Member Avatar for dintymoore

So just to try it, and so far I like it, I made a solid black jpg on Photoshop and put that as the desktop pic on both my 2 monitors. I hid the hard drives, and made the icon for Firefox black and put it in the lower left corner so the title is below the screen; you can't tell it's there. I've killed the dock.
In other words, both screens are totally black, the one on the left has the menu bar at the top, which actually might go north and disappear with the screen size controls on the monitor itself.
Way easier on the eyes.
So here's the question: These are Sony Trintron CRT's, SVGA's you have trouble giving away.
Since it's roots are Edison's tubes and tubes use a fair amount of juice, do the monitors use less electricity when the screens are black?

A 60w bulb uses more electricity than a 25w, and it's brighter. For sure the guts electronics, power supply and such are still working, but wouldn't the analog screen be a major amp suck?
On the other hand, as I type this, the left screen is white, and the right one is black, and they feel roughly the same temp, both pretty cool.

Was just wondering what you guys thought.

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Member Avatar for xxMulderxx

I think that its definitely making things greener.. Crt's are like television sets.. They definitely suck a good portion of juice when used to full effect. I would agree that your saving juice somewhere in the scheme of things.

Member Avatar for John A

This whole black thing is very silly because it's only been proven that black saves some energy on CRT displays (and some have noted that in LCD monitors it could actually require more energy). It's really quite a fad, and there are so many better ways of trying to conserve energy. But sure, if you're using a CRT and really concerned about how much power it draws, use black.

Member Avatar for OlyComputers

I doubt you're saving more than a couple of watts. Most of the power used is to power the tube in the first place and will be pulled no matter what color you're working with. If you look at your black screen it will still look "lit" that's because the tube is still pushing electrons at it. Black is not "off" it's just "black" which may use less power, but not a whole lot.

Besides, if you have windows open on the screens it's using colors, so the only time there would ever be power save is when the screens are just sitting on the desktop, which is when you'd turn the monitor off anyway if you really cared about saving power.

If you want to save power, set the monitors to turn off, enable sleep mode, or just turn off your second monitor when you're not using it. I'd bet my certs that turning one monitor off for fifteen minutes a day saves more power than keeping the desktop black all day long.

Member Avatar for OlyComputers

I read that blog post, and the results are better than I expected, but you have to remember that's if you leave the same page up! changing the image uses power, and having multiple pages at once does too. using something like Macs key command to inverse the color on the screen might actually make a difference, but you shouldn't leave a CRT on to the desktop anyway, it's a waste of power to let it idle at all.

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