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Gamut

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A color gamut is a subset of colors, usually representing the colors that a display or a printing device can represent.

No display or printer can represent the whole range of colors that a human eye can perceive. The device gamut represents the set that it supports.

Traditionally, in web development, the only gamut used was sRGB (Standard Red-Green-Blue), where each color is described using three bytes, one for each primary color. However, "wide-color" monitors and professional printers support a wider range of colors, that can't be represented using this gamut.

Since 2021, browsers have started to provide functionality for other gamuts, like Display-P3, widely used in the movie industry, and rec2020.

Developers can define different sets of colors for devices supporting larger gamuts using the {{cssxref("@media/color-gamut")}} media feature. They can describe colors outside the RGB gamut using specific CSS functions like {{cssxref("color_value/lch")}} for the LCH cylindrical coordinate system, or {{cssxref("color_value/lab")}} for the Lab coordinate system.

See also