Explain Color calibration to me, please.

[Supreme Calamitas]

So I'm being very perfectionistic about buying a new laptop, and knowing this information might help me narrow out my options. If you buy one of those screen calibration devices that (I'm guessing) plugs into your pc via USB, could you calibrate your screen to 100% DCI-P3, 100% Adobe RGB?

[Eigenvektor]

Calibration makes sure that the color you get to see is the color you're supposed to see.

 

~edit: Have a look here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DCI-P3

 

You can see while DCI-P3 and Adobe RGB overlap a lot, there's some colors covered by either that's not covered by the other. So you'll need more than 100% of both, to be able to cover all of both of them at the same time.

[Mihle]

Calibration can make colour look like what it's supposed to look like, as long as the monitor is able to display it.

 

If a monitor is 80% sRGB, it will always be 80% sRGB, it can't display anything more. Same thing with Adobe RGB or whatever.

Aka, the % is not how accurate it is, it's how large part of the colour space, or area it is capable of displaying.

[e22big]

It can make your display output the correct colour (that is the correct white point value), it won't make a display that already don't cover 100 percent of SRGB to cover the entire colour space. 

 

And it doesn't work while USB, well it does, but the core part is a camera dongle that's supposed to look at your display and help you create a setting that will match the colours it has in its memory