How does DCI-P3 relate to color depth, and can an 8-bit display support it?
Asked 7/5/2017
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I’m confused about the difference between a color gamut like DCI-P3 and color depth. Is there a fixed number of distinct colors in the DCI-P3 gamut? If not, what bit depth is needed to display it properly? For example, some 2015 iMac 5K models are described as supporting P3 but use 8-bit panels, so how can an 8-bit display cover P3 if people also talk about billions of colors?
Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
Photography Stack Exchange contributor
9y ago
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A Color Gamut refers to colors within a Color Space which is a representation of which colors exist within it and which ones are not.
It does not usually define a representation which is why there is not specific number of colord within it. sRGB for example use 3 chromacities which form a triangle within all possible colors. When one uses an 8-bit-per-component or 24 bits-per-pixel, it has 16,777,216 colors. When one uses 10-bits per color component or 30 bits-per-pixel, it has 1,073,741,824. TIFF files can use 32-bit values per component and so are able to represent even more colors with the sRGB color space.
So, there is no answer to your question but the screen determines how many colors can be displayed. Even so, it does not tell you which ones since the gamma affects spacing between colors and make it non linear. This means that two 8-bit monitors show the same number of colors within a color-space yet they may not show all the same colors. It gets worse if you calibrate your graphics card rather than the display. The LUTs loaded into the graphics card map an 8-bit input from the OS to the input that is supported by the monitor (usually 8 or 10-bits), in the worse case of an 8-bit monitor, after calibration it will not even use all possible colors which is why this often results in banding! It is immensely better to calibrate the monitor which can have 12 or 14-bit Hardware LUTs, so they can map a full 8-bit input to the bit-depth of the display without loss of the number of possible colors shown.
Originally by user1620. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
user1620
9y ago
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DCI-P3 and bit depth describe different things. A gamut like DCI-P3 defines the range of colors a device or system can target; it does not specify a fixed count of colors by itself. Bit depth defines how finely colors are encoded within that gamut.
So there is no single answer to “how many colors are in DCI-P3.” The number of reproducible color values depends on the encoding precision: for example, 8 bits per RGB channel gives 256 levels per channel, or about 16.7 million possible RGB combinations; 10 bits per channel gives about 1.07 billion.
An 8-bit display can still “support P3” if its red, green, and blue primaries cover most or all of the P3 gamut. That means it can display a wider range of colors than sRGB, even though it still has only 8-bit steps between tones. In practice, gamut is about how far the colors reach; bit depth is about how smooth the gradations are within that range.
So wide gamut and high bit depth are related but separate specs.
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