Wide Gamut: Saturating the Market
In 2006, Samsung released the first wide gamut monitor (the SyncMaster 931C). Although it had a TN panel, it revolutionized the way we thought about LCDs. Their gamut was starting to exceed the standard 72% gamut of CRTs, signifying one more win over the still-loved tube technology. Several non-TN displays followed, opening the wide gamut floodgates and virtually eliminating every trace of “big non-wide gamut display” that existed.
We should talk about what gamut actually is, and why it matters. Gamut is a 3D measurement (3 ordinates x, y, z on a CIE diagram) that describes the portions of the visible spectrum that can be reproduced by a display device. The wider the gamut, the more vibrant certain colors appear. Most displays, in or before 2006, had a 72% gamut, although some professional or high-end LED-backlit LCDs and wide phosphor CRTs did exist. The following is an annotated CIE diagram of the sRGB, or 72% NTSC, color space. It should be noted that “72% gamut” almost always refers to 72% of the NTSC (American television color standard) gamut, because otherwise, we might ask “72% of what?”
3D Visualization of Adobe RGB vs sRGB
The white body is sRGB, which is swallowed by the bigger gamut of Adobe RGB 1998.
The first wave of wide color gamut (WCG) LCDs reproduced about 92-97% of NTSC. This has been further improved to 100-120%, proving the point that color management needs to become mainstream.
Color management, including gamut transformation/mapping, specifies that any image coming into a display should be preprocessed in order to be reproduced properly on the monitor. If a monitor has a gamut of +20% over normal, the image should be toned down -20% before it is sent to the monitor. This is a gross oversimplification, because gamut transformation occurs in 3D space, but it should give you a general idea of what needs to occur.
There are several methods (“intents”) of color management specified by the ICC (International Color Consortium), including Perceptual, Absolute Colorimetric, Relative Colorimetric, and Saturation. The concepts of these are beyond the scope of this article and are a little complicated to explain, but knowing that they exist is important if you want to get into photo editing on a wide gamut display. These “intents” differ in how they adapt an sRGB image to be displayed on a wide gamut monitor.
Color management mainly manifests itself in high-end applications like photo editors (Photoshop), but you will find it in a few web browsers as well. With wide gamut displays “saturating” the market, an innumerable number of programs will begin to adapt color management in the coming years. For example, there are methods or patches for Media Player Classic and the infamous Linux-based mplayer that allow for color management, but setup can be difficult. Windows 7 is supposed to have better color management as well, but we won't know for sure until it's released in October 2009.
Back to the subject at hand: wide gamut on the market. Do you even have a choice anymore if you want a non-TN panel? There are still many value-oriented TN panels using standard backlights for economic purposes, but about 90% of the higher end PVA and IPS-based panels have adopted wide gamut backlights for good. The best standard gamut monitor available now is the NEC LCD2490WUXi. There really aren't many others available. I recommend that you take the plunge and accept the fact that wide gamut and color management are here to stay, and that you should have been using color management all along anyways even on a “72% gamut” monitor since they don't exactly match sRGB.
What if your applications don't support color management? How do sRGB images appear on a typical wide gamut display (~92% gamut)?
Conventional CCFL vs. WG-CCFL (right)
background image by Amecke
As you can see, there is a noticeable difference. In particular, the wide gamut LCD looks a lot redder overall and has oversaturation in the green and cyan in this sRGB picture. With color management enabled, it will look roughly the same as the left monitor but a little less saturated overall. This is why it's best to get a true sRGB monitor if you are editing photos, but a color managed wide gamut monitor is almost as good.
This concludes the article for now. In the future you may see articles or news on color aware (managed) applications.