Dark mode is a light-on-dark colour scheme that is slowly making its way into our daily technology. It's basically like a text document with black text against the white background of the digital page. In dark mode, the text becomes white and the page becomes dark. One thing is for sure. This new addition to most technologies is rapidly growing in popularity and has a huge number of internet users crowing in jubilation!
The benefits of dark mode, acolytes say, are twofold. First, the device uses less light and so consumes less battery or electricity. And, even more crucially, dark mode cuts the amount of light flooding into your peepers, reducing eye strain and perhaps making it easier for you to get to sleep.
Regarding the latter claim, scientific evidence leaves a lot of questions unresolved. According to Silas Brown, a partially-sighted computer scientist from the University of Cambridge, looking at dark backgrounds does reduce video glare and eye fatigue. Yet there is contrasting evidence that if you are reading large amounts of text, black on a white background is easier on the eye.
If you haven't made the switch to dark mode yet on your phones and laptops, it may be worth looking into! Read about the entire study here!
Image Credits: Wired
Come to the dark side - we save power.
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Some of us are old enough to remember when all computer text was green ascii on a black background. We were jubilant when we finally got to look at something that reembled a real book or newspaper.
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yep, dark mode reminds me of DOS
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Eh, it's nice to have options, but I find white-on-black to be more distracting than soothing.
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Dark mode only saves energy when using OLED screens where a pixel emits its own light. In an LCD the light is emitted by a backlight and to get dark it needs to activate 100% blocking in a screening layer. It draws more energy than showing white, though not much. The only way to reduce energy in LCD is to turn down the backlight brightness.
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I've been reading e-books in dark-mode ever since it first became a thing.
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Ever been on call and had to look at your phone at say 3am after you've been asleep for a few hours? It's more than energy savings. Google (Android) gets it and I presume Apple does too. Not Microsoft though. The oblivious ant army marches on. . .
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