Sit back, relax, and keep reading, because in the following lines you will learn, in a simple and easy-to-understand way, things you may never have had the chance to learn before.
What is light?
Light is electromagnetic radiation emitted as waves by the electromagnetic field and distributed throughout the universe. These waves consist of oscillating electric and magnetic fields that travel in a vacuum at the speed of light, about 299.792 kilometers per second (or about 186.282 miles per second).
Think of these electromagnetic waves like a ping-pong ball. The more bounces it makes on the table as it moves, the shorter the wavelength of the electromagnetic wave, and vice versa.
By measuring the distance between these bounces, we can determine the type of "light" with great accuracy. And guess what? We have managed to measure the entire spectrum of these waves and found that their length (the distance between the "bounces") ranges from 100 meters to 0,0001 nanometer (a nanometer is a billionth of a meter!).
To give you an idea: that ranges from the size of a large building (100 m) to the size of a single atom (0,0001 nm).
This is the full spectrum of these electromagnetic radiation waves. This is what we call light.Now you have just found out why, for example, TV or FM signals travel at the speed of light - because they are light! We just can't see them!
What is visible light?
Visible light is just a small part of this electromagnetic radiation that our eyes can detect and decode. Think of our eyes as special biological devices that perceive only this small spectrum of these waves and reject everything else.
From the vast range of the full light spectrum (waves from 0,0001 nanometers to 100 meters), we see only a very small part, namely the light waves between 380 and 740 nanometers!
Colors
This small visible part of light, when broken down into small pieces through a prism, consists of 6 colors with wavelengths between 380 and 740 nanometers.
When we pass a beam of light through a prism, colors appear.
These are the colors that a human can see in our physical environment. These are the specific electromagnetic waves that our eyes are designed to receive and decode.
We call them the three primary colors (red, green, blue) and the three secondary colors (yellow, cyan, magenta). By mixing these 6 colors, we can create every possible shade we can imagine.
Let's call it the "natural color space".
Color Space - CIE 1931
An international scientific organization founded in 1913 (the International Commission on Illumination - CIE) succeeded in 1931 in capturing this "natural color space" with a mathematical model in the form of a chart, which it called CIE 1931 (after the name of the organization and the year it created this mathematical model). The CIE 1931 chart includes all colors visible to the human eye within its horseshoe-shaped boundary. Colors within the boundary are considered realizable colors, meaning they can be reproduced by combinations of light sources. Colors outside the boundary are imaginary colors that cannot be reproduced with typical light sources.
Now let's move on to the color spaces developed by the video entertainment industry and used to this day.
Rec.709 color space
This is a standard developed in 1990 by the ITU (International Telecommunication Union) for high-definition television (HDTV) and digital video transmission.
The Rec.709 color space covers only about 35.9% of the visible color spectrum (CIE 1931).
Keep in mind that for the last 30+ years, we have watched every film in HD (720p & 1080p) with color reproduction that reaches only 35.9% of the colors our eyes can see.
DCI-P3 color space
DCI-P3 was defined in the early 2000s by the Digital Cinema Initiatives (DCI), a consortium of major Hollywood studios, as a color space standard specifically for digital cinema projection systems, and was published in 2007.
The DCI-P3 color space covers only about 45.5% of the visible color spectrum (CIE 1931), which is about 10% more than the Rec.709 color space.
Rec.2020 color space
And now we come to the latest color space standard from the ITU (International Telecommunication Union) from 2012, Rec.2020, also known as BT.2020. This standard was developed for ultra-high-definition television (UHDTV) and the latest generation of video transmission.
The Rec.2020 color space covers about 75.8% of the visible color spectrum (CIE 1931).
Rec.2020 was developed to overcome the limitations of earlier standards (such as Rec.709) by significantly expanding the color space to cover a broader range of colors. This expansion was intended to enable advances in display technology and provide consumers with a more immersive and realistic viewing experience.
Evolution of display technology
Advances in color reproduction in the video industry and digital imaging have made enormous progress with the introduction of standards such as HDR10 and Dolby Vision, as well as new color standards such as the Rec.2020 color space.
Of course, very few digital displays today can reproduce the color range that reaches 75.8% of the visible color spectrum and covers 100% of the Rec.2020 standard. Even 12 years after the introduction of the Rec.2020 standard, there is no consumer TV technology that can reproduce 100% of the Rec.2020 color space.
RGB laser technology and color space
However, the revolution in RGB laser technology through laser TVs has made full reproduction of the Rec.2020 color space possible and in some cases even surpassed it!
The AWOL Vision Laser TV UST projectors with their modern pure RGB laser technology not only fully cover the Rec.2020 color space, but exceed it by 107%. That corresponds to about more than 81% of the visible human color spectrum! It is truly impressive.
Real screenshot - AWOL LTV-3000pro
Do you know...
What exactly is a color space, and to what extent does a display device reproduce the natural color spectrum according to its specifications?
What is the difference in color performance between a display device that covers the Rec.709 or DCI-P3 standard and one that covers the Rec.2020 standard?
Now you know!
AWOL Vision technology
