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schipht
Making moves
Status: Delivered

Understanding Wide Gamut and Its Benefits

What is Wide Gamut? A "gamut" is essentially a range of colors that a device, like a monitor or a printer, can produce. When we talk about a "wide gamut," we're referring to devices that can display a broader spectrum of colors compared to standard devices.

Most regular screens use something called the sRGB color space, which is a standard range of colors suitable for everyday tasks. However, wide gamut screens use advanced color spaces like Adobe RGB or DCI-P3, which cover a larger range of colors. This means they can show more variations and nuances in color, leading to richer and more vivid images.

palette.jpg

 

Why is Wide Gamut Important?

  1. Enhanced Visual Experience: Wide gamut screens can display colors that are closer to what we see in real life. This results in more vibrant, lifelike images and videos, making everything from movies to photos look more immersive.

  2. Better Color Accuracy: For professionals in fields like photography, graphic design, and video production, color accuracy is crucial. Wide gamut screens ensure that the colors they see while editing are true to life and consistent across different devices and mediums.

  3. Future-Proofing: As technology advances, more content is being created in wider color spaces. Having a wide gamut screen means you're ready to enjoy this new, higher-quality content as it becomes available.

  4. Improved Printing: If you print photos or artwork, a wide gamut monitor allows you to see a more accurate representation of the colors that will appear on the printed material, leading to better and more predictable print results.

Everyday Benefits Even if you're not a professional artist or photographer, you can still benefit from wide gamut technology. Here are a few examples:

  • Watching Movies: Experience films as the director intended, with more accurate and vibrant colors.
  • Gaming: Enjoy games with richer graphics and more detailed environments.
  • Browsing Photos: View your personal photos with enhanced detail and color accuracy.

In summary, wide gamut technology enhances the way we see and interact with digital content, making it more vibrant, accurate, and true to life. Whether for professional use or personal enjoyment, it offers a significant improvement in visual quality.

WCG-vs-normal.jpg

 

The Impact of Wide Gamut and HDR Technology

The combination of wide gamut and HDR technologies significantly enhances the visual experience by providing richer colors, improved contrast, and more lifelike images. Whether for entertainment, content creation, or everyday use, this powerful duo brings out the best in visual content, making everything look more realistic and engaging.

Key Benefits:

  • Vivid Colors: More shades and enhanced contrast for detailed, realistic visuals.
  • Better Experience: More engaging entertainment and accurate, future-proof content creation.

 

wgcplushdr.png

Firefox doesn't currently support WCG (needs some configurations on about:config for monitor color profile to support) and HDR. You see content like the left side, but once HDR and WCG are supported, your videos, movies, and high-quality photos will look like the right side.

 

 

You can test your browser and monitor for wide gamut support using this link (Chromium browsers are already supported): https://www.wide-gamut.com/test

I tested my monitor with the chromium browser and added the results; as you can see, the letter 'W' is inside the red square.

wide-gamut-test.jpg

 

Dear @david-rubino, I hope the dev team releases this feature with the HDR support deadline.

12 Comments
Status changed to: New idea
Jon
Community Manager
Community Manager

Thanks for submitting an idea to the Mozilla Connect community! Your idea is now open to votes (aka kudos) and comments.

okay_okay
Making moves

+1 following 

hirosaki
New member

These days, even cheap LCDs claim to be DisplayP3 color gamut and HDR, so I personally would like them to be compatible. Setting "gfx.color_management.mode=1" improves things a little, but it doesn't work for videos, and there's a bug in bugzilla that has been left unfixed for years because it prevents wind animations from displaying properly on sites like windy.com, so I'm disappointed in Firefox for not supporting this.

 
 

 

 

 
 

 

 

itskaren
Community Manager
Community Manager

Hi all! Thank you, @schipht, for the wonderful summary for WCG! I want to follow up in this thread with an update: our team will be shipping WCG support on our WebGL implementation to Windows and macOS users in Firefox 132, which will be released on October 29.

Specifically, this current work supports wider color (P3) profiles in 8-bit. Improving Firefox' color support is important to us, so we hope to keep you all updated on more of our work in flight--coming soon!

If you encounter any issues regarding WCG when you update to Firefox 132, please let me know, and we can have a ticket filed to our team on Bugzilla. Thank you!

Status changed to: In development
Jon
Community Manager
Community Manager

Good news...

This is 'In development' and will ship soon—see @itskaren's recent comment for more details and stay tuned for updates.

 

lukedasav
New member

Wow this news of WCG support is timely and amazing! I have had to go through many hoops to setup my GLSL development on windows and its a nightmare for portability and version control. With this update I would love to test and migrate some of my shader artworks to WebGL to finally be able to share and allow others to experience the vibrant and beautiful full range of colors!!! Keep up the great work mozilla thanks!!

Status changed to: Delivered
Jon
Community Manager
Community Manager

This was delivered with Firefox 132—see Release Notes.

We look forward to continuing to collaborate with you all here on Connect 🙌

myspace
Making moves

thanks! 

Thaek
New member

The following test fails for me with Firefox 132.0.1:

https://www.wide-gamut.com/test/image-sdr

I receive the following message:
"It looks like your monitor or browser does not support wide-gamut colors 😞
You may not notice any difference between the test images below."

Works fine with Edge or Chrome.

itskaren
Community Manager
Community Manager

Thanks for bringing this to our attention, @Thaek! I'll bring this up to my engineering team and follow up with you.

Pinchies
Strollin' around

In addition to the message, on my OLED monitor, the colours are fairly washed out compared to how they look in Edge or Chrome.

XingJingBing
New member

Nearing the end of 2024 and Firefox still doesn't support wide colour gamuts and HDR video playback (on Windows). Sucks that if I want to use those features, I have to resort to using Edge or Chrome. I mean, come on...