Home: Color: Color Device Gamut

Modern printers and monitors are limited in the colors they can reproduce.  The above image displays the color gamut of a dye sublimation printer in CIEL*a*b* D50 color space (the solid structure) and the color gamut of an Apple 17 inch color CRT (the mesh structure).  Colors that are outside both volumes cannot be reproduced by either device.  If it is desired to display such a color, then a color that can be reproduced and hopefully closely matches the out-of-gamut color will be displayed.  Selection of the color to print is determined by the gamut mapping algorithm.  Note that in the above figure, there is a significant volume of the two gamuts that is not in the intersection, indicating a gamut mismatch between these two devices.

For further information, please see:

M. J. Vrhel and H. J. Trussell, "Color Device Calibration: A Mathematical Formulation,"  IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, vol. 8, no. 12, pp. 1796-1806, Dec. 1999.

G. Sharma, M. J. Vrhel, and H. J. Trussell, "Color Imaging for Multimedia," IEEE Proceedings, vol. 86, no. 6, pp. 1088-1108, June 1998.