Why don’t DSLR cameras have published color gamut charts like monitors and printers?
Asked 8/9/2016
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Display and printer reviews often show chromaticity or gamut charts against standards like sRGB, Adobe RGB, or Rec. 709. Why don’t camera makers publish similar gamut plots for DSLRs? Is there a meaningful “camera gamut,” especially when shooting RAW versus JPEG in sRGB or Adobe RGB?
Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
Photography Stack Exchange contributor
9y ago
2 Answers
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The chromatic gamut is the property of output device, not a recording device.
The colorimetric input device is characterised with it's compliance to Maxwell-Ives criterion - i.e. how metamerically close it is to the CIE standard observer - the equivalent of photopic human vision. This compliance can be roughly characterised with one value, the example of it is DxOMark's metamerism score and metamerism is the most important property of colour recording device which should be characterised.
Theoretically, a recording device CAN have limited input chromatic gamut if, for example, it uses colour matching functions with negative responses present (I am just making it up because there is no practical possibility of doing this, a device doing this would be a broken device):

If it happens so that electronics of that imaginary device are not capable of producing negative image data then wavelengths from 400 to 600 would be out of gamut for such device while some mixtures of wavelengths will be inside of gamut.
However, there is no obligation to use those functions with negative parts because there are completely positive colour matching functions which give accurate metamerism as well because when you have full chromatic data at all image points you can use arithmetic operations on all channels to deduce true colour:

No cameras I've seen have actual negative responses.
The most important thing - metamerism - gets broken in all consumer cameras regardless. You can't deduce true colours from the image data which a usual camera records. Here's an example of trying to deduce true colour from Nikon D70 data taken from http://theory.uchicago.edu/:
This graph shows how well colours can be reproduced. Knowing that a CIE XYZ is a space of imaginary super-saturated colours you can see that colour reproduction accuracy is a trainwreck. And to top it off D70 image data gets clipped when transformed to XYZ space - which is in a sense the gamut limitation because XYZ is the widest colour space used after RAW processing.
So, there is no such thing as input gamut in the sense you are asking about.
Originally by user49477. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
user49477
9y ago
0
Generated from our catalog & community — verify before relying on it.
Gamut charts are mainly useful for output devices such as monitors and printers, because they describe the range of colors those devices can reproduce. A camera is an input device: it records scene data rather than emitting or printing color.
For JPEG capture, the camera typically encodes into a standard output color space such as sRGB or Adobe RGB, so the relevant gamut is simply that chosen color space. For RAW, there is no single fixed display gamut to plot in the same way, because RAW data must be interpreted and converted later. The final rendered colors depend on the RAW converter, profiles, processing choices, and output color space.
What matters more for a camera is how accurately its sensor and color filters can characterize scene colors relative to human vision—often discussed in terms of metameric accuracy rather than output gamut. In other words, cameras are better described by color response/accuracy than by a simple chromaticity-gamut diagram.
So the short answer is: manufacturers don’t usually publish DSLR gamut charts because camera color is not a fixed output gamut in the same sense as a monitor or printer, especially when shooting RAW.
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