Hmm, are you sure about this? From a quick search, I'm able to find plenty of people complaining about the dark background being pitch black[0] (there's also a Feedback Hub item linked in there, not able to open it as I'm on Linux). I might be wrong, but I am fairly sure my display is not mis-calibrated, as I actually spent a lot of time calibrating it when it got here (have only had it a handful of months). The only downside of the monitor is that blacks really smear when you move them around, whereas dark greys are substantially better.
That's one of the reasons I really dislike the pitch black mode, anyway. It also just looks horrible on anything that isn't AMOLED, IMO.
> If you enable transparency effects the color of your background will blend with these and raise/lower them accordingly.
That's only for surfaces with blur enabled though, like the sidebar in Settings or the taskbar. Non-blurred surfaces are pitch black.
[0]: https://old.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/6nzs34/any_way_t...
As much as I'd like to be able to claim to be a color expert that can eyeball HSL values with enough certainty to give the answer in decimal percentages the above numbers are from color picker readings of a screenshot of my install.
> I'm able to find plenty of people complaining about the dark background being pitch black[0]
I can't speak about what was true 4 years ago in a preview build adding dark theme, or Windows 10 at all for that matter as I don't have a current install anymore, but for Windows 11 today the above are the measured values.
> That's only for surfaces with blur enabled though, like the sidebar in Settings or the taskbar. Non-blurred surfaces are pitch black.
For that particular preview version of 10 perhaps, in Windows 11 there is also a new opaque material called Mica used heavily throughout the interface as it has less of a performance hit (no blur/transparency) https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/apps/design/style/m...