Wide or narrow gamut monitor?

Updated on 29 Jun 2010 by Andy Bryant

Updated on 29 Jul 2011 by Andy Bryant

I’m in the market for a pair of new monitors for my home office.  I am starting to get more into Photoshop, and after reading Scott Kelby’s Adobe Photoshop CS4 Book for Digital Photographers, am realizing that I need to think about wide vs narrow colour gamuts.  

“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.”
- LCD Resource.com

I’m not an expert in this space - but from what I gather, sRGB is a compressed colour space optimized for use on the web and ‘normal’ monitors, whereas Adobe RGB (1998) is a larger colour space which aligns with what’s possible to achieve on an inkjet printer.  Most typical monitors can only display the smaller sRGB space.

Scott recommends using Adobe RGB vs sRGB, to ensure colours are more accurately matched between screen and your printer.  However it seems that at the moment, this is only important if you’re using your own printer (or for publication via printing-press).  Most commercial labs will expect sRGB files at the moment (although it also seems that there’s mention of aRGB beginning to take over here).

“What i should have said is that sRGB was the standard before but as we move forward with the IPS and PVA panels the aRGB is the better colour space to work with since more labs are using it on printers form what i read and been told.” - Nasha Wilson on photo.net

“aRGB has a wider gamut than sRGB, ProPhoto has a wider gamut than aRGB. A decent monitor should be able to display beyond the sRGB gamut and a substantial percentage of aRGB” - The Crofter on photo-i.co.uk

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