Can your TV accurately display your favorite NFL team's colors?

Feb 5, 2016
Author: Jeff Yurek

In honor of Super Bowl 50, featuring the Panthers vs the Broncos, I thought it would be fun to look back at a post I wrote in 2012 about NFL team colors. Turns out most TVs cannot accurately reproduce the Broncos uniforms...

Broncos tweet

Over the weekend I saw this interesting tweet about color gamut and the NFL and I had to find out if it was true: Could it be that something as simple as an NFL jersey is not within the color gamut of modern HDTVs? I mapped the Broncos team colors onto the CIE 1976 color space along with the HDTV color gamut standard, called rec.709. As you can see, the orange is right on the edge and the blue is indeed outside the gamut.

Broncos Team Colors and rec 709 color gamut

When we think of high color content, we think of action movies and video games, but this exemplifies how color performance affects everything we see on our TVs, even down to the jersey being worn by our favorite sports team. Luckily high color displays are on their way to fix this problem.  As you can see, the Bronco’s colors fall nicely within the much wider DCI-P3 color gamut.

NFL Broncos team colors mapped against wide gamut DCI-P3 color gamut