Plum Screen
Fill your whole display with plum in one click. Nothing to install, nothing uploaded.
Plum wallpaper
What a plum screen is for
Plum is a muted purple with red and blue at moderate strength. Mixed dark tones like this expose whether a panel keeps them neutral or lets one channel dominate as brightness drops.
A dark purple, with the same spectral gap
Plum is purple at reduced brightness, so it inherits the fact that no single wavelength of light produces it. The red and blue cones are being stimulated together while green is left largely out, and no wavelength between them can do that because red and blue sit at opposite ends of the spectrum. On a display it is red and blue at moderate output with green very low, which places it among the darker colours that still read clearly as a hue rather than as near-black.
Where it sits against navy and maroon
Plum, navy and maroon occupy the same useful band: dark enough to work as a background for light text, saturated enough not to be mistaken for grey. What separates them is temperature. Maroon reads warm, navy reads cool, and plum sits between the two, which is why it is often chosen when neither of the other two feels right. On an OLED all three cost more power than black, and plum costs slightly more than either because it drives two channels rather than concentrating on one.
Judging a dark colour on a screen
Dark saturated colours are where panels differ most visibly. A display with poor black levels renders plum as a washed-out mauve, and one with aggressive contrast processing crushes it toward black and loses the distinction between it and the shades around it. Viewing it in a dim room, straight on, and comparing it against navy and maroon is a quick way to see whether a screen actually separates dark colours or simply flattens them.
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.
Plum color values
The exact values for this shade, if you need to match it somewhere else.
| Hex | #8E4585 |
|---|---|
| RGB | 142, 69, 133 |
| HSL | 307°, 35%, 41% |
| CMYK | 0%, 51%, 6%, 44% |
| Contrast on white | 6.29:1 |
| Contrast on black | 3.34:1 |
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. Plum reaches that bar on white.
Colors close to plum
Measured as perceived difference, not by name, so these are the shades that genuinely sit nearest plum 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 plum 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 plum screen?
This page uses #8E4585. The same value is shown in RGB, HSL and CMYK further down, so you can match this exact shade somewhere else.
Does a plum 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 plum 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.