How do I buy a monitor? Find out in one article

When choosing a monitor, we all look at the monitor's colour gamut as a parameter. After all, monitors with too small a colour gamut are prone to off-colours and other situations when displaying images, which affects the gaming experience, and for professional users it can even affect colour matching designs, so everyone tends to choose monitors with a wider colour gamut.

But there are monitors that don't perform as well in terms of colour gamut, so how do companies sell their wares? The answer is simple: create a new term: colour gamut volume. By confusing gamut volume with gamut coverage, the difference between products becomes less obvious. So what are gamut coverage and gamut volume?

Let's start with a quick explanation of colour gamut. The colour gamut of a monitor refers to the range of colours that can be displayed by the monitor in the colour space; the wider the gamut, the more colours that can be displayed.

However, due to technical limitations, monitors cannot display the full CIE colour gamut. As a result, manufacturers have developed a number of colour gamut standards to make it easier to compare displays. Common gamut standards include sRGB, Adobe RGB, DCI-P3 and others.

A monitor's colour gamut coverage refers to the percentage of the area covered by the monitor's colour gamut within its standard range, provided it is within its range, i.e. the upper limit of colour gamut coverage is 100%, i.e. the entire colour gamut is covered.

Gamut volume refers to something different. Colour gamut volume means that the ratio of the range of colours that the monitor can display to the standard colour gamut range can not only exceed 100%, but because it is a ratio, the part outside the standard colour gamut range is also counted.

For example, if a monitor with an extreme colour display does not fall within the standard sRGB range, then its sRGB gamut coverage is 0%, but its gamut volume can reach 60%.

Because the standard colour gamut is more relevant to our daily use, and therefore the colour gamut coverage is more practical, whereas the colour gamut volume is often a word game used by poorly performing monitors to improve surface parameters, be careful when you see monitors advertising their colour gamut volume, it's necessary to see what the colour gamut coverage actually is, and don't be taken for a ride by the company.