Monitor Display Colors and Power Consumption

Believe it or not, the very colors you choose for your web pages and graphics will directly impact the amount of watts that a monitor will consume to display them! The brighter the colors, the more energy it takes to display those colors on one's cathode-ray tube (CRT) monitors. A table which illustrates the differences in CRT power consumption for a handful of colors is shown below. That table was directly derived from the United States Department of Energy web site.

White - 74 Watts Fuchsia - 69 Watts Yellow - 69 Watts Aqua - 68 Watts
Silver - 67 Watts Blue - 65 Watts Red - 65 Watts Lime - 63 Watts
Gray - 62 Watts Olive - 61 Watts Purple - 61 Watts Teal - 61 Watts
Green - 60 Watts Maroon - 60 Watts Navy - 60 Watts Black - 59 Watts

As of the Summer of 2007, research showed that roughly 75 percent of the monitors in use within developed economies were liquid crystal display (LCD), versus 25 percent using CRT...and LCD monitors have an entirely different set of rules when it comes to energy consumption and color. From Pablo Päster's "Ask Pablo" blog when studying the issue of power consumption and the Google.com home page:

"While CRT monitors function like a light bulb, getting dimmer and brighter, and therefore using more and less electricity depending on screen brightness, LCD screens are a back-lit display where a liquid crystal display selectively blocks out certain wavelengths of light. What this means is that, when I hook up my Kill-A-Watt meter to my screen I get a reading of 16 watts when it is on the regular google.com page. Surprisingly, I actually get a reading of 17 watts when I switch over to the blackle.com page! So, with a black screen a LCD monitor actually uses 1 watt more."

Very interesting! What this means (to me) is two things:

  1. One should make sure to pay attention to the type of monitor they use on their own computer(s) as they strive to reduce their own energy consumption, and:
  2. One should try and learn as much as one can about the types of visitors to their web site(s), in effort to understand how to help reduce the amount of electricity that is being consume to display their content on their visitor's monitors.
On the whole, the amount of energy saved by the 25 percent of CRT users out there will outweigh the incrementally-larger power consumption of LCD users using black backgrounds versus white backgrounds. However, it does raise some interesting dilemmas related to the color palette one chooses for their web designs. Our web site uses a predominant "white" background, since the vast majority of our site's visitors are using LCD displays. That decision, however, is something that should be evaluated on a site-by-site basis.

 
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