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VESA Display Power Management Signaling (or DPMS) is a standard from the VESA consortium for power management of video monitors. Example usage includes turning off, or putting the monitor into standby after a period of idle time to save power. Some commercial displays also incorporate this technology.


History

VESA issued DPMS 1.0 in 1993, basing their work on the
United States Environmental Protection Agency The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is an independent executive agency of the United States federal government tasked with environmental protection matters. President Richard Nixon proposed the establishment of EPA on July 9, 1970; it ...
's (EPA) earlier Energy Star
power management Power management is a feature of some electrical appliances, especially copiers, computers, computer CPUs, computer GPUs and computer peripherals such as monitors and printers, that turns off the power or switches the system to a low-power ...
specifications. Subsequent revisions were included in future VESA BIOS Extensions.


Design

The standard defines how to signal the H-sync and
V-sync Analog television is the original television technology that uses analog signals to transmit video and audio. In an analog television broadcast, the brightness, colors and sound are represented by amplitude, phase and frequency of an analog s ...
pins in a standard SVGA monitor to trigger the monitor's power saving capabilities. DPMS defines four modes: normal, standby, suspended and off. When in the "off" state, some power may still be drawn in order to power indicator lights. The standard is:


Reception

By the late 1990s, most new monitors implemented at least one DPMS level. DPMS does not define implementation details of its various power levels; while in a CRT-based display the three steps could logically be mapped to three blocks to be shut down in order of increasing savings, thermal stress, and warm-up time (video amplifier, deflection, filaments) not all designs would be trivially adaptable to this model, and neither would the technologies that commercially succeeded CRT monitors. Partially due to this reason, most major operating environments (such as Microsoft Windows and the MacOS family) do not implement the 3-level DPMS specification either, offering only a single timer. Notable exceptions include X11 and the XFCE Power Manager. DPMS competed with the alternative
Nutek The Swedish Agency for Economic and Regional Growth ( sv, Tillväxtverket) is a Swedish government agency organized under the Ministry of Enterprise, tasked to promote entrepreneurship and regional growth, and to implement structural funds program ...
power saving system, in which the monitor recognizes a black picture produced by a screensaver and enters a power saving mode after an appropriate delay. - implementation example.


References


External links


VESA Display Power Management Signaling (DPMS) Standard
(requires purchase of the specification)
VESA Standards Listing
Display Power Management Signaling {{software-eng-stub