Pixel Inversion Test - Custom Colors
Instructions: Specify your own set of colors in the form below. View the home page for more instructions.
Screens use a pattern to hide the flickering caused by pixel inversion. Technically it's the subpixels that flicker. A pixel is comprised of three subpixels: a red, a green and a blue subpixel. Usually, all the subpixels are flickering, but the screen's pixel inversion pattern ensures that the flicker of one subpixel is cancelled out by the flickering of nearby subpixels so that we don't consciously notice the flickering. Tips:
- Use a pattern of lighter and darker colors. Examples:
- Checkerboard pattern example: Put lighter colors in the top left and bottom right and darker colors in the top right and bottom left (or vice versa).
- Linear pattern example: Use lighter colors to form one line and darker colors form the other.
- Lighter colors include #FFFFFF, #9F9F9F, and #FF9F9F. Darker colors include #000000, #9F9F9F, and #009F9F.
- Use black pixels (00) adjacent to colors that do flicker. Examples:
- Black (00) pixels will not flicker. On most screens, the In many screens, the subpixels that are fully bright (FF) and fully dark (00) do not flicker, but colors that are not fully bright (e.g., 9F) do flicker. Brighter (but not too bright) colors seem to flicker the most. So you could pair #9F9F9F with #000000.
- You can mix and match the subpixels. For instance, #FF9FFF and #9F009F may make a good pair because the green subpixel will flicker for the first pixel and the red and blue subpixels will flicker for the second pixel.
Please note that I've presented a simplified version of the adjacent pixels concept described above. For instance, in a 4x2 pattern, the pixels in the "Adjacent pixel pair #1" appear above and below each other and so they are adjacent. But each pixel also has other adjacent pixels (to the left and right, as well as diagonally adjacent). To really understand how the screen flickers, you'll want to consider how all the pixels interact with one another.
If you're interested in viewing many (dozens or more) colors at the same time and you're somewhat familiar with JavaScript, you can download this page and any referenced JavaScript and stylesheets and edit the "customColorsGrids" variable. It's an array of JSON objects that describe the grids that this page will generate.