At NAB 2025, Larry Jordan spoke with Bram Desmet, CEO, Flanders Scientific, about color gamuts, brighter displays, monitoring HDR on set, future display technologies, color volume & more. In this excerpt, Bram explains why we don’t want Rec. 2020 as native device primaries.
Larry Jordan: The big challenge we’ve got with HDR is, we’ve got to have more pixels – that one’s easy, we’ve got that one covered. Brighter pixels – that one’s slowly covered. And more accurate, richer color pixels. And along [with] that, we’ve got the Rec. 2020 specification, which is a long distance from Rec. 709. How close are we to achieving full Rec. 2020 color space?
Bram Desmet: So this is pretty much the main thing that I talk about amongst the color science type community that I deal with on a regular basis, is that we don’t necessarily want to go all the way to Rec. 2020, because you end up having a lot of problems when you make Rec. 2020 capable displays. Laser projector manufacturers have realized this as a problem as well. In my discussions with people, most post houses are actually pretty happy with P3 as an operating gamut for monitors. Rec. 2020 though, it’s so baked in to how we encode things, that Rec. 2020 is not going away. But we really have to start thinking about Rec. 2020 as a container: Rec. 2020 as a way to encode values that represent color, but not necessarily as a target for a display to actually hit.
Larry Jordan: So we can think of Rec. 2020 as like an MPEG-4 container that we can put other things in that container and it may not achieve full Rec. 2020 specification, but it’s contained in that master container.
Bram Desmet: Exactly. And it’s a little bit future proof. There are all these sorts of like color science type issues that go into Rec. 2020, which is why we’re starting to kind of try to dissuade people from chasing that as this operating monitor gamut target. That’s not really what it should be. It should really be about encoding in Rec. 2020, not necessarily displaying in Rec. 2020.
Larry Jordan: How much of the P3 color space do your monitors hit?
Bram Desmet: 100%. Essentially, most high-end display technologies these days can cover all of P3, which is another reason that I like advising that as the actual operating monitor gamut; it is quite wide, it’s a lot wider than Rec. 709, and tons of displays can actually do it. There’s no flat panel display that’s doing all of Rec. 2020 and that’s a problem, because now all these displays are doing different percentages of Rec. 2020, which is another reason that it’s ill-advised to use that as a target operating monitor gamut, because everybody’s doing a different percentage of it, and then you get variability in the way things are represented, which again is not what you want in a reference environment.
Edited for clarity
The Daejeon Chronicles 
This is good to bring attention to. People are still very stuck thinking of everything as display referred, so I think that is where some of that confusion comes from. I do think it makes sense to stick to P3 as the standard mastering gamut since it is so prevalent and has become the standard for years now on modern devices.