Monitor Color Test

How to test monitor colours

1. Turn off night light, Night Shift, True Tone, eye comfort and any vivid, dynamic or game picture mode. These change colours on purpose.
2. Use normal room lighting, not a dark room or direct sunlight, and set the browser zoom to 100%.
3. Press Start full-screen colour test. Step through the patterns with a click, tap or the arrow keys.
4. Check the colour bars and gradients first, then the reference patches: skin tones should look like real skin and the grey row should have no tint.
5. If two screens are side by side, open the page on both and compare the same pattern.

What the results mean

You are looking for four kinds of colour problem:

• Tint (wrong white point): greys and whites look pink, green, blue or yellow. Usually the colour temperature or a night mode; fix it in the monitor menu (choose 6500K or sRGB) or by calibration.
• Clipping: the last few saturation steps or the brightest end of a gradient look the same. Saturation or contrast is set too high, or a vivid mode is on.
• Banding: steps in the RGB gradients or the spectrum. Low bit depth, a reduced colour output setting, or a colour profile adjustment.
• Oversaturation: skin tones look orange or sunburnt and greens look neon. Common on wide gamut monitors showing normal web content without an sRGB mode.

Colour is also personal: your eyes adapt to the white of the screen within a minute, so compare with another trusted screen or a white sheet of paper in daylight if you can.

What the reference patches show

The colour patches page uses 24 colours modelled on a standard photographic colour chart: dark and light skin, sky blue, foliage, a blue flower, primary and secondary colours, and six greys from white to black. These are colours everyone knows from real life, so a screen that shows them wrongly is easy to spot. Skin that looks orange or pink, a sky blue that looks purple, or greys that are not neutral all point to a colour setting worth changing.

sRGB, wide gamut and HDR

Almost all web pages, photos and games are made in the sRGB colour space. Wide gamut monitors (DCI-P3, Adobe RGB) can show deeper reds and greens, but they make sRGB content look oversaturated unless the monitor has an sRGB mode or the system manages colour. If skin tones look too red, look for an sRGB mode or "sRGB clamp" in the monitor menu. Browsers show this page in SDR, so it does not test HDR brightness. For brightness, contrast and gamma, follow our monitor calibration steps; for a full panel check, run the monitor test.

Common problems and fixes

Whites look blue or yellow

In the monitor menu set Colour temperature to 6500K, Warm or sRGB, and turn off blue light filters while comparing. On Windows check Settings > System > Display > Night light; on a Mac, Night Shift and True Tone.

Colours are too strong

Choose the Standard or sRGB picture mode instead of Vivid or Dynamic, and lower the saturation if the monitor has a setting for it. On Samsung phones choose Natural under Screen mode.

Gradients show bands

Set the graphics card output to full RGB at 8 bits per colour or more, remove custom ICC profiles you do not need, and turn off dynamic contrast. On HDMI make sure the PC and monitor agree on full or limited range.