What a white screen is for
- A soft light for a video call or a live stream, in place of a lamp.
- A reading light or night light if you switch to warm white and lower the brightness.
- Finding dust, fingerprints, and stuck pixels on a monitor.
- Tracing a drawing laid on a tablet.
- Checking whether a new display is evenly lit.
How to use it
- Choose white, warm white, black, red, green, blue, yellow, pink, or a custom color.
- Click Show full screen.
- Raise the brightness if you are lighting your face. Keep it lower for reading.
- Click anywhere, or press Escape, to leave.
Keeping the screen awake
While this page is in the foreground, the browser is asked to hold the screen awake (the Screen Wake Lock API). Current Chrome, Edge, Safari, and Firefox support it. If yours does not, lengthen the sleep timer in your display settings. A bright white screen uses more battery on a laptop, so plug in if you will leave it up for a while.
Eyes, cleaning, and other colors
Full brightness in a dark room is hard on your eyes. For a night light, use warm white and turn the brightness down. For a video call, put the screen just above eye level and face it so the light fills shadows, the way a ring light does. On a phone, a white screen is also a milder flashlight than the LED flash.
White shows fingerprints; black shows dust. Switch between them, then wipe with a slightly damp microfiber cloth, preferably with the screen off. Black also helps you notice light bleed. Red keeps more of your night vision. Green and blue light up individual subpixels.