What is Color Gamut?

Color gamut is defined as the range of colors which a particular device could produce or record. It is usually shown by an enclosed area of the primary colors of the device on the chromaticity diagram. For example, the primary colors of monitor are red, green and blue; hence, the color gamut of the monitor is shown in a triangle area enclosed by the color coordinates of the monitor red, green and blue colors. A chromaticity diagram with different color gamuts is shown in Figure 1.

One very important aspect about color gamut is color gamut is three dimensional, not two dimensional. Because when we describe a color, it usually consists of three components; hue, saturation and brightness. Since color gamut is a collection of colors, it is logical that color gamut can also be described from hue, saturation and brightness. So when we plot the color gamut, it should be a three dimensional graph, as shown in Figure 2. However, plotting a three-dimensional graph is never an easy job, even nowadays. As a result, we often use a two-dimensional graph to represent a color gamut, as shown in Figure 1. The missing dimensional is the brightness, which is perpendicular to the screen or paper.

The most commonly known color gamut might be “NTSC” (established in 1953 by FCC), however, it is not the standard color gamut. “sRGB” is the standard color gamut standardized by IEC since 1999. The reason for standardizing a color gamut was to promote an easier way for color reproduction. If all the color devices, including digital cameras, scanners, monitors, printers, projectors and etc., can all reprofu6g6duce sRGB color gamut correctly, then images could be reproduced very closely across these color devices. This phenomenon is due to the color devices having the same capability of recording (with proper calibration of course), displaying or printing the same range of colors, so for the same image, the variation of color reproduced on difference devices will be limited. Hence, color fidelity or color management could be achieved. This is also the concept of reproducing in-gamut colors.

However, in order to achieve color fidelity or color management, the exact R, G, B color coordinates on chromaticity diagram must be agreed. Each pair of color coordinates specify a distinct or unique color. For example, (x, y) = (0.64, 0.30) is not equal to (x, y) = (0.63, 0.29), even though the numbers are very close to each other. In the display industry, there is also another piece of misleading information. Some panel manufactures or display brands marketing their monitors as “72% NTSC” in terms of color gamut to be “sRGB compatible”. Unfortunately, this is not the case. If we take the color coordinates from each color gamut from Table 1, and calculate the area of each color gamut. We can find out that the area ratio of sRGB to NTSC is 0.72 to 1. This is where the misleading concept of 72% NTSC equals to sRGB came from. The correct interpretation is “the number of colors that sRGB can reproduce is the same as 72% of NTSC, but the colors being reproduced are not necessarily the same colors.” Because the only constraint on 72% is the area ratio, and there is no information about the R, G, and B color coordinates. Hence, we could not say 72% NTSC color gamut is equal to sRGB color gamut. Therefore, it only makes sense when we talk about “coverage rate” when comparing two color gamuts. Example can be shown in Figure 3. On the left-hand side, both color gamuts have the same area ratio, but not 100% covered each other. On the right-hand side, only certain amount of monitor color gamut covers sRGB, and is not 100%. It is clear that this particular monitor cannot reproduce 100% of sRGB can, in terms of color.