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Reverse video (or invert video or inverse video or reverse screen) is a computer display technique whereby the background and text color values are inverted. On older computers, displays were usually designed to display text on a black background by default. For emphasis, the color scheme was swapped to bright background with dark text. Nowadays the two tend to be switched, since most computers today default to white as a background color. The opposite of reverse video is known as true video.
Video is usually reversed by inverting the brightness values of the pixels of the involved region of the display. If there are 256 levels of brightness, encoded as 0 to 255, the 255 value becomes 0 and vice versa. A value of 1 becomes 254, 2 of 253, and so on: n is swapped for r - n, for r levels of brightness. This is occasionally called a ones' complement. If the source image is of middle brightness, reverse video can be difficult to see, 127 becomes 128 for example, which is only one level of brightness different. The computer displays where it was most commonly used were monochrome and only displayed two values so this issue seldom arose.
Reverse video is commonly used in software programs as a visual aid to highlight a selection that has been made as an aid in preventing description errors, where an intended action is performed on an object that is not the one intended. It is more common in modern desktop environments to change the background to other colors such as blue, or to use a semi-transparent background to "highlight" the selected text.
On a terminal understanding ANSI escape sequences, the reverse video function is activated using the escape sequence CSI 7 m (which equals SGR 7).
Reverse video is also sometimes used for accessibility reasons. When most computer displays were light-on-dark, it was found that users looking back and forth between a white paper and dark screen would experience eyestrain due to their pupils constantly dilating and contracting. [1] Flicker was also an issue with early white-background displays. [2] Today, people with visual impairments such as ocular toxocariasis may find it less tiring to the eyes to work with a predominantly black screen, since modern operating systems usually display a lot of white in a normal use. For the same, white-dominant reason, reverse video is an efficient way to read or write text in a dark environment, since the darkness of the screen may blend into the darkness of the environment.
A number of operating systems, graphical programs, and websites offer dark modes, which serves a similar purpose as what was originally true video and is now reverse video in modern systems.
The RGB color model is an additive color model in which the red, green and blue primary colors of light are added together in various ways to reproduce a broad array of colors. The name of the model comes from the initials of the three additive primary colors, red, green, and blue.
ANSI escape sequences are a standard for in-band signaling to control cursor location, color, font styling, and other options on video text terminals and terminal emulators. Certain sequences of bytes, most starting with an ASCII escape character and a bracket character, are embedded into text. The terminal interprets these sequences as commands, rather than text to display verbatim.
Gamma correction or gamma is a nonlinear operation used to encode and decode luminance or tristimulus values in video or still image systems. Gamma correction is, in the simplest cases, defined by the following power-law expression:
A computer terminal is an electronic or electromechanical hardware device that can be used for entering data into, and transcribing data from, a computer or a computing system. The teletype was an example of an early-day hard-copy terminal and predated the use of a computer screen by decades. Starting in the mid-1970s with machines such as the Sphere 1, Sol-20, and Apple I, terminal circuitry began to be integrated into personal and workstation computer systems, with the computer handling character generation and outputting to a CRT display such as a computer monitor or, sometimes, a consumer TV.
Web colors are colors used in displaying web pages on the World Wide Web; they can be described by way of three methods: a color may be specified as an RGB triplet, in hexadecimal format or according to its common English name in some cases. A color tool or other graphics software is often used to generate color values. In some uses, hexadecimal color codes are specified with notation using a leading number sign (#). A color is specified according to the intensity of its red, green and blue components, each represented by eight bits. Thus, there are 24 bits used to specify a web color within the sRGB gamut, and 16,777,216 colors that may be so specified.
The Color Graphics Adapter (CGA), originally also called the Color/Graphics Adapter or IBM Color/Graphics Monitor Adapter, introduced in 1981, was IBM's first color graphics card for the IBM PC and established a de facto computer display standard.
In computing, text-based user interfaces (TUI), is a retronym describing a type of user interface (UI) common as an early form of human–computer interaction, before the advent of bitmapped displays and modern conventional graphical user interfaces (GUIs). Like modern GUIs, they can use the entire screen area and may accept mouse and other inputs. They may also use color and often structure the display using box-drawing characters such as ┌ and ╣. The modern context of use is usually a terminal emulator.
The Monochrome Display Adapter is IBM's standard video display card and computer display standard for the IBM PC introduced in 1981. The MDA does not have any pixel-addressable graphics modes, only a single monochrome text mode which can display 80 columns by 25 lines of high-resolution text characters or symbols useful for drawing forms.
Text mode is a computer display mode in which content is internally represented on a computer screen in terms of characters rather than individual pixels. Typically, the screen consists of a uniform rectangular grid of character cells, each of which contains one of the characters of a character set; at the same time, contrasted to graphics mode or other kinds of computer graphics modes.
sRGB is a standard RGB color space that HP and Microsoft created cooperatively in 1996 to use on monitors, printers, and the World Wide Web. It was subsequently standardized by the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) as IEC 61966-2-1:1999. sRGB is the current defined standard colorspace for the web, and it is usually the assumed colorspace for images that are neither tagged for a colorspace nor have an embedded color profile.
High-dynamic-range rendering, also known as high-dynamic-range lighting, is the rendering of computer graphics scenes by using lighting calculations done in high dynamic range (HDR). This allows preservation of details that may be lost due to limiting contrast ratios. Video games and computer-generated movies and special effects benefit from this as it creates more realistic scenes than with more simplistic lighting models.
Video black level is defined as the level of brightness at the darkest (black) part of a visual image or the level of brightness at which no light is emitted from a screen, resulting in a pure black screen.
The MC6847 is a Video Display Generator (VDG) first introduced by Motorola in 1978 and used in the TRS-80 Color Computer, Dragon 32/64, Laser 200, TRS-80 MC-10/Matra Alice, NEC PC-6000 series, Acorn Atom, and the APF Imagination Machine, among others. It is a relatively simple display generator compared to other display chips of the time. It is capable of displaying alphanumeric text, semigraphics, and raster graphics contained within a roughly square display matrix 256 pixels wide by 192 lines high.
Blend modes in digital image editing and computer graphics are used to determine how two layers are blended with each other. The default blend mode in most applications is simply to obscure the lower layer by covering it with whatever is present in the top layer ; because each pixel has numerical values, there also are many other ways to blend two layers.
VGA text mode was introduced in 1987 by IBM as part of the VGA standard for its IBM PS/2 computers. Its use on IBM PC compatibles was widespread through the 1990s and persists today for some applications on modern computers. The main features of VGA text mode are colored characters and their background, blinking, various shapes of the cursor, and loadable fonts. The Linux console traditionally uses hardware VGA text modes, and the Win32 console environment has an ability to switch the screen to text mode for some text window sizes.
Reversing type is a method of typographic printing with black or colored inks, in which the entire surface is printed, except for text elements. Reversing is one of the special cases of printing on a color solid, when the color of the solid is black or colored, and the color of the letters is white. This means that the colors of letter background and letters change places. As such, reversing is a meaningfulful way to add emphasis and contrast to the page as well as to develop a visible typographic hierarchy.