Fifty-five checks, one click each

For two years the front page of this site made you work for a white screen. You clicked Dead pixel test, read a help card, and pressed Space until the color you wanted came around. Three tools, nine colors, a handful of ramps. It was tidy and it was slow, and it hid most of what the site could do.

As of today the console shows the fields themselves. Sixteen solid colors, thirteen gradients, sixteen patterns, four motion tests and six measured instruments, each drawn as a small chip in the color it will fill your screen with. Click the chip, the screen fills, Esc brings you back. Fifty-five checks, one click each.

What the data said

Search Console has been telling us something for months. On desktop, where most people find this site, we were being seen and not chosen: the homepage sat around position twelve for “screen test” and got clicked about one time in two hundred. Mobile clicked three times as often on the same page. The difference wasn’t the search result. It was what people found when they got here and compared it to the other tabs they had open.

The other tabs show a grid of fields. Ours showed three buttons. So we looked at what people actually search for and built the grid we should have had: display test, screen check, pixel test, oled test, ghosting test, resolution checker. And one query we rank for without deserving it — screen crack test — now has a real test behind it, a white field with a fine grid so a crack or dead zone can be traced instead of guessed at.

What’s new, specifically

Solids. Orange and purple, four more grays between the black and white we already had, and a custom hex picker for the one color your problem happens to need.

Gradients. The old ramps stay. Added: an RGB split with the three primaries stacked, a full hue sweep, the shadow quarter and the highlight quarter on their own (the two places cheap panels give up first), gamma steps, and a plain sixteen-step staircase with the values written on the bands.

Patterns. A new tool that draws at device pixels. A fine grid for geometry, a checkerboard, text at eleven sizes on both white and black, one-pixel lines in three directions, a dot field, a one-pixel checker that reads as flat gray only at native resolution, near-black and near-white steps with their code values labeled, a saturation ladder, an overscan frame for TVs, and the crack grid. The three broadcast cards are still there next to them.

Motion. The UFO lanes are unchanged. New: a block chase that advances one slot per frame, so a dropped frame shows as a skip; a flashing block that should settle into a steady gray and doesn’t if something is flickering; and scrolling text for judder. Keys 1 through 4 switch between them without leaving fullscreen.

Measurement. The rows for refresh rate, resolution, calibration, touch, burn-in and OLED show their live reading on the homepage where they have one, and open their own page where the full instrument and the explanation live.

What didn’t change

The benchmark card is where it was, with the ten-best board and your own lane inside it. Under the board there’s a new line: the median score of each hardware group that has passed thirty samples, the same gate the hardware benchmarks page uses. While a group is still filling, the line says how many samples exist. No number is invented to make the page look busier.

Nothing about scoring moved. Benchmark 2.2.0 is still benchmark 2.2.0, and every score on the board is comparable to the one before it.

The page is also still one frame to first paint and under the same JavaScript budget it was yesterday. Chips are HTML and CSS; the tools load when you click one, as they always did.

The full board

Later the same day the board grew a page of its own. The leaderboard lists up to 200 rows instead of ten, one per machine, over the last 30 days or all time, and lets you pick an earlier benchmark version to see what the ranking looked like under that workload. It is the same data the homepage shows, at the same coarseness, just deeper. When nobody else is showing you live numbers from real machines, the least we can do is show you all of ours.

Try it

Go to the homepage, pick the field you actually need, and look at your screen. If you find something, the dead pixel guide says what it is and whether it’s worth a return. If you don’t, run the benchmark and put your machine on the board.