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Comment by JoshTriplett | Hacker News Reader

And OLEDs in particular, where black stops transmitting light at all. (And saves power, too.)

An OLED and a dark default would probably also reduce insomnia.

I don't know about you guys, but Night Shift at max setting is still too blue for me. I end up turning the brightness down. I just need to switch to dark.

Heck yeah. Totally agree. For my app I'm working on dark true dark modes and then try to do true dark/true black on mobile.

Black looks much better on mobile IMO ...

Neat tidbit that I learned while working on dark mode at my company. Don't use true black. It looks amazing on OLED screens at rest but it results in a weird sluggish appearance when scrolling. This is because there is a lag time between pixels going from off to on.

The material team at Google made a blog post about it which I recommend going through: https://material.io/design/color/dark-theme.html

The quote around the OLED: "On OLED screens, turning pixels on and off can cause a delay when the screen is scrolled, making the pixels blur."

As an example, the facebook messenger app uses a true black background and the delay is _very_ noticeable.

And non-OLEDs by exception, where black means shining a light at a black surface for maximum device heating.

Plus you can't burn in what you didn't turn on.

But you can burn in the turned on pixels can't you? Do the LEDs lose luminance with age?

They do sadly, which is why you wanna keep them off, or I suppose burn them all out at the same rate. I know my OLED TV actually does a burn-in balancing once I turn it off.

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