What is color gamut? For a monitor, it is the scope of colors the original color space can display on the screen. The more area the scope covers, indicate the color gamut is larger of the display device.

Then how the color gamut influence the display effect of a monitor? First, let’s see what is color gamut. The chart below shows REC-709 color gamut, which is the standard color gamut of HD TV signal. This chart illustrate:

This is a complete REC-709 color gamut chart( see chart 1), there are six white boxes at the edge of the triangle, they represent the tricolor(red, green, blue) and three secondary color(yellow, cyan, magenta)respectively, they are the target value of this gamut. In each boxes, there is a spot, they are the tested value of the screen color gamut. When the tested value and target value of red, green, blue completely overlap, indicate the original color gamut of the screen is in accordance with REC-709.

If the original color gamut of the panel cannot reach REC-709, the testing result shows as below:

After knowing the comparison effect of original color gamut, let’s see how the color gamut influence the saturation.

We don’t talk about the function of chromaticity coordinate at this moment. Only Taking red color as an example,the center point is white, the saturation increases by 20% from center to stretch out until reach 100%.

In chart3, the actual value is totally into 100% red target frame, but in chart 4, can only be up to 85% saturation.So how result for 15% difference will lead to. In short, the red color on the screen can not display the true red, but only performances orange color. So it means even though colorist tries to correct color to true red, because the color gamut can not cover REC-709, it is no way for colorist  to render 100% red displayed for post production.

As most of customers don’t have test equipment for color, they always to check color reproduction by visual. Because of different color sense for people, it still exists the common issue of different test result by visual in this industry.

Ruige PCC professional color calibration management software can help you to analyze the gamut of monitors very quickly.