Example usage includes turning off, or putting the monitor into standby after a period of idle time to save power.
VESA issued DPMS 1.0 in 1993,[1] basing their work on the United States Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) earlier Energy Star power management specifications.
[citation needed] DPMS does not define implementation details of its various power levels;[3] 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.
[5] DPMS competed with the alternative Nutek 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.