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Dec
17
2008
How come the colors I use on my website look different on different computers?
Answer #2
Thnak you Soruk, I’m expermenting and learning about rgb after reading your answer. I think that is helping. I probably need a new monitor too – but that may take some time.
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Answer #1
Various different things can cause colours used on a website to vary from machine to machine. Also, how different? Subtlely different or wildly inaccurate?
Firstly, the colour depth setting – if a machine is using a depth less than 24 bit (16,777,216 colours), then it’ll have to approximate and choose a next nearest colour. If you want to see an example of this, take any photograph, save it as a .gif file (ignoring any warnings you might get), then re-open that gif file. DON’T save over the original! GIF is an ancient format that can’t handle colour depths of more than 8 bits, that’s just 256 colours.
Another possibility is if you’re specifying the colour by a name (e.g. blue) rather than an RGB value (e.g. #0000FF). In the case of names, what it will display as will depend on what the browser designers chose. RGB values are an "exact" method in that you’re specifying precisely how much red, green and blue is to appear for that colour setting.
Some Windows drivers for graphics cards also include a control for adjusting the colours, however I’ve never played with this to know the effect on absolute-specified colour settings in web pages, but that is something that might be worth looking at.
Then of course, there’s always the monitor in use. A cheap and/or old one might not show the colours exactly the same as a newer or better one.