I sent this message to DataColor: "How do I calibrate the display on my iMac M using SpyderX Elite to either Adobe Color Pro or Adobe RBG."
If you mean an iMac M1, then that display is capable of reproducing the P3 color gamut.
P3 is a wide gamut color space, similar in size to Adobe RGB. Both Adobe RGB and P3 are much larger than sRGB.
The answer to your question is probably that the question does not need to be asked. What does that mean? First of all, as far as I know, iMac displays are like most displays out there, in that they can be software calibrated (measured and then a profile generated to correct any deviations), but not fully hardware calibrated. Because it cannot be fully hardware calibrated, you cannot tell it what gamut to reproduce. It’s going to reproduce the P3 gamut no matter what you do. That's why the gamut question doesn't need to be asked; you probably can’t do anything about it.
The function of the profile that Datacolor produces is not to change the gamut. What it does is make the display reproduce colors as accurately as it can, within the gamut it covers.
It didn't seem to recommend any color space. At the end, it said 100% sRGB and 85% AdobeRBG.
It did not recommend any color space for the reasons in the previous paragraph: An M1 iMac display going to reproduce P3, and you can’t change that.
It says 85% Adobe RGB probably because that is the difference in coverage between the P3 gamut of the display and the Adobe RGB gamut.
But the “missing” 15% has little meaning, it isn’t useful for comparison. It doesn't even mean that Adobe RGB has 15% more colors than the display. Color gamuts are 3D shapes that are not uniform. As stated earlier, P3 and Adobe RGB are both much larger than sRGB. Yet Adobe RGB and P3 do not cover all of each other, so you can’t say either one “covers the most.” However, P3 does cover almost all of sRGB, which is why it claims the iMac P3 display covers 100% of sRGB. But a better answer would be that the iMac P3 display covers well over 100% of sRGB.
Another complication is that those percentages are often measured at a single luminance level, but that doesn’t tell the whole story. If measured from light to dark, at some luminance levels sRGB extends beyond Adobe RGB or P3, even though sRGB is overall much smaller. A single percentage doesn't account for this.
The Adobe RGB gamut is not a holy grail standard for anything, so not having 100% Adobe RGB coverage is normally not a concern when you also have 100% coverage of P3 (which the profiler did not list). The P3 gamut of the iMac is about the same size as Adobe RGB, it’s just a different slice of the visible RGB colors. P3 is actually more consistent with sRGB than Adobe RGB is. For all of these reasons and more, saying “85% of Adobe RGB” is not a cause for concern on its own, so you should not get hung up on it. Depending on the colors in the photos you take, either Adobe RGB or P3 might be a better fit as demonstrated at this link (
The Wide Gamut World of Color — iMac Edition).
If you were to measure P3 coverage on an Adobe RGB display, that test could end up saying "85% of P3,” but again, that percentage wouldn’t make that display look bad if the point of the display is to cover Adobe RGB and not P3.
The #1 reason the percentages are not useful is because they don’t tell you which colors are not covered: Are they unnatural colors that are never in your photos, or natural colors that are always in your photos? Missing 15% of unused colors is no problem, missing 5% of frequently used colors is a big problem. But the percentage specs never talk about it that way.
And if you are editing in Lightroom, neither Adobe RGB nor sRGB matches because Lightroom converts all imported images for editing in the ProPhoto RGB color space, and exports to the color space you choose. This is also totally normal color management, not a problem.
Hope all this didn’t just confuse you further…
Just run the Datacolor software and accept the profile that comes out the other end, and you will have a calibrated wide gamut P3 display, ready for you to edit photos and enjoy editing on your M1 iMac!