One thing people appreciate the most when watching a movie with a projector or viewing a projection with a projector is the colors that the device can produce. Some projectors can produce a wide spectrum of colors, giving you great color detail when used. But why do some have a wider color gamut and others do not?
Why do some projectors have a wide color gamut?. Some projectors have a wider color gamut due to the type of color gamut it was built to have. Generally, there are two color gamut standards: Rec. 709 and DCI-P3. Of these two, DCI-P3 is the widest color gamut. The standard that most projectors use is the Rec. 709. Others even use Rec. 709 and DCI-P3 color gamut built in them, ensuring wide coverage of color. Note that a color gamut higher than Rec. 709 does not mean greater color accuracy.
We all want the best color detail when using a projector; obviously, some have a wider color gamut than others; why is this so? Is it worth it to have a wider color gamut? Keep reading to learn more.
What Is Color Gamut?
The range of colors found in the visible color spaces, or color gamut, as it is popularly known, reproduced on an output device can be called the color gamut. Every screen will show varying amounts of color depending on how wide the gamut is.
Therefore, you may think of color gamut as the color palette you can select to make an image; the richer the palette’s color variety, the more detailed the image it can depict.
The color gamut indicates the number of colors a projector can display, which is a crucial aspect of image quality. A large color gamut tool will offer richer and more consistent colorings than a device with a smaller color range.
Therefore, when shopping for projectors, it’s crucial to choose a device with a broader color gamut if you want vibrant visuals and sparkling colorings.
A triangle drawn within the CIE color space diagram, with each corner representing the purest red, green, and blue that the device can reproduce is one of the most popular ways to illustrate a color range graphically.
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Standard Color Gamut For Projectors
In projector technology, two main types of color gamut tech are used: Rec. 709 and DCI-P3.
Rec. 709
Rec. 709 is a color gamut created by the ITU Radiocommunication Sector (ITU-R). It is used as a standard by the HD display and projector industry to ensure that all of the products on the market that use it as their standard have the same color gamut.
In other words, by adhering to a standard like Rec 709, manufacturers may communicate about colors in a similar language, ensuring that another also produces the type of color a projector produced by one manufacturer. Rec. 709 is also known as Rec. 709, BT.709, and ITU 7009.
Many businesses have discovered that one of the most practical ways to describe the color gamut of their products is as a percentage of the Rec. 709 color gamut. This kind of description for a color gamut can be easily misunderstood, especially when a brand advertises a color gamut that exceeds the Rec. 709 color gamut, such as 125% of Rec. 709.
The claim that a color gamut is 125% of Rec. 709 is misleading; it simply indicates that the color gamut of the corresponding product is larger overall than Rec. 709, not necessarily that it covers 100% of Rec. 709 plus an additional 25%. Instead, color coverage is the appropriate metric for expressing how much of the Rec. 709 standards is covered by a color gamut.
DCI-P3
The Society of Motion Pictures and Television Engineers decided to launch its color standard, the DCI-P3, as an alternative to the widely used alternatives. DCI-P3 places a strong emphasis on digital video capture and projection.
Due to its organizational foundation, the DCI-P3 color standard is compatible with all digital cinema projectors. A typical example of this is used in the iPhone X’s camera.
The DCI-P3 color gamut, which is broader than Rec. 709, is currently the standard for color reproduction in the movie business, for instance, the high-end device in that sector is required to provide 100% color coverage of the standard.
However, a buyer seeking the best projector in their budget range should always keep an eye out for color coverage to ensure the most accurate color reproduction, regardless of the eventually accepted standard.
Other Color Gamut (Not Necessarily Used In Projectors)
sRGB
The most prevalent color standard in use is sRGB. You have undoubtedly used sRGB on devices like cameras, monitors, and televisions. However, sRGB is well-liked for a reason. It has relatively little lag time and inconsistencies between its input and output. These advantages have helped sRGB gain the current level of acceptance.
Adobe RGB
A color standard called Adobe RBG was created to compete with sRGB. Adobe RGB is designed to provide a wider color spectrum and to display colors more realistically when used appropriately. Given its focus on vivid detail when it was released, Adobe RGB was a little too ambitious and sophisticated for the technology for which it was designed.
Adobe RGB has become more widely used as LCD monitors and photography technologies have developed.
NTSC
To establish its color standard as the benchmark for all next televisions, the National Television Standards Committee, or NTSC, did so. The NTSC color standard is largely identical to Adobe RGB, with a small difference in how red and blue colors are produced.
The NTSC color standard has found a home in displays intended for high-end video and photo processing, even if it hasn’t yet become the televisual standard.
EBU
The European Broadcasting Union (EBU) intended to adopt its color standard, much as NTSC did. The photography, video editing, and graphic design industries have traditionally been the main targets of the EBU color standard. Wider color gamuts and UHD resolutions have been introduced, including the EBU color standard, which appears in more widely available consumer-level products, including 4K.
Rec. 2020
The recommendation from ITU-R Ultra-high-definition television is defined by BT.2020, also called Rec. 2020 or BT.2020. Two typical image formats are 3840 x 2160 (“4K”) and 7680 x 4320 (Rec. 2020). (“8K”)
Rec.2020 subsequently offers a gateway to unprecedented color purity with visuals that are brighter than ever and more realistic, as the human eye is most sensitive to wavelengths in this range.
What is Considered a Wider Color Gamut?
Broad-range RGB color space, often known as Adobe Wide Gamut RGB, is an RGB color space created by Adobe Systems that uses only pure spectral primary colors to provide a wide gamut.
Compared to sRGB or Adobe RGB color spaces, it can store a greater range of color values. Contrastingly, the normal Adobe RGB color space only covers 52.1%, and sRGB only covers 35.9% of the visible colors given by the CIELAB color space. In comparison, the wide-gamut RGB color space encompasses 77.6% of them.
To prevent posterization effects while working in color spaces with such a wide gamut, it is advised to use 16-bit per channel color depth. Due to the bigger gradient steps in 8-bit per channel modes, this will happen more frequently.
Wide-gamut RGB’s color component values are not inversely proportional to their luminances.
Is Wide Colour Gamut Worth It?
Only HDR sources, like UHD Blu-rays and some streaming videos, are designed to benefit from the capacity to display more colors. Therefore wide color gamuts are only important for HDR sources. Wide color gamuts are not the sole benefit of viewing HDR media, but they are one of them.
A larger color range than the typical Rec. 709 color space used in SDR material creates a highly obvious difference when viewed with compatible video.
Conclusion
Every projector has a color gamut, which defines its color coverage. Note that a wide color gamut does not mean the projector will produce good color accuracy. Because of that, some projectors, like BenQ’s HT3550i, which has both Rec. 709 and DCI-P3.
Projectors with a better color gamut tech will have a wide color gamut. As technology advances, new color gamut techs are being developed to cover more of the color spectrum.
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