What a purple screen is used for
- Ambient and mood lighting behind a desk or a camera
- Backgrounds for photography and product shots
- Checking that red and blue mix cleanly with green fully off
- A calm alternative to black for leaving a screen on
Purple screen online: #800080 at full screen
Purple as most people mean it is #800080 — red and blue at half output, green at zero. It is a darker, more saturated colour than violet, which sits at a similar hue but much higher brightness.
Because green is entirely off, a purple field is a quick way to confirm the green channel is not leaking. Any green cast in this screen points at a stuck subpixel or a badly miscalibrated display.
Purple is a common choice for ambient screen lighting behind a desk, because it reads as atmospheric without being bright enough to affect what you are looking at. At low brightness it works well as a background glow on a second monitor.
How to get a full screen purple 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.