What a cyan screen is used for
- Confirming the red channel is fully off — any red tint is a fault
- Checking green and blue subpixels together
- Cool-toned lighting for photography and streaming
- Print and design work needing a screen reference for cyan
Cyan screen online: #00FFFF at full screen
Cyan is the complement of red: green and blue at maximum, red at zero. That makes it the cleanest test for a stuck red subpixel, which shows on this field as a bright pinkish dot that is impossible to miss.
It is one of the three subtractive primaries used in printing, alongside magenta and yellow. Screen cyan and printed cyan are not the same colour — a display can hit a far more vivid cyan than CMYK ink can — which is a common source of surprise when a design that looked electric on screen comes back muted from the printer.
As a light source, cyan reads distinctly cold. It is useful for a deliberately clinical or nighttime look on camera, and unflattering for skin, which is exactly why it works for that effect.
How to get a full screen cyan background
Press the fullscreen button on the player above, or the F key. Escape returns you to the page. On a desktop browser F11 does the same job and hides the browser's own toolbars as well.
The colour box is a control, not a picture: use the hex field to enter any value, pick another shade from the palette, or download the current colour as a PNG at your screen's resolution. Whatever you set is written into the address bar, so the link you copy reproduces exactly what you are looking at.