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Unpopular opinion: I fought pure black backgrounds for 3 years and a coffee shop wifi outage changed my mind
For the longest time I was dead set against #000000 as a background. I read all the same stuff everyone reads about halation and eye strain and how true black makes text look like it is floating, and I repeated it to anyone who would listen. Then two months ago I was sitting in a diner off Route 9 in Poughkeepsie with my laptop open, tweaking a night theme for a buddy's fishing log app, and the wifi dropped for about 40 minutes. With nothing else to do, I flipped the background from #121212 to #000000 just to see it side by side on a cheap screen, and the difference was not what I expected at all. On that low contrast panel the pure black version actually read cleaner, and it hit me that every mockup I had judged was on my own nice monitor where #121212 looks soft and muddy. Since then I have started shipping pure black as the default for OLED phones and offering a slightly lifted gray as a toggle, and my beta testers picked pure black about 7 times out of 10. Now I am wondering how much of the standard advice is just people repeating it without testing on cheap hardware. Has anyone here run both on real phones and seen the same thing, or am I just late to this?
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