Maroon Screen
Fill your whole display with maroon in one click. Nothing to install, nothing uploaded.
Maroon wallpaper
What a maroon screen is for
Maroon is red at half power, which is a useful test of low-level red reproduction. Panels that crush dark tones will show it as near black rather than a clear dark red.
Red that keeps its identity in the dark
Maroon is red at low brightness, and like navy it stays recognisably itself where many colours collapse into indistinct dark shades. That durability is why it has been a common choice for uniforms, upholstery and bindings: it reads as a colour rather than as dirt, and it does not show wear the way a light colour does. On a display it is produced by driving the red subpixel at around half output with the other two very low, so it is essentially the red page with the brightness taken out.
Dark red and night vision
The reasoning behind red preserving dark adaptation applies with more force here. Rods, which handle night vision, respond weakly to long wavelengths, so red light interferes with dark adaptation less than white; a dark red reduces the total light as well, which compounds the benefit. If you want a screen visible in a dark room without wrecking your night vision or waking anyone, a maroon field at low brightness is a more practical choice than full red, which is uncomfortably bright in the dark.
Contrast, and where it fails
Maroon is dark enough that light text sits on it well and dark text does not, which is the straightforward part. The trap is pairing it with black or with other dark saturated colours: maroon on black looks striking and performs badly, because the two are close in perceived lightness even though they are far apart in hue, and text at that contrast fails accessibility guidelines regardless of how deliberate the pairing looks.
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.
Maroon color values
The exact values for this shade, if you need to match it somewhere else.
| Hex | #800000 |
|---|---|
| RGB | 128, 0, 0 |
| HSL | 0°, 100%, 25% |
| CMYK | 0%, 100%, 100%, 50% |
| Contrast on white | 10.95:1 |
| Contrast on black | 1.92:1 |
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. Maroon reaches that bar on white.
Colors close to maroon
Measured as perceived difference, not by name, so these are the shades that genuinely sit nearest maroon 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 maroon 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 maroon screen?
This page uses #800000. The same value is shown in RGB, HSL and CMYK further down, so you can match this exact shade somewhere else.
Does a maroon 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 maroon 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.