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Things have flip-flopped over the years:

CRT - Black didn't light up the pixels (I don't remember the details as to how), so it did reduce power usage some.

LCD - Had a constant backlight (see sibling comment for details), so there was little to no difference between black and anything else.

OLED/AMOLED - Black LEDs are actually turned off, instead of displaying a dark color, so we're back to it saving power - more even than CRTs did.



> no difference between black and anything else.

Just a detail that isn't quite right in the article: black is actually the highest power state for LCDs. The backlight draws the same power all the time (for a given brightness setting) but the pixels draw more power when they are black.


Many monitors now have local array dimming to increase contrast. It's probably fair to assume that dimmed backleds lead to decrease power consumption.




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