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Back in the 1950s, when color television was invented, things were 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 promise to be one way or another more colors, but what does that mean? And why do manufacturers use confusing jargon like color spaces and gamuts to explain it? Let's break it down.
You’ve probably come across the terms “color space” or “color gamut” while shopping for a high-dynamic-range TV, but you’ll also see them pop up with certain computer monitors, particularly those designed for gaming. Sometimes a manufacturer will say that a display covers a certain percentage of a particular color space, such as DCI-P3 or Rec. 2020.
If none of these words mean anything to you, then it's probably It’s fine if you ignore them. Most people just need to know whether their monitor supports HDR, a significant upgrade in color displays that can produce over a billion colors in bright, vibrant detail. But if you do a lot of media editing, or just want to get the most accurate color reproduction you can, here’s how to make sense of all the jargon.
What is a color gamut?
As you may remember from high school science class, color is simply how our soft human eyes perceive different wavelengths of light. The spectrum of wavelengths that we can see is only a small subset of the entire electromagnetic spectrum. So a color display will show all the colors that a human eye can see. Right?
Well, not quite. In fact, every display you’ve ever seen only shows a small portion of the colors your eyes can see. That portion is called a “color gamut.” A color gamut refers to the range of colors within the visible light spectrum that the display can reproduce.
It may not seem like there are colors missing from your screen, since you are seeing approximations of most colors, but there are certain colors that simply cannot be displayed. For comparison, Standard Dynamic Range (SDR) TVs can display 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 screen can produce.
An HDR TV, on the other hand, is capable of displaying at least 1,024 different levels of red, green and blue, each representing more than 1.07 billion unique color combinations. This dramatically increases how much of the visible spectrum displays can reproduce. But it also means that all the content you see on your display – every show, movie, or video game – has to be created with those new color options in mind.
