Learn / What is Display P3

What is Display P3?

Display P3 is a wider color gamut than sRGB — about 25% more visible colors, mostly in saturated reds and greens. It's the default wide-gamut space on most modern Apple and Android screens.

A color gamut is the full set of colors a color space can represent. sRGB, the space nearly every image defaults to, was standardized in the 1990s around what CRT monitors could show. Display P3 takes the primaries from DCI-P3 — a cinema projection standard — and adapts them to the D65 white point most screens actually use. The result covers meaningfully more of the visible spectrum than sRGB, especially in saturated reds and greens.

Gamut is not dynamic range

This is worth being precise about: Display P3 is about which colors can be shown, not how bright they can get. You can have a wide-gamut SDR image, and in principle a narrow-gamut HDR one — they're independent properties, even though displays that support one increasingly tend to support both. Our own Inspect tool keeps these as separate fields for exactly this reason.

How we actually detect it

We don't assume a P3 image based on file type. For JPEGs and PNGs, we look for a real embedded ICC color profile and check its actual primaries (the rXYZ/gXYZ/bXYZ tags) against known reference chromaticities — with a tolerance we calibrated against a real browser-generated ICC profile, not a guess. For AVIF, we check the file's CICP color metadata directly, which is more authoritative when it's present. If neither exists, we report the gamut as unconfirmed rather than assuming sRGB.

Can you actually see the difference?

Only if your screen supports it and the app showing the image respects the color profile (most modern browsers do). Our Display Test page includes real Display P3 swatches alongside a live check of whether your current browser reports P3 support — so you're looking at an honest answer specific to your setup, not a generic claim.