Blackle

[seren]

I never know which forums to put things in. >:-)

Anyway, is this (http://www.blackle.com/about/)nonsense or not?

[bobdezon]

Nope, its true for CRT monitors, LCD and display not so applicable. Sounds stupid I know but apparantly its not. On a CRT screen it takes 3 rods being charged to present white, this is 3x the energy required for any other colour. So they have a point, but I think this is more to do with heap media trying to swoop googles traffic then anything to do with energy conservation.

[Cuddles]

This was dicussed on the JREF forums a while ago. Bob is basically correct that it's sort of valid for CRT displays, but not for any others, and since it's almost impossible to buy CRTs anymore, it's all a bit pointless. I say sort of valid, because the actual amount of energy saved is very little. The vast majority of energy use in a PC is not the monitor. Depending on your setup, the CPU and graphics card will use much more, and with many people now using computers as media centres, speakers are likely to use as much as the rest of the computer put together. And of course, this is just a search engine. How many people spend hours looking at Google? None. You spend a few seconds searching for something and the rest of the time you are looking at the results, which aren't black. So you might get an utterly insignificant energy saving for a very short amount of time. But only if your monitor is more than a few years old.

What's particularly ironic is that in LCD screens, black is actually the on state. The cells always have a voltage across them, so there is no real difference in energy use, but if there were, black would actually use more energy. If you really want to save energy, just turn your computer and monitor off instead of leaving them in standby, or even leaving them on permanently like some people do.

[seren]

Sorry, I keep forgetting to thank you both for this info.

Thank you, both.