[ComputerGuru]

These days cheaper monitors with only 8bpc support advertising higher color support use FRC to flicker between different 8-bit colors at a high enough rate to trick the vision receptors to seeing a mix between the two.

Separately, sorry to nitpick, but while wide gamut colors with only eight bits of data have lower resolution than sRGB, that doesn’t make them an inferior option. You might not be able to specify the exact shade but a) your effective accuracy is still greater and b) you trade that for greater range.

Just as an example, assume you have buckets of granularity 1 (sRGB) and 0.5 granularity (wide gamut). With only eight bits you can precisely select any individual bucket of granularity 1, whereas with only eight bits you sometimes miss the intended wide gamut 0.5 precision bucket and hit its neighbor instead (as if you had a granularity of 1 in this specific worst case). That doesn’t make it worse; you just aren’t taking full advantage. On top of that, your range with granularity one is, say, 200 to 800 while your “range” with the wide bucket is 0 to 1000 (just as an example).

There’s a reason photos or graphics saved as eight-bit png or jpeg still manage to look ten times better in a wide gamut profile than in sRGB (on a better-than-sRGB display).

[account42]

> Separately, sorry to nitpick, but while wide gamut colors with only eight bits of data have lower resolution than sRGB, that doesn’t make them an inferior option. You might not be able to specify the exact shade but a) your effective accuracy is still greater and b) you trade that for greater range.

The problem is that you almost never are showing a single solid color and in the real world it matters much more how wrong your colors are compared to the ones displayed next to than it does how wrong they are compared to some far away reference. Banding is VERY noticeable and would be even more so if camera sensors didn't have noise.