#FFFFFF, every sub-pixel fully on. On a screen set to the sRGB standard this is D65, average daylight at about 6,500 K. No other colour is brighter, so use it for tracing, negatives and pixel checks. The page opens on this preset.
The page's own dimmer, not your device's brightness.
Candle glow, 1,850 K#FF8100, the colour temperature of a candle flame. No screen can show it exactly: blue is already at zero, so this is the nearest colour inside sRGB. It gives about 37 percent of the light of pure white, the dimmest preset here.
Soft white, 2,700 K#FFAD59, the figure printed on most soft white LED and compact fluorescent bulbs. Pick it when the screen has to blend in with table lamps. It gives about 52 percent of the light of pure white, so raise the device's brightness to make up the loss.
Warm white, 3,000 K#FFB86D, the warm white of LED bulbs. Beside a daylight window it looks orange. In a room lit only by the screen your eyes soon adjust and it passes for lamp light. About 57 percent of the light of pure white.
Neutral white, 4,000 K#FFD6A1, between lamp light and daylight, a peach tint on screen. Use it in a room that mixes both, or when pure white turns skin blue on camera and the warmer presets turn it orange. About 72 percent of the light of pure white.
Show all 30 presets and uses (26 more)
White presets, warm to cool, continued
Paper white, 5,000 K#FFEBCE, the chromaticity of D50, the white that ICC colour profiles are built round. A cream that is gentler than pure white over a long tracing session and still gives about 85 percent of its light.
Daylight white, 5,500 K#FFF3E0, the chromaticity of D55, mid-morning and mid-afternoon daylight, and close to electronic flash at 5,500 to 6,000 K. Match it when a camera's white balance is set to daylight or flash. About 91 percent of the light of pure white.
Pure white, 6,500 K#FFFFFF, every sub-pixel fully on. On a screen set to the sRGB standard this is D65, average daylight at about 6,500 K. No other colour is brighter, so use it for tracing, negatives and pixel checks. The page opens on this preset.
Cool white, 7,500 K#E9F1FF, the chromaticity of D75, the blue-white of north sky daylight. A screen can only make white bluer by turning red and green down, so this preset is dimmer than pure white, at about 87 percent, never brighter.
As a light 7
Video call fill lightOpen this page in a window beside the call, or full screen on a second monitor at face height. Start at Neutral white, 4,000 K so the screen agrees with the room's lamps. If your glasses show a white rectangle, raise the screen or tilt it slightly.
Reading light in bed or a tentChoose Warm white, 3,000 K and turn the device's own brightness right down. Prop the screen so it faces the page, not your face. On an OLED phone white is the most power-hungry picture there is, so expect the battery to fall faster than usual.
Room light in a power cutSet Pure white, 6,500 K at full brightness and aim the screen at a white ceiling or wall: bounced light fills a room better than a bare screen. The screen still sleeps on the device's own timer, so lengthen that in its settings first.
Finding something small on the floorHold the phone a few centimetres above the floor with the white screen facing sideways across it. Light that skims a surface gives an earring back or a tiny screw a long shadow and a glint that a ceiling light never shows.
Small product photo lightStand a tablet on Daylight white, 5,500 K at 45 degrees to the object, with white card on the far side to lift the shadows. Most LED backlights dim by pulsing, some as slowly as 180 times a second, so if dark bands appear use 1/60 s or slower.
Backlight for leaves, glass and slices of fruitLay the tablet flat, rest the subject on clear glass or acrylic held two or three centimetres above the screen, and shoot from directly above. The gap throws the pixel grid out of focus, so the background photographs as clean white and not as a fine mesh.
Camera sensor dust checkSet the lens to f/16 or f/22, switch to manual focus, defocus completely and photograph the white screen from a few centimetres away. Dust on the sensor shows as soft grey spots in the same place in every frame. The screen's own pixels blur away.
As a light box for tracing and viewing 7
Tracing a drawing onto paperPure white, device brightness full, room lights low. Fix the original and the top sheet to the bezel with low-tack tape, never to the panel. Use a soft pencil and a light hand: hard pressure can mark an LCD. A resting palm only brings the controls back for three seconds.
Transferring an embroidery pattern to fabricWorks through light-coloured cotton and linen. Denim, felt and dark fabric block too much light. Fix the printed pattern to the bezel with low-tack tape, never to the panel, then lay the fabric over it, flat but not stretched, and draw with a water-soluble pen so stray marks rinse out.
Calligraphy guide sheet under layout paperPrint your guidelines and slant lines once, fix the sheet to the bezel with low-tack tape and write on thin layout or copier paper above it. You rule nothing and erase nothing. Paper white, 5,000 K is kinder over an hour. Keep ink bottles well away from the device.
Viewing film negatives and slidesHold the strip two or three centimetres above the screen, not flat on the glass. Laid flat, the pixel grid shows through as a mesh, above all when you photograph the frame with a phone or a macro lens. Mask the spare screen with black card to cut flare.
Weeding cut vinylLight from below shines through the blade's cuts, so they show as bright hairlines even where the vinyl's colour hides them from above. Lay clear acetate over the screen first, because a weeding hook will scratch the coating on the glass.
Diamond painting and cross-stitch chartsLay the tablet flat under the canvas or chart so the printed symbols read clearly from above. A tablet is smaller than most canvases, so work one section at a time and slide the device along, with a sheet of acetate between the two.
Checking that a double-sided print lines upHold the printed sheet against the white screen and both sides show at once. You can see whether the back page's margins and crop marks sit over the front's, and measure how far the duplex feed is off, before you print a whole booklet.
Checking the screen itself 8
Dead pixelsA dead pixel is a black dot that stays in the same place on white. Work across the screen in strips, at arm's length and then close up. One white field cannot find every fault: a pixel stuck on shows only against dark colours.
Dust on the glass or a fault under itWipe with a dry microfibre cloth. A speck that moves or goes was on the surface. For one that stays, shift your head from side to side: dust on top of the glass slides across the pixels beneath it, while a dead pixel stays locked to the picture.
Uneven backlight and dark cornersOn an LCD, set the device to about half brightness and look at the white from a metre back. Darker corners and edges, or a band with a yellow or pink cast, come from the backlight and the layers that spread it. Then judge it on a real document.
Burn-in and image retentionLook for faint shapes of things that sit still all day: a status bar, navigation buttons, a channel logo. OLED pixels dim with use, so heavily used areas show darker or tinted on white, and that mark is permanent. On an LCD the ghost is usually temporary.
Dark spots on an OLEDOLED material is damaged by oxygen and moisture, and where they get in a dark spot forms. White makes its outline sharp. Photograph the screen today with the brightness fixed, then again in a month, and compare the two while the warranty still runs.
Is a night mode changing your colours?Pure white should look plain white. If it looks cream or amber, a night mode, reading mode or automatic colour-matching setting is warming the whole display. Switch it off before you judge tint or match two screens. It shifts every preset on this page too.
Matching two monitorsOpen the page on both screens and compare the whites side by side, where the eye catches differences it would miss one at a time. Then change the colour temperature or RGB gain in one monitor's own menu until the join between them disappears.
Checking a projectorA white field shows what films hide: soft dark blobs from dust in the light path, corners that will not focus at the same time as the centre, and colour fringes along the edges. It also exposes keystone: the white shape should be a rectangle, not a trapezium.
How this list was compiled: Presets and uses written for this page. Every hex value was computed: the chromaticity of each colour temperature comes from the Kim approximation of the Planckian locus below 4,000 K (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planckian_locus) and from the CIE daylight series formula at 4,000 K and above, using the corrected temperatures 5,003 K, 5,503 K, 6,504 K and 7,504 K for D50, D55, D65 and D75 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_illuminant). Each chromaticity was converted to sRGB with the matrix and transfer function at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SRGB, scaled so the largest channel is 255. D65 comes out as exactly #FFFFFF, which is the check on the method. At 1,850 K the blue channel is negative and was set to zero. The share of light each preset gives is its relative luminance from the same article (0.2126 R + 0.7152 G + 0.0722 B on linear values), with pure white as 100. The colour temperatures of candle flames, soft white and warm white bulbs and electronic flash are from the table at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_temperature. OLED power use on white, OLED dark spots from oxygen and moisture, and burn-in against temporary image persistence are from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OLED and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screen_burn-in. Backlight dimming by pulse-width modulation at 180 Hz to several kHz is from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flicker_(screen). Dead and stuck pixel definitions are from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defective_pixel. Browser support for full screen and for keeping the screen awake was read from https://github.com/mdn/browser-compat-data (api.Element.requestFullscreen and api.WakeLock.request); its notes for Safari on iOS say full screen is only available on iPad, not on iPhone, and that it shows an overlay button which cannot be disabled, with a downward swipe leaving full screen. All checked 2026-09-19. Licence: own work
How it works
This white screen fills your display with white, #FFFFFF, in one press: a bright white screen for light, a blank white screen for tracing, or a white screen test for dead pixels. A warm white screen is a slide away.
Read the full guide
A bright screen light, or a dim one
The page cannot change the device's brightness or stop the screen sleeping, so set both in your device settings first. Dimmer darkens the white itself, down to 10 percent, for a bedside light.
Warm it up, and what that costs
A warm white screen sits between 2,700 K and 4,000 K and matches household bulbs. A screen warms white by turning blue and green down, so warmth costs light: at the same brightness 3,000 K gives about 57 percent of pure white. For tracing and pixel checks, stay on pure white. The kelvin labels assume an sRGB screen, whose full white is 6,500 K.
Cleaning the screen? On white, dust shows as dark specks; only a speck that survives a wipe matters.
As a lamp, aim it at a white ceiling: bounced light fills the room.
Questions and answers
How do I get a bright white screen?
Stay on the pure white screen the page opens on, #FFFFFF, at full device brightness. Pure white lights every sub-pixel fully, so no other colour a screen can show is brighter.
Can I use a white screen for light on a video call, like an online ring light?
Yes. A full white screen facing you lights your face like a soft lamp. Video call fill light, in the list under the tool, says where to put it and which white to start on.
Is this an all white screen with nothing else on it?
Yes. In full screen the controls fade after three seconds, leaving a blank white field from edge to edge, plain enough for a white screen background. They return when you move the pointer or tap.
Why will it not go full screen on my phone?
On an iPhone no web page can: full screen is switched off there, so the white fills the browser window, and turning the phone sideways hides most of the bars. An iPad allows it, but a small close button stays in the corner.
Does a white screen use more battery?
On an OLED screen, yes. A black pixel is switched off and a white one is fully on, so all white is the most demanding picture it can show. On an LCD the backlight runs behind every picture, so brightness matters far more than colour.