In the 1950s, when color television was invented, everything was simple. Televisions were either color or black and white, and you could tell at a glance which was which. Today, you can find televisions and monitors that somehow promise further Colors, but what does that mean? And why do manufacturers use confusing jargon like color spaces and color gamuts to explain it? Let’s break it down.
You’ve probably seen the terms “color space” or “color gamut” when shopping for a high dynamic range TV, but you’ll also see them appear on certain computer monitors, especially those designed for gaming. Sometimes a manufacturer will say that a display covers a percentage of a particular color space, such as DCI-P3 or Rec. 2020.
If none of these words mean anything to you, then it is… probably It’s okay if you ignore them. All most people really need to know is whether their display supports HDR, a significant upgrade from color displays that can produce more than a billion colors in bright, vivid detail. But if you edit a lot of media or care about getting the most accurate color reproduction possible, here’s how to make sense of all the jargon.
What is a color range?
As you may recall from high school science class, color is simply the way our squishy human eyes perceive different wavelengths of light. The spectrum of wavelengths we can see is just a small subset of The entire electromagnetic spectrumSo a color display will show all the colors that the human eye can see, right?
Well, not exactly. In fact, every screen you’ve ever seen displays only a small portion of the colors your eyes are capable of perceiving. That portion is what’s called the “color gamut.” A color gamut refers to the range of colors within the visible light spectrum that the screen is capable of reproducing.
It may not appear that colors are missing on the screen, because you see approximations of most colors, but there are certain colors that It simply cannot be provenFor a simple comparison, SDR (standard dynamic range) TVs are capable of displaying over 16.7 million colors – more specifically, there are 16.7 million unique combinations of the 256 different levels of red, green, and blue that the display can produce.
An HDR TV, on the other hand, is capable of reproducing at least 1,024 different levels of red, green and blue each, for more than 1.07 billion Unique color combinations. This dramatically expands the amount of visible spectrum that displays can reproduce. But it also means that all the content you see on your screen—every show, movie, or video game—must be created with those new color options in mind.
What is a color space?
The term “color space” doesn’t just refer to a range of colors, but to a specific way of organizing colors in a way that device manufacturers can reference and support. For example, The sRGB color space It 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 spacewhich quantifies all the colors that are visible to the human eye. The vast number of other color spaces that exist define a subset of these colors, and some are used to define colors for purposes such as printing. When shopping for a monitor or TV, there are a few key spaces that are worth considering: