At this year’s Consumer Electronics Show, quantum-dot displays like the Samsung 2016 SUHD were among the biggest news. PHOTOGRAPH BY ALEX WONG / GETTY

Each year, a group of experts at Pantone, the company best known for its exacting color-matching system, chooses and promotes a Color of the Year that aims to set the world’s fashion agenda—“a color snapshot of what we see taking place in our culture that serves as an expression of a mood and an attitude,” their Web site proclaims. In 2013, for instance, the company chose Pantone 17-5641, a deep-green hue that they labelled Emerald. (This year they picked two: Rose Quartz, 13-1520, and Serenity, 15-3919.) The Web site also offered examples of how Emerald could spruce up your personal style and home décor, and it advertised Emerald coffee mugs and iPhone cases. The selections were covered in countless online and television news outlets.

But, no matter how closely you watched the news reports or ogled Pantone’s Web site, you never actually saw the color Emerald: the vast majority of televisions, computer monitors, and mobile devices are unable to display it, as Jeff Yurek, a communications manager at Nanosys, a company that makes color-display technology, revealed in a blog post. That’s not the only color we’re missing. If you watched this year’s Super Bowl on television, you most likely never really saw the true shade of the Broncos’ blue helmets (Pantone 289). And viewing online photos of London’s famous red double-decker buses (Pantone 485) while you plan your vacation falls far short of experiencing that color in person.

It’s easy to assume that our constantly proliferating digital devices can easily generate any color we want. But, in fact, our screens paint from a depressingly small palette: most can only recreate about a third of all the colors that our eyes can perceive. And the ones they leave out are the boldest, most saturated colors, like Emerald and double-decker-bus red.

The limited gamut, or range of colors, that is available on our screens is a conspicuous weakness of modern information technology. In the past five decades, since Gordon Moore issued his famous eponymous law, computers have become eleven billion times more powerful. The effective resolution of our televisions has increased by a factor of about twenty-seven since 1941. Yet the color space of our screens has hardly changed; in fact, the gamuts of some new digital devices are actually smaller than those of televisions from the nineteen-sixties. Apple’s iPad mini 3, released in October of 2014, had a color range less than two-thirds as large as that of televisions from fifty years ago. Part of the limitation has been technological: it was hard to coax bright, saturated colors from cathode ray tubes and flat-screens when each technology was initially introduced. In the nineteen-nineties, those technical limitations were codified. The electronics industry, working through a United Nations agency called the International Telecommunication Union, or I.T.U., adopted a simple standard gamut that all televisions should be able to display. (Later on, an identical gamut was adopted for monitors and mobile devices.) That standard guided the design not only of technology but of content—how HBO films its shows, how a designer creates Web pages, how Comcast pipes content into homes. Since the various players were all building around the same set of colors, it was hard for any one of them to change—a classic chicken-and-egg problem, which resisted more than two decades of rapid technological change.

Recently, however, content creators are starting to expand beyond the limited, outdated color space. Some artists and photographers have adopted a digital-color standard that better matches the wider gamut of printing. Movie producers and theatres have also adopted an expanded gamut. Some TV manufacturers are selling models with wider color ranges, but different brands use different approaches, and they don’t all display comparable or accurate colors. Without an agreed-upon standard gamut, we have no way to know exactly what we’re seeing on our millions of mobile devices, TVs, and computer screens. So, in 2012, the I.T.U. created Rec. 2020, a set of technical specifications for future generations of displays. It’s meant to be adopted in the year 2020, and it will include a gamut that will finally surpass the colors available to the castaways on “Gilligan’s Island.” But how broad should the new gamut be? The I.T.U. asked, essentially: Which colors should the technology of the future show us?

The history of color research provided a concrete answer. For a 1980 study, a British color researcher named Michael R. Pointer gathered more than four thousand objects with very saturated colors, including more than twenty-five hundred paint swatches from various collections and hundreds of colored textiles, papers, and plastics. Pointer shined light of various wavelengths and brightness levels on the samples and measured the reflections. By charting the results, he produced a good approximation of the range of colors one could ever expect to see. In 2012, when the I.T.U. set the future for our displays, they chose a color gamut large enough to include practically all of Pointer’s, which would make it about twice as big as the standard set in the nineteen-nineties. It was a bold choice: at the time, there was no practical way to make displays with a gamut anywhere near that big.

Much has changed in just four years. Engineers have made rapid progress with new color technologies. The most promising approach involves quantum dots, tiny crystals that can be precisely tuned to efficiently produce very specific colors. The crystals are grown from a mixture of various semiconductor materials and liquid solvents. By carefully controlling the conditions, engineers can adjust the size of the crystals, which determines the wavelength of the light that the crystals emit. Smaller quantum dots, with a diameter of two nanometres (two billionths of a metre) or so, emit short-wavelength, or blue, light. Bigger dots, with diameters closer to eight nanometres, produce light that’s nearer the long-wavelength, or red, end of the spectrum.

Displays based on quantum dots are the same as liquid-crystal displays, or LCDs, used widely today. In quantum-dot displays, a set of ordinary blue light-emitting diodes is used to excite trillions of the nanocrystals, which then emit red and green light. The red, green, and blue are combined to make white light, which is sent through a grid of filters to create red, green, and blue pixels. (The grid of filters is necessary because it’s not yet practical to build the pixel layer directly out of quantum dots, and the industry is already very experienced using color filters.) As in conventional displays, the light behind the pixels is always on, and the liquid crystals selectively mask certain ones, thereby determining the images that are visible on the screen. Since quantum dots produce much purer colors than conventional lights, they can generate pixels with much more saturated hues, and the displays can produce a much wider gamut.

Because quantum-dot displays are built on top of (or, technically, in back of) the ubiquitous LCD, they have been relatively easy to manufacture. Sony showed off the first consumer TV with a quantum-dot screen in 2013, and other major manufacturers have since offered many more models, including a wide range of TVs, along with the first tablet, laptop, and computer monitor illuminated by nanocrystals. These displays have dramatically expanded the range of colors available to screens in your house and in your hand. At an industry trade show in Berlin last year, the Chinese manufacturer T.C.L. unveiled a television that could offer more than ninety per cent of the new, recommended gamut. At the Consumer Electronics Show in January, where quantum-dot displays were among the biggest news, Sharp and Hisense both showed off displays, powered by quantum dots from Nanosys, that offered ninety-one per cent. A few years ago, many experts doubted that manufacturers would be able to produce the new gamut by 2020; now the goal seems well within grasp. At the moment, it’s difficult to fully appreciate these vibrant screens because the content makers haven’t yet widely adopted the new gamut, but that hurdle will fall soon, too.