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  • Braumin - Monday, March 3, 2014 - link

    Surprising none of the mobile OS actually have any sort of color profiling. They're all based on a OS that DOES have it.
  • BMNify - Monday, March 3, 2014 - link

    All the Nokia Lumia phones come with Colour profile options.
  • tipoo - Monday, March 3, 2014 - link

    I don't think you're talking about the same thing.
  • BMNify - Monday, March 3, 2014 - link

    I just answered in this context "Surprising none of the mobile OS actually have any sort of color profiling". And Nokia Lumia phones do come with basic colour profile options which is helpful in setting up the screen colour temperature and colour saturation, which if of great help for over saturated OLED screens. You can check screenshots here:

    http://imgur.com/EqlNxwo
    http://imgur.com/svqs3Pt
    http://imgur.com/X4N7Isb
  • Braumin - Monday, March 3, 2014 - link

    I didn't mean this exactly I meant more like ICC profiles. I've yet to see the Nokia profiles tested to see if they can actually make the display more accurate, but my gut feeling is that it's just to tailor the output to an owner's preference rather than make it match the correct color.

    I do have a Lumia 1020 so I know what you're talking about though.
  • althaz - Monday, March 3, 2014 - link

    Windows Phone DOES have this...but I don't think it's used at all (could be wrong though) and it's not reachable by 3rd party developers.
  • nickggully - Monday, March 3, 2014 - link

    I don't see how a gamut and accuracy are related as long as the gamut is equal to or wider than the sRGB profile. As long as display is calibrated or has good quality control, you will have a more reliable picture. If somebody were to make a ROYGBIV display, with even more pixel spectra, it would depend on quality production and testing.
  • JoshHo - Monday, March 3, 2014 - link

    If the gamut exceeds sRGB the display can be inaccurate, please reference the saturation sweep test in the article that shows how this happens.

    That is the fundamental misunderstanding that I hope to correct.
  • Solandri - Monday, March 3, 2014 - link

    While it is a misconception, I think "correcting" it is going about it backwards. The real fix is for devices to accept color profiles. If the display is profiled, then having a larger-than-sRGB gamut does no harm. You just set it to sRGB mode and the colors are perfect (or close to it). A display with a too-small gamut OTOH can *never* accurately show sRGB.

    The fact that the display can show those super-saturated colors outside of sRGB is not a problem. Those colors are possible, so a bigger gamut comes closer to representing what we can see in the real world with our eyes. The problem is with mapping pictures and videos into that color space - i.e. the lack of a calibrated color profile.

    In fact I'd go so far as to say that stating a too-big gamut is bad just creates a new misconception. People start to think displays which can *only* show up to sRGB are best. When in reality a profiled display that can show something bigger like Adobe RGB is better.
  • JoshHo - Monday, March 3, 2014 - link

    I think there's some kind of miscommunication here. It doesn't matter how wide the gamut of the uncalibrated display is, what matters is the calibrated profile.
  • fteoath64 - Monday, March 3, 2014 - link

    Josh, I think you are right but being very clinical about accuracy. Nothing wrong with that but worth noting as "over-saturation" of colours could be the preference for some. ie Being overaccurate becomes inaccurate because it veers outside the accurate line. This is not dissimilar to audio equalizer where the settings corrects the frequencies that matter to the person, thus closing in on the preference. Maybe the preference is 10% over pure accurate but that would be ok as it is a preference. Only for PRO work do people quest for acuracy. In normal cases, preference typically overrides everything else. Colors popping out for AMOLED displays attracted many fans while some just got a srong turn-off. It is preference at play!.

    If you look at the Mac screen with its colour calibration, many people prefer a slight blue tint rather than a brownish gray tint that is more accurate for the display.
  • bradleyg5 - Tuesday, March 4, 2014 - link

    sRGB is NOT a stardard all display manufacturers, all OS creators, all printers, all content creators adhear to. sRGB is the most common and in a lot of instances assumed, but you can't just go around calling every display that doesn't come out of the box calibrated for sRGB innaccurate.

    You mean to say large gamut displays tend to display sRGB content innaccurately.
  • emn13 - Tuesday, March 4, 2014 - link

    Is that really the case, though? Calibration focuses on absolute color accuracy, and while that's an impeccable standard, it's not really close to how human vision works - a more lenient standard can be perceptually better in fact, by exploiting the fact that the white balance of the device (for instance) should be approximately equal to its surroundings.

    Furthermore, although you can more "accurately" display sRGB images if correctly profiled, you can be almost positive that most images aren't intrinsically sRGB; they're just produced in the most common color space. The sRGB representation isn't necessarily the most accurate representation of the underlying conceptual image; it's just all you have. If the underlying image had out-of-gamut colors (quite likely, given how small sRGB is), then most imaging software/hardware will choose to introduce saturation errors, rather than the more disturbing hue errors, and so simply rendering the image in an enlarged gamut may in fact be *more* accurate.

    The point is, you want to achieve something that looks good & realistic. If you follow sRGB precisely, you're safe that you know you'll be OK. But you're being accurate to the *representation* not necessarily the original photographic subject and/or artistic intent, and *that's* what actually matters.

    The fact that people routinely oversaturate sRGB images is an indication that sRGB is simply too small.

    As an analogy: sRGB color accuracy is to color quality as a microbenchmark is to a real power-hungry workload. It's a useful and illustrative, but it's *not* the ultimate aim.
  • makruiten - Thursday, March 6, 2014 - link

    I think it's clear that the author doesn't imply that sRGB as a standard is the most accurate choice. Rather, he says that sRGB is the most widely used color space and that therefore any OS without color awareness and a too large color gamut will wrongly display most of the available content. And this is especially true for a mobile OS, since most content is on the web. I'm all in for larger gamut displays with proper color management and I'm sure the author of the article is too. Let's all make the shift.
  • quickbunnie - Monday, March 3, 2014 - link

    This is a good article, and you explain why wide color gamuts become inaccurate under improper constraints (saturation compression) or no constraints. However, isn't the solution to simply use proper constraints (ie no saturation compression) during calibration? I believe the galaxy note 3 does this using its movie mode.
    If you want to use vanilla Android with no color profiles, then yes, you don't want a wide gamut calibration (and thus obviate the need for a wide gamut display).

    But I agree with the comments of other users that the solution isn't to keep using sRGB gamuts, as this will never improve the gamut that we use. Instead, the solution is to have wide gamut technologies that are properly calibrated to sRGB, and can switch to a wider colorspace when the on-screen content encodes for it (such as viewing Adobe RGB photos). Otherwise, we will forever be limited to colorspace ignorant OS'es and be tied down to the dull sRGB colorspace.
  • jordanclock - Monday, March 3, 2014 - link

    The article explains this in that Android does not have any kind of built-in color control. What this means is that if the display has too wide of a color gamut, the OS isn't aware of this. This causes colors sent by the OS to the display to differ, since the OS doesn't know its idea of "dark blue" or "bright green" are different from the displays spread of colors.

    Basically, it's like telling someone coordinates on a map, but their map has wider units on the X axis and shorter units on the Y axis.
  • lilo777 - Monday, March 3, 2014 - link

    The device can take care of it by providing several display modes. As I understand, in this case the device would change driver settings so that in certain modes the driver uses only a segment of the gamut. This way user may chose to do a sRGB gamut (available on most phones like iPhone) or a wide gamut.
  • fteoath64 - Monday, March 3, 2014 - link

    Yes, I agree with Lilo777. It does seem the display will ditter/spread the colour depending on its mode. It is not great but better use of the wide gamut. Let's us hope Android gets the colour support fully to make good use of the brilliant screen soon.
  • editorsorgtfo - Thursday, March 6, 2014 - link

    An easy means to see why this is important is to find an Anaglyph Video (perhaps on YouTube) and watch it on your PC, make certain it has reasonable color and most importantly no ghosting.

    Next watch the same Video on your Cellphone - ouch !
  • Krysto - Monday, March 3, 2014 - link

    But from what I understand that doesn't have much to do with the fact that the display has wider gamut per se - just that OEMs tend to screw with the wider gamut to make it "pop" or they don't try to make it accurate enough.

    But assuming they do keep the colors accurate, isn't a wider gamut preferable - even if CURRENT content doesn't support it? Isn't that how progress happens? Maybe we ought to have a "retina moment" for color gamut, too, while sRGB is the "old standard"?

    Unless you're saying sRGB is "more than enough for the human eye", but I don't think that's quite true, is it?
  • Darkstone - Monday, March 3, 2014 - link

    sRGB is not 'enough' for the human eye. In fact, the stomped triangle shape is based on the physical aspects of the human eye. That is the reason why, in the first diagram (CIE 1931), there if much more green than red or blue. The human eye is more sensitive to green.

    The issue is that we have been using sRGB as the standard color profile since... well, since the beginning of the web. It is not so easy to switch to an different standard. In theory most web browsers support images with color profiles embedded, but in practice there is still a lot of content that isn't color space aware.

    Another problem is that ferry few monitors have full sRGB coverage. I estimate that 95% of all laptops on the market are unable to show more than 80% of the sRGB standard. There are only 2 consumer laptops that i know of that come close to aRGB (which is often used for printing), end neither of those are still available to buy. It is hard to motivate people to embed color spaces into their images when there are barely monitors that support that.

    On the desktop space it is a different story though.
  • JoshHo - Monday, March 3, 2014 - link

    This doesn't have anything to do with the native gamut of the display. All that matters is the end result that is exposed to the OS.

    This isn't quite like pixel density, it's important for standards to be set or else there's no way to ensure that content will look correct on other displays.
  • bengildenstein - Monday, March 3, 2014 - link

    "Too large or too small of a gamut makes for inaccurate color reproduction."

    This is not strictly true. The Galaxy Note 3 was measured to have very accurate calibration despite the larger gamut. This gamut was confined to a smaller gamut in so-called "movie mode," and measured to have excellent sRGB accuracy to add to its other great generational performance improvements (contrast, viewing luminance, viewing angle colour shift, power efficiency, brightness, etc). This was tested by Display Mate.

    In the case of the Galaxy S5, the large colour gamut is actually being used to counter-act non-white ambient light (eg. fluorescent/incandescent lighting) by tweaking the AMOLED colours to display more accurate colour given this bias. In this case, the larger gamut is being used precisely to offer more accurate colours. It supposedly uses a custom imaging processor to do this. I expect this is a refinement of the Galaxy Note 3's panel, but precise testing will need to confirm this.

    It's popular to associate larger than sRGB colour gamut with inaccurate colours. In a way this makes sense: the majority of media is calibrated somewhere around this standard. But it is also easy to forget the other characteristics that dictate a good viewing experience, not to mention the fact that the human eye is capable of viewing a far larger gamut yet. The last point is of worthy consideration, considering that we are rooted well into a future long past when the sRGB standard was established.
  • JoshHo - Monday, March 3, 2014 - link

    Relative to the target colorspace too large is a problem. And the Note 3 continues to have poor calibration on sRGB, DisplayMate is consistent in its relaxation of standards for AMOLED displays. The Note 3 is considered good in its constraint to sRGB at 113% yet the Xperia Z has too large a gamut at 115%.

    There's nothing wrong with a display that has a larger native gamut, the key is that the end result must be well controlled to ensure that content is shown as intended.
  • bengildenstein - Monday, March 3, 2014 - link

    Regardless of the terms used to describe competing screens 13% (or 15%) north of standard is still very good. Some would argue that a 13% difference is academic.

    Of course, this doesn't speak to the points made about the larger gamut used to account for ambient lighting, nor does it speak to the ageing sRGB standard. For that matter, it doesn't speak to the amount of media that was actually calibrated for sRGB at the moment of creation or even created via a calibrated display.
  • JoshHo - Monday, March 3, 2014 - link

    That has nothing to do with a clearly different grading scale for AMOLED and LCD. If 113% sRGB is accurate, then 115% sRGB counts as accurate as well. Because of this inconsistency, using DisplayMate as a standard for judging calibration accuracy is indefensible.

    Once again, it doesn't matter what the native, uncalibrated gamut of the display is. As long as the calibrated profile of the display is calibrated to the target colorspace (sRGB for almost all cases), then that's all that matters.

    The whole point of calibrating to sRGB is that it has been the standard for almost two decades now, just about everything is created using sRGB as the expected color space. Absent knowledge of the intended color space, sRGB has to be assumed.

    At any rate,
  • ltcommanderdata - Monday, March 3, 2014 - link

    Is part of the problem with color accuracy for existing sRGB content on larger gamut displays that if the display remains 24-bit, there is insufficient bit depth to accurately present sRGB content on say a 24-bit Adobe RGB display? Is this why 30-bit or higher displays are associated with larger gamut color spaces?

    And for games what are the roles of sRGB textures and framebuffers for color accuracy? They were only just mainlined in OpenGL ES 3.0 so mobile is behind in this regard.
  • User.Name - Monday, March 3, 2014 - link

    Yes, this is part of the problem. As you increase the gamut, the individual "steps" that each 8-bit value represents get further and further apart from each other.

    So an 8-bit wide gamut display would probably be worse at displaying an 8-bit sRGB image, than an 8-bit display whose gamut is much closer to the sRGB spec.

    Moving to a wider gamut display, you would ideally increase the bit-depth at the same time.
    Going from 8-bit (256 steps) to 10-bit (1024 steps) should be sufficient to move from sRGB to Adobe RGB.
    As the gamut expands beyond Adobe RGB (BT.2020 for example) you would want to move to 12-bit color (4096 steps) or possibly even more.
  • makruiten - Thursday, March 6, 2014 - link

    That is assuming that 8 bit is just barely enough for the sRGB standard. I don't think this the case. It is said that the human eye is 'only' capable of discerning 10,000,000 different colors, which would mean that the 8 bit standard would accurately cover any gamut that lies within the color spectrum of the perception. However, sensitivity of the human eye is not linear, so 8 bit /could/ be to small for certain parts of the spectrum. I do not know the answer to that, but you would think that the 12 bit standard is based on something (could be marketing, could be science). It's not as straightforward as make it anyway. Either that, or you have knowledge beyond mine, which is perfectly possible.
  • User.Name - Monday, March 3, 2014 - link

    Having a wider color gamut is a good thing, as long as two things are in place:
    1. You have a properly functioning color management system
    2. You are using sufficient precision to avoid banding

    The problem is that color management has traditionally been so bad on PCs, that just about everything on the web is designed for sRGB and this has transferred over to smartphones as well.

    Just look at the state of color management on the desktop - Firefox is still the only browser which is capable of full color management on the web, and it requires you to enable it via about:config.
    Every other browser displays an oversaturated view of the web if you have a wide gamut display. (though some do at least support tagged image files)

    And with smartphones being low power devices, they have not been able to "waste" processing time on something like a color management system.

    I would much rather that devices properly supported wide gamuts, than focus on restricting the hardware to sRGB.
  • Darkstone - Monday, March 3, 2014 - link

    Are you sure about the browser support? The following site has a few images with different color spaces:
    http://diglloyd.com/articles/guides-howto/howto-co...

    Both firefox 27 and IE 11 display all tagged images correctly.
  • User.Name - Monday, March 3, 2014 - link

    Yes, most browsers will now support tagged images. (though I'm not sure that they all support ICC v4 yet? http://color.org/version4html.xalter )

    The main issue is that they display untagged images and HTML colors at the display's native gamut, when the rendering intent for untagged images or HTML colors should be sRGB.
    Firefox has a preference which enables this ( gfx.color_management.mode = 1 ) but no other browser does, as far as I am aware.
  • JoshHo - Monday, March 3, 2014 - link

    The hardware should be capable of supporting larger than sRGB gamuts, but after calibration for sRGB mode it should be constrained closely to sRGB.
  • JoshHo - Monday, March 3, 2014 - link

    I do agree that it's time to start moving to larger color gamuts but it's important that it's standardized. The current situation with wide gamut panels in mobile is anything but standardized.
  • User.Name - Monday, March 3, 2014 - link

    We already have a solution. The web is effectively designed for sRGB and should be treated as such. Anything using a wider gamut should be tagged with the appropriate color profile. (Adobe RGB photos etc.)
  • bengildenstein - Monday, March 3, 2014 - link

    The Galaxy S5 purportedly has a dedicated image processor (presumably ultra-low power) specifically for this task. It is used to modify the gamut to improve perceived colour stability in response to coloured ambient light. As with the Galaxy Note 3, I suspect that the S5 is also much more sRGB accurate than its predecessors using an OS settable mode.

    The negative reporting of large gamut on mobile is no doubt in direct response to Samsung OLED screens, which historically haven been over saturated. Ironically, it seems that Samsung is actually doing something about it, but these improvements get virtually no attention in the press. Additionally, other aspects of mis-calibration (ie. media creation) go entirely unmentioned.
  • vdidenko - Monday, March 3, 2014 - link

    Kind of expected for Android, given Google attitude towards color profiling even on a directly commercial venue - YouTube. While at Google I/O'13 I did not find anyone at the YouTube stand (talked to 4 people) who would understand why is it needed. And path-to-profit with YouTube proper color supposedly very direct. And yet another question is how the remote display options, like Chromecast should receive and treat profile information.
  • Stuka87 - Monday, March 3, 2014 - link

    So then is this true for all phones?

    It would seem some phones must support it. Because in phone reviews, some phones have horrible color accuracy (Like Samsung Phones), while some have pretty good accuracy (Like iPhones). Is this because the displays have different gamut ranges, or because the OS's handle them better?
  • LordOfTheBoired - Monday, March 3, 2014 - link

    Two different issues. Gamut and accuracy are not the same thing.
    You can have a small gamut display that's incredibly inaccurate, or a wide gamut one that's spot-on.
    Gamut is how much range there is in the colors you can ask of the display, accuracy is how close the color you ask for will be to the one you get.
    The original Macintosh has an EXTREMELY limited gamut, as it can only do solid black and solid white. But it's also extremely accurate. Blacks are black, whites are white. No one ever asked for black and got a gray instead.

    But whatever the display, the software needs to know how it behaves so it knows what to ask of it.
    And that's where we are now. Android has no idea there ARE different kinds of displays. Accurate or inaccurate, wide gamut or narrow gamut, it just sees a display.

    And then manufacturers intentionally mess up the accuracy to get brighter colors.
    (Which still pisses me off. I had a quite nice phone display, and when I upgraded, I couldn't get a phone that wasn't oversaturated and cartoonish.)
  • SeannyB - Monday, March 3, 2014 - link

    As a wide-gamut user on a Windows desktop, you'll get plenty of angst from me on the state of "color-awareness" on part of software/OS. The Windows shell itself isn't usefully color-aware... ideally it would render at sRGB, and force all non-color-aware software to remap to sRGB as well. Firefox, as mentioned elsewhere, is the only browser that's renders the web (CSS, untagged images, etc.) at an "assumed" sRGB, with exceptions for tagged graphics (e.g. AdobeRGB JPEGs), but unfortunately this is a hidden toggle and not the default. MPC-HC and Irfanview are color-aware if I manually load my monitor profile into them. For Android, we know that color management simply doesn't exist on it, which is a shame because Android is at the front of the OLED evolution. It's doing it wrong and setting a bad example.
  • melgross - Monday, March 3, 2014 - link

    That's not correct. My background includes having run a large commercial color lab in NYC for two decades. So I understand this.

    So let me say that there are a lot of misconceptions out there. While you are correct about profiles for content, it isn't so simple. The display needs to be characterized as well. You can't make a display that is Adobe RGB 1998 capable into an sRGB display. You can just have the correct profile for it.

    But without the OS understanding profiles with built in color management, content profiles won't work. The entire system needs to be implemented. Right now, if a manufacturer has a display that is capable of sRGB gamut, and calibrates it for that properly, even without a formal profile, content that is sRGB, again, even without a profile, will display correctly. No other content, sadly, will.

    So unless Apple, Microsoft, Google, etc. can be convinced to implement proper color management in mobile os's, we're stuck where we are. Unfortunately, proper color management is complex, and does require some understanding and interaction with the user to work properly. It's not all automatic, even at this stage.

    Even for "proper" computers, only Safari and a couple of other browsers have correctly implemented color management. With the others, anything other than sRGB won't appear correct.
  • melgross - Monday, March 3, 2014 - link

    That's not it. Having a wider gamut with a lower gamut content stretches the gamut of the content to fit the larger gamut of the display, unless proper implemented color management is used, AND assuming the content has a profile.

    So the results are that every bit of content is over saturated. We end up with orange faces, as an obvious example. That's the problem we see with OLED displays. While graphics can look better, because we have no reference for what they are supposed to look like, photos and videos are all way off. Yes, some people may like that, but it's wildly inaccurate. Remember going into a store with Tv's lined up against the walls? A lot of them are over saturated, and look terrible.

    So the problem is that all of this needs to be done all at once. Right now, a display that does sRGB, and is properly calibrated (by the factory, as there is no real way to calibrate a mobile display by the user currently), will have the best overall IQ.
  • nerd1 - Monday, March 3, 2014 - link

    None requires a professionally calibrated display on smartphones - they are commercial products, and they only have to SATISFY the buyers and nothing else.

    Similarly, you can quantitatively measure the distortion of any audio equipment, but some of highly sought-after amplifiers actually have huge amount of distortion.
  • Taracta - Monday, March 3, 2014 - link

    A bigger color gamut is nearly always better! What the title of this article should be is "Why Display calibration matters" and not something trying to spread FUD about bigger color gamuts. The title of this article could not have been a bigger disservice to the advancement of display technology which have been until recently, mostly regressing.

    Please have the title of the article at least match what the article is covering rather than some outlier statement.
  • Anders CT - Monday, March 3, 2014 - link

    Wider color gamuts indeed are better, as long as they are a subset of the visible color space.

    The problem is that the legacy sRGB color space is way too small for a modern quality display, and conforming to the sRGB standard does not make a display accurate, it merley means that the display is well-calibrated for legacy media. The solution is for media-encoders to abandon the awful sRGB standard and adobt a better.
  • theSuede - Tuesday, March 4, 2014 - link

    I would like to add that the article totally lacks one of the more important aspects of real-world image viewing and perception on portable devices. The measured colorimetrical data is only valid for one viewing condition - and that is often a very dark, sometimes totally blacked out surround, zero glare. This is in no way representative of how most people use their devices!

    Look at the definition of sRGB. It is coded for a surround illumination of 64lx and a glare of 1% - this is at least ten times less than what a typical phone or tablet is subjected to.
    Absolute accuracy demands absolute viewing conditions. In the graphical industry I typically specify working overhead lighting conditions and surround coloring (room/wall colors) to very tight conditions before even STARTING to look at the screen workflow.
    A portable device with perfect profiles and a good calibration will be showing VERY incorrect colors in 99% of a normal user's use cases. Due to flare and contrast losses the color saturation will typically be lowered by 50% or even more. And due to the contrast loss, the color accuracy over the brightness curve is even more compromised than the static saturation accuracy...
  • jlabelle - Tuesday, March 4, 2014 - link

    The latest comment from SeannyB, melgross and Anders CT are all correct.

    In THEORY, wider gamut screen is better like my Dell U2711 27" calibrated screen.
    But this is only useful if :
    1/ the screen is properly calibrated : none of the existing screen on the market (or almost) are and the tablet are generally very bad. Even an iPad Air (which is the less bad) is far from being accurate (I can't tell you cmparing side by side with my calibrated HP Envy X2 tablet) --> so you need a calibration device and an OS that allow you to do that (MacOS, W8)

    2/ you need to have this profile recognized and loaded by the OS and software you are using. As it was mentioned, even on Windows, very few software take that into account : irfanview, Photoshop... and basically only Firefox handle correctly the color (IE do not because it just take care of the point n°3 below but not of using the display calibration profile).

    3/ you need to have a software that can read the color space used by a picture (if embedded inside) to transform the native color space to the screen color space keeping the color accuracy.

    As can be easily understood, there is a lot of if.

    1/ You need an OS that is properly color managed (so not iOS),
    2/ you need to have application that are color managed (even on Windows or MacOS, a few of them, including the browser), and
    3/ you need to have images that incorporate the color space in which they were taken.

    I am using my DSLR in aRGB mode in sRGB, I have a calibrated display (that I calibrate every month as unfortunately, color of the LCD dispaly shift with time) and I am using color managed software but this is quite a pain in the ass outside of my controled environment.

    This is why, in PRACTICALITY, especially for phone and tablet which are NOT color manageable (iOS for instance, WP), in order to that the best color accuracy (something that you may wish or not, this is another question), the easiest way is to :
    - have a screen where the gamut is the closest to sRGB
    - have it properly calibrated. Even if not, we can assume that if the color are evenly distributed from the minimum to the maximum saturation possible which is sRGB for such screen color gamut, the accuracy in between with not be too bad (so no compression of colors like some Androïd tablet).

    Doing so, it will ensure that for image on the web for instance or from camera which are taken in sRGB color space (out of the box at least), the representation will be the most accurate.

    Bottom line : NO WAY we could advice for higher or lower color gamut screen for phone and tablet (at least Androïd and iOS) at this point in time as the OS / software and not able to cope with a proper color management and this is anyway too cumbersome for 99,9% of the population.

    Nota 1 : also, I can assure you that this is really hard to distinguish the extra color of the aRGB color space compared to a sRGB picture. You need to have really some special case to have in a pictures colors outside of sRGB space. This is very difficult to see that reproduce in print. While I am having a workflow where I keet all my aRGB picture to extract the last juice of colors, in all practical purpose, it makes almost no difference in the very large majority of the case.

    Nota 2 : as was also mentioned by theSuede, the color calibration only works for a given type of lightning. So you calibrate your screen with outside sun light and then, the color are off when viewing at home with incandescent light. Unfortunately, this is the reference taken for screen accuracy measurement (by Anandtech for instance). And while we are looking a lot our phones outdoor, tablets are much more used inside buildings in darker places and with lights.

    For phones, you are a little bit out of luck even if some OS like WP allows to change saturation and white point.
    For tablet, there is only W8 tablet that allow to run a display calibration software and probe and therefore, you can enjoy properly sRGB calibrated screen, to the prefered lightning usage but otherwise...
  • Rdmkr - Tuesday, March 4, 2014 - link

    A broader color range is also an objectively positive feature. It makes a greater amount of chroma (color) detail perceptible to the human eye, i.e. raises the "retina" level dpi level for chroma information. Even when a display is inaccurate this is an advantage. Also, sRGB is just a standard, a convention. The convention is dependent on the app used at any time (one can easily write an app with the adobe range in mind, for example, or add a setting for adobe adjusted colors) and can change on a global-community wide level too as screens with a broader color depiction capability become more widely available.
  • jlabelle - Tuesday, March 4, 2014 - link

    Seems you do not understand how color management work then... sRGB is not a standard or a convention, it is a specific color space.
    It happens that this color space is the one where 99,999% of the sold cameras are configured to take picture with. Therefore, most of the pictures online are defacto in sRGB color space.
    Having a non color managed (be aware, this point is crucial) software displaying an image on a larger or smaller gamut display than sRGB simply result in INaccurate display of the given picture.
    Simple as that.

    It is up to you if you prefer oversaturated or dull pictures, cyan that looks like fluorescent blue and red that looks like blinking fushia or not. But this is just NOT accurate and representative of the intended color rendition of the given picture.

    How an app would now what is the gamut of the device where the picture will be displayed ???
    If you take a picture in a browser, it can be viewed on your phone, your tablet, your TV, your computer of different brands. How the developper can possibly knows which display your are using ?
    How can he codes for EACH INDIVIDUAL screen display in this world ?

    Do you understand better why it is important that a screen display stick to a standard color space or be able (through a color managed aware application + the profile of the screen) to translate accurately the colors to the display that you are using ?

    Also, on your last point, the problem is not the number of wide gamut screen (or lower gamut because the pb is the same in both directions) in this world, the problem is the usage of OS which are NOT color managed (iOS, WP, Androïd).

    Last point, I don't know what you mean by your first point about "rasing the retina level dpi for chroma information" (sounds like you smoke before writing that !) but how is a broader color range always a positive feature ? If you do not need this additionnal broader range for instance ?
    Because the point is that, in real life, you really really rarely encounter a situation where the colors go beyong sRGB space.
    And the one telling you that is someone taking all his pictures in aRGB space, with a full frame DSLR, and developping its raw pictures with a calibrated 27" DELL U2711 wide gamut display on a full color managed workflow. I just can tell you that it hardly makes a difference in real life in 99% of the case.
    So if we have the choice, it is much better to offer correct color reproduction to 99,99999% of the population without any intervention than to introduce a feature that screw up those 99,99999% of the population while not allowing even you take advantage of this wider gamut screen because your applications is not color managed so you gain nothing except a more saturated picture false in every way.
  • Anders CT - Tuesday, March 4, 2014 - link

    The vast majority of digital cameras have ccds that capture a colorspace much larger than the sRGB colorspace. Throwing all that visual quality away, and then handicapping the color-gamut of good displays to conform to the mutilated media is a sad, sad way of achieving "accuracy".

    sRGB is an abomination. No media should ever be made to the sRGB standard and no display should ever be calibrated to it.

    And it DOES make a difference. Watching real colors on a wide-gamut display can be a revelation. You see colors that you have never seen on a screen before, and you never knew they were missing.
  • jlabelle - Tuesday, March 4, 2014 - link

    1. Indpendantly of what the ccds or cmos sensors can capture the vast majority (all ?) cameras are conforming that in sRGB color space. Some DSLR are offering the choice in menu to switch from sRGB to aRGB or ProPhoto but out of the box, this is ALWAYS configured in sRGB.

    2. Also, I am not saying this is good to throw away additionnal color information but unfortunately, until mobile OS can manage colors (and we are far from it considering that even on MacOS and Windows, IE and Safari are not properly color managed), it is a BAD thing to have wider or lower gamut screen as you throw away the color accuracy FOR EVERYONE.
    And having a non accurate color rendition IS a mutilation. Independantly of if you over or under saturate.
    The only thing that you gain on a proper color managed complete workflow (calibrated wide gamut screen, color managed programs, pictures with embeded color space information) is to be able in YOUR control environment to enjoy wider gamut picture but outside of YOUR control environment, everyone else that do not have a proper color managed workflow (so basically, almost everyone) will have worse result looking at your pictures.
    This is why, whenever my pictures go out, I transform them in sRGB to ensure at least that users with on their tablet, computer, using any browser with a display close to sRGB will see my pictures more or less like intended.

    3. A screen is not "calibrated" to a color space. It does not mean anything. A screen is calibrated or not. On the otherside, a screen has a given color gamut (so how saturate he can display colors or not).
    Now, if you meant, that a screen with a sRGB color gamut is an abomination, sorry but you don't know what you are speaking about. I can tell you that looking REAL colors (as you named it) and REAL pictures on wide color gamut (with a proper workflow) is not at all a revelation. There are some rare cases where it can make small difference here and there but I can assure you that you would not able to tell if not showed side by side.

    Would you care sharing your configuration or workflow ? Because what I think you saw is that you are speaking of looking oversaturated pictures on a wide gamut screen in a NON color managed workflow. Then yes, obviously, it makes a lot of difference because you over saturate your image. But otherwise, the difference is really rather small.
    By the way, most of the best online print service are asking for sRGB picture and do not accept wider color space.

    Once again, please clarify the workflow and on which material you are seeing those revelation because, I take picture with a full frame Canon 5D mkII on aRGB mode (which is wider color gamut that it allows to capture) with L lenses. I edit my RAW in Photoshop and DDP, 2 color managed application with a 27" DELL U2711 wide gamut which reach 96% of the aRGB color space gamut calibrated with a Color Munki X Rite probe everymonth.
    And once again, the difference can in very rare case be seen and even then, it is not night and day. So what do you use in your case ?
  • baii9 - Sunday, March 9, 2014 - link

    If you are editing raw then the camera color mode does not matter fyi.
  • Rdmkr - Tuesday, March 4, 2014 - link

    "Last point, I don't know what you mean by your first point about "rasing the retina level dpi for chroma information" (sounds like you smoke before writing that !) but how is a broader color range always a positive feature ? If you do not need this additionnal broader range for instance ?" - it spaces out the real color values, in terms of their position on the electromagnetic spectrum, of adjacent digital color values, meaning that more photoreceptors are employed to distinguish colors from one another. This increases the density of (chromatic) pixels the eye can distinguish at any fixed depth.
  • jlabelle - Tuesday, March 4, 2014 - link

    Sorry, even having an engineering background, I read several time and did not understood one bit what you are speaking about.
    Can you put what you mean in context of the discussion ?
    What would an oversaturated picture would produce on the eye that would be an advantage ?
    What do you mean by the fact that displaying more saturated colors would make "more receptor to distinguish colors" ?
    What do you mean by "increasing density of pixel the eye can distinguish" ? Are you saying that more saturated colors allow the eye to see higher density ? What "depth" are you speaking about ? "depth" of what ?

    What don't you answer to my questions about which workflow you are using and where did you see "revelation" ?
  • josephnero - Wednesday, March 5, 2014 - link

    Sony is claiming tehy have a special algoritim to go with their live color led in their developer site
  • Fidelator - Sunday, March 9, 2014 - link

    Bigger gamut does mean the panel is better and able to display a wider variety of colors, seeing how displays have advanced in this department in the past few years the standards need to step up, they should really be updated to take advantage of the new, superior tech, We can't be forever stuck using sRGB when our eyes can see much more than that, the more manufacturers using a wider gamut, the more likely we are to see the adoption of new standards, I believe Sony and Samsung are in the right by providing superior panels, there's no reason to complain about the use of Triluminos.
  • Fidelator - Sunday, March 9, 2014 - link

    Of course the best way out of this would be is they provided us with software capable of calibrating our displays out of the box.

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