Over the weekend I saw this interesting tweet about color gamut and the NFL and I had to find out if it was true:
Could it be that something as simple as an NFL jersey is not within the color gamut of modern HDTVs? I mapped the Broncos team colors onto the CIE 1976 color space along with the HDTV color gamut standard, called rec.709. As you can see, the orange is right on the edge and the blue is indeed outside the gamut.
When we think of high color content, we think of action movies and video games, but this exemplifies how color performance affects everything we see on our TVs, even down to the jersey being worn by our favorite sports team. Luckily high color displays are on their way to fix this problem. As you can see, the Bronco’s colors fall nicely within the much wider DCI-P3 color gamut.
Great blog! I love the graphics which clearly show what you’re talking about- would be interesting to put all NFL teams through the same exercise to see if any others are also outside the color gamut. The Dolphins are looking at changing their uniforms for next year, hopefully they’re looking at color gamut.