What a navy blue screen is used for
- Dark ambient screen light that stays unobtrusive
- Deep backgrounds for photography and product shots
- Checking blue channel banding at mid output, where it is worst
Navy Blue screen online: #000080 at full screen
Navy is #000080, blue at half output with red and green off. It is the blue equivalent of maroon, and it is where blue banding is most visible: the eye resolves blue detail poorly, panels allocate it the fewest bits, and mid-output blue is where the steps between adjacent values become large enough to see.
If this screen looks like a series of bands rather than a flat field, that is the panel’s bit depth showing, not the page. It is very common on 6-bit-plus-dithering laptop displays and much rarer on true 8-bit or 10-bit monitors.
As dark ambient light, navy is unobtrusive but noticeably cooler than maroon, and it does not preserve dark adaptation the way red does — blue is the worst wavelength for that.
How to get a full screen navy blue 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.