In the 1950s, when color television was invented, everything was simple: a TV was either color or black and white, and you could tell which it was at a glance. Today, we find TVs and monitors that promise color television in one way or another. more Speaking of color, what does it mean? And why do manufacturers use confusing jargon like color spaces and gamuts to describe it? Let’s take a closer look.
You’ve probably come across the terms “color space” and “color gamut” when shopping for a high dynamic range TV, but you’ll also see these terms pop up frequently on certain computer monitors designed for gaming. Some manufacturers might state that their displays cover a certain percentage of a particular color space, such as DCI-P3 or Rec. 2020.
If these words mean nothing to you, probably You can safely ignore it. What most people really need to know is whether their display supports HDR. HDR is a major upgrade for color displays that can reproduce over a billion colors in bright, vivid detail. However, if you do a lot of media editing or care about having the most accurate color reproduction possible, here’s what you should interpret all the jargon as:
What is color gamut?
As we learned in middle school science class, color is simply how our soft human eyes perceive different wavelengths of light. The spectrum of wavelengths that humans can see is only a small portion of the entire electromagnetic spectrum. Therefore, a color display shows all the colors the human eye can see. Right?
Well, not exactly. In fact, every display you’ve ever seen only displays a small portion of the colors your eye can see — this portion is called the “color gamut.” Color gamut refers to the range of colors in the visible light spectrum that a display can reproduce.
Most colors are displayed as approximations, so it may not seem like your display is missing any colors, but some colors are not available. For a quick comparison, an SDR (Standard Dynamic Range) TV can display over 16.7 million colors. More specifically, there are 16.7 million unique combinations of 256 shades of red, green, and blue that the display can produce.
HDR TVs, on the other hand, support at least 1,024 different levels each of red, green and blue, for a resolution of 1.07. a billion A unique combination of colors. This dramatically expands the range of the visible spectrum that a display can reproduce. But it also means that all content shown on the display – every show, movie, and video game – must be created with these new color options in mind.
What is a Color Space?
The term “color space” refers not only to a range of colors, but to a particular way of organizing colors in a way that device manufacturers can reference and support. For example, the sRGB color space is used to specify the 16.7 million colors that most SDR monitors and TVs have been producing for years.
Most of these color spaces are defined in part by their relationship to the CIE 1931 color space, which quantifies all colors visible to the human eye. Many other color spaces define subsets of these colors, and some are used to define colors for purposes such as printing. When purchasing a monitor or TV, keep the following in mind:
