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Design Nomenclature / Color

Rec. 2020

Also called BT.2020, Rec2020, UHDTV

  • Color
  • Digital Model Making
  • Systems & Spec
  • 2D & 3D

The ITU's ultra-high-definition space, with primaries sitting on the spectral locus itself. No real display reaches them, and that is deliberate — the container was sized for hardware that did not exist yet. Encoding into it is routine; mastering happens inside a P3 sub-volume and rides in the larger container.

Three nested primary triangles on the chromaticity chart — sRGB smallest, Display P3 larger, Rec. 2020 reaching the spectral edge.

Not to be confused with

  • Display P3Apple's display space: DCI-P3's primaries carrying sRGB's D65 white point and transfer curve. Roughly twenty-five percent more volume than sRGB, nearly all of it in the reds and greens, and the default panel on most current laptops and phones. Colors specified in it clip visibly where a viewer's display cannot reach them.
  • sRGBThe 1996 HP and Microsoft standard, written to describe a typical CRT and still the default assumption of the untagged web. Its gamut is small — it cannot reach a saturated cyan or a traffic-cone orange — but ubiquity made it the floor everything else gets measured against.

Treated at length in

3.0 Color and ContrastThe Universal Web — the chapter this entry summarises.

Related

  • Display P3
  • sRGB
  • Gamut
  • Gamma
  • CIE XYZ

How this term connects

CIE XYZDisplay P3GammaGamutsRGBRec. 2020
Related Confused with
  • CIE XYZ
  • Display P3
  • Gamma
  • Gamut
  • sRGB

Referenced by

  • Display P3
  • Gamma
  • Gamut
  • sRGB
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