# Help me understand monitors



## Jesse17 (Mar 8, 2016)

I'm looking for a monitor I can use for editing, photos. I'm confused on something I keep seeing in the different specs. 

_Color Gamut (CIE1976)
72%
Color Depth(Number of Colors)
16.7M colors_

Please explain this to me. It looks to me like 16.7M colors means it covers the entire sRGB gamut, but is the CIE1976 gamut that much smaller than the sRGB or what? I can't seem to find anything helpful by googling for CIE1976 vs sRGB gamuts.


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## Ysarex (Mar 8, 2016)

Jesse17 said:


> I'm looking for a monitor I can use for editing, photos. I'm confused on something I keep seeing in the different specs.
> 
> _Color Gamut (CIE1976)
> 72%
> ...



CIE 1976 is an international standard method for defining the range of visible color. sRGB is much smaller than CIE 1976. What you want to know is how well the display matches either sRGB or Adobe RGB. The 72% CIE 1976 figure is not very helpful. Here's sRGB inscribed inside CIE 1976:







16.7 million colors means it's an 8 bit display which is good but also pretty standard. That also does not mean the display does or does not match sRGB or Adobe RGB. Both the figures you have are positive but neither one is very specific and neither one is specific to the needs of photo editing. So you want more info.

You want to know the percentage of the sRGB color space that is covered by the display.

If you're not given that specific info be suspicious until you get it.

Joe


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