Laptop: 95% NTSC TN vs 60% NTSC IPS for my use?

Question

I'm fairly new to photography, got a G3 in December 2011. Had nothing  but compacts prior. Bought Lightroom 4 and started shooting RAW a year  ago. Upgraded to a G5 last fall and just upgraded to Lightroom 5. I  shoot family and vacation photos, and in particular a lot of photos of  our toddler. I export to JPEG on a shared drive which I stream to a  couple of HDTVs for viewing. I rarely print, and if I do, it's to frame a  photo that came out particularly well at 4x6 or 5x7 or to stick it on  the fridge. In short, it's all personal / hobby, nothing professional /  paid / critical, although I like to do the best job I can with my  limited skill set.
Historically I've been using my desktop PC w/ 23" 72% NTSC matte IPS  monitor calibrated with Spyder4Pro and it's been fine.  However, life  changes when the baby starts walking, and I no longer have the time to  camp out in the basement developing photos. After getting further and  further behind, I started shopping laptops that I could use as a desktop  replacement as I roam around the house watching my son, and also while  traveling. Based on this, the laptop screen needs to be suitable for  editing, and not rely on an external monitor.
I was looking at the Sagers with 95% NTSC matte panels. Then they  released a Haswell-based model with IPS screen. I emailed Sager about  color gamut, and it's only 60% NTSC. I thought that may be subpar since  it doesn't even cover sRGB, so I ended up with a model with the 95% TN  screen, which I've calibrated with Sypder4Pro which is stating 91% NTSC.
The laptop is nice, and has the nicest display of any laptop I've ever  owned. However, vertical angles are still somewhat limited. I'm  wondering how important 95% color gamut is when I don't know at exactly  what angle I'm actually seeing the colors at their most accurate  rendering.  I believe that the slight shift I see within a reasonable  range of viewing angle will probably not create any severe problems when  the finished JPEGs are viewed on the TVs, but I'm wondering if the 60%  NTSC IPS screen would have been a better choice.
I'm not making fine adjustments to color, I don't even know how to any  real degree. I apply the Huelight Standard G5 profile on import.  I  might tinker with bringing out some blue in the sky on a landscape shot,  or add a touch of vibrance, but that has to do more with the amount of  color, not whether the color is accurate.  I'm not moving tone curves  around and stuff like that. I do adjust white balance, but I don't know  if a reduced gamut would impact my ability to do that. It's more a  matter of warmer vs cooler than whether this shade of blue meets aRGB  specifications.
I've got a couple weeks of no-questions-asked return window left.  On  one hand, I've spent a lot of time getting all my programs installed and  set up just the way I want, Lightroom is running fast, and an exchange  and re-setup would be a fairly significant hassle.  On the other hand,  I'd like to make the purchase last on the order of 5 years, and I could  justify an extra day or so if there's a compelling reason to do so.
So, does anyone have an opinion to offer?  For my particular use, does a  cheap IPS panel that doesn't cover sRGB make more sense than a high end  TN panel that almost covers aRGB?  My guess is that I could make either  one work for what I'm doing, and there's probably not enough reason to  switch at this point, but I'd like to hear from those who are more  knowledgeable about it.  Has anyone actually done any editing on a low  gamut IPS monitor and what was your experience?
Thanks!
Steve

Answer 1

PayodPanda wrote:
The standard panels that we get nowadays generally cover 95-105% of sRGB.
And there are at least two ways to report this:
"Percent Area" and "Percent Coverage".The "Percent Area" is simply the area in CIE xy of the display gamut vs the reference gamut, with no consideration of how much of the gamuts actually overlap. This value can be > 100%. The "Percent Coverage" is the overlapping area of the 2 gamuts expressed as a percent of the total area of the reference gamut. The maximum possible value for this is 100%. So when evaluating the spec's, see if you can find out which is used (NEC reports Percent Coverage FWIW).
Now let's consider these color spaces as triangles, the visible spectrum to the human eye being the largest (refer photo: in this the visible spectrum is a horseshoe shape instead of a triangle (which is how it should be)). The three corners of the triangle are the colours red, green and blue. The ProPhoto is a smaller triangle, adobeRGB inside that, and sRGB the smallest triangle fits inside the adobeRGB space
These RGB working space are theoretical for one. Built with simple math defining primaries, white point and TRC gamma. You can build them in Photoshop's Color Settings if you wanted to. And ProPhoto RGB has two primaries that fall outside the horseshoe 'gamut' of human vision so we need to be very careful in calling these "colors". If a human can't see them as such, I'm hard pressed to call them colors!
This is where the display bit depth kicks in. A higher bit depth will be able to show more number of colours on the screen. 8-bit means it can show 2^8 = 256 colours per channel. That gives you 256^3 =  16,777,216 (16.7 million) colours as a combination of the RGB channels.
Again, this is all theoretical math! Yes, on paper you can define 256^3 =  16,777,216 colors be we can't see anything like this number of colors. It's simply math, not reality. It makes for interesting marketing too. Who would want to buy a display that can divide up numbers to present a spec that works out to 16.7 millon colors when the spec sheet can advertise billions of colors? Despite the fact we can't possibility see or use that?
The benefits here are encoding, not anything else we can see. The wider the gamut, the higher the precision with more bits. Think of sRGB as a half inflated balloon with 16.7 million dots printed on it. Now you inflate that balloon to twice it's size to suggest ProPhoto RGB. What happens to the distance between the dots? They grow farther apart. The dE values between dots raise with the distance between them. The colorimetric distatnce between the two dots raises. Having more bits simply 'fills in' more data (values) here. It doesn't give us more gamut. Bit depth and gamut are two separate things.
The point is, be careful expecting more bits (greater encoding precision) to be either useful in terms of what you'll actually be able to see and use. In a wider gamut space, subtle colors you might edit, say the white dress of a bride, will be more difficult to edit with in a wider than narrower bit depth. But more bits doesn't mean more color gamut.
A high gamut display (in my humble opinion) would only be useful if the display can reproduce a 10-bit colour depth. Then, the higher range will still be divided such that banding won't be discernible by the naked eye in normal circumstances.
To some degree yes. But keep in mind there's an entire display path! On the Mac, there isn't as yet a full 10-bit path thanks to Apple. We have high bit displays and cards but the application and the OS must support this! That's possible on Windows but not on Mac OS. Having a partial high bit path (say in the panel) is useful and restricts banding but only to a point. I don't know of any wide gamut displays I'd even consider (NEC or Eizo) that don't provide high bit panels.
Going back to bit depth and gamut and color spaces, a few items:
It IS true that the wider the granularity in a color space, the harder it is to handle subtle colors. This is why wide gamut displays that can't revert to sRGB (some current LCD technology doesn't allow this.) are not ideal for all work (ideally you need two units). If you purchase a wide gamut display system, you want one that can also emulate sRGB when you are handling subtle color editing.
The output plays a role as well. There are way, way more colors that can be defined in something like ProPhoto RGB than you could possibly output. But we have to live with a disconnect between the simple shapes of RGB working space and the vastly more complex shapes of output color spaces to the point we're trying to fit round pegs in square holes. To do this, you need a much larger square hole. Simple matrix profiles of RGB working spaces when plotted 3 dimensionally illustrate that they reach their maximum saturation at high luminance levels. The opposite is seen with print (output) color spaces. Printers produce color by adding ink or some colorant, working space profiles are based on building more saturation by adding more light due to the differences in subtractive and additive color models. To counter this, you need a really big RGB working space like ProPhoto RGB again due to the simple size and to fit the round peg in the bigger square hole. Their shapes are simple and predictable. Then there is the issue of very dark colors of intense saturation which do occur in nature and we can capture with many devices. Many of these colors fall outside Adobe RGB (1998) and when you encode into such a space, you clip the colors to the degree that smooth gradations become solid blobs in print, again due to the dissimilar shapes and differences in how the two spaces relate to luminance.
Lastly, for anyone interested in color gamut in terms of working space and images (capture devices and the scene we photography themselves have a gamut), there is this video:
Everything you thought you wanted to know about color gamut: A pretty exhaustive 37 minute video examining the color gamut of RGB working spaces, images and output color spaces. All plotted in 2D and 3D to illustrate color gamut.
High resolution: http://digitaldog.net/files/ColorGamut.mov
Low Res (YouTube): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0bxSD-Xx-Q