 1920 by 1080 PNG on this page, and the panel above will generate the same color at your own screen size, at 1440p or 4K, or at phone dimensions. No watermark and no sign-up.
Is it free?
Yes, and there is no sign-up. The page draws a color; that is the whole tool.