Purple Screen
Fill your whole display with purple in one click. Nothing to install, nothing uploaded.
Purple wallpaper
What a purple screen is for
Purple sits between the red and blue primaries with no green, so it is a quick check of whether your panel is reproducing mixed colors cleanly or pushing them toward magenta.
Purple does not exist as a wavelength
Every colour in a rainbow corresponds to a single wavelength of light, and purple is not among them. It is what the brain produces when the red-sensitive and blue-sensitive cones are stimulated together while the green ones are largely left out, which no single wavelength can do. Colours like this are called extraspectral, and magenta is the other well-known example. This is not a quirk of screens: purple has no line in the spectrum anywhere, which makes it a good reminder that colour is assembled by the visual system rather than measured off the light.
Why purple meant wealth
Tyrian purple, the dye of Roman and Byzantine officialdom, was extracted from the mucus of predatory sea snails, and it took an enormous number of them to dye a single garment. The result was ruinously expensive and, unusually for ancient dyes, it did not fade but deepened with light and weathering. That combination of cost and permanence is why purple became legally restricted to emperors in several periods, and why the association with luxury survived long after synthetic mauve made the colour cheap in 1856.
Purple on a display
Purple is produced by lighting the red and blue subpixels while leaving green low, so a full purple field is a way of checking those two channels together with the one that carries most of the brightness switched down. Because green contributes the bulk of perceived luminance, purple looks darker than its numbers suggest and sits closer to black in apparent brightness than most saturated colours. That makes it comfortable as a large background and poor as a field for judging panel uniformity, where a lighter colour reveals more.
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.
Purple color values
The exact values for this shade, if you need to match it somewhere else.
| Hex | #800080 |
|---|---|
| RGB | 128, 0, 128 |
| HSL | 300°, 100%, 25% |
| CMYK | 0%, 100%, 0%, 50% |
| Contrast on white | 9.42:1 |
| Contrast on black | 2.23:1 |
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. Purple reaches that bar on white.
Colors close to purple
Measured as perceived difference, not by name, so these are the shades that genuinely sit nearest purple 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 purple 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 purple screen?
This page uses #800080. The same value is shown in RGB, HSL and CMYK further down, so you can match this exact shade somewhere else.
Does a purple 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 purple 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.