please help with color banding issues

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cannondale06

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Nov 27, 2007
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I am on my fourth lcd in two weeks and ALL of them have had color banding in games that my crt doesnt. overall its not horrible but it still very distracting and I would really like to see if there is a way to get rid of it. I have tried messing with the brightness and contrast but that doesnt help very much. any advice is appreciated before I completely give up on LCDs.


this is not my screenshots but here is an example of what i am encountering..http://forums.nvidia.com/lofiversion/index.php?t68796.html
 
That looks like posterisation. It is caused by the screen not being able to show enough colours for smooth gradients/not dithering properly to hide it (I have seen cheap LCD screens do this before) or by a low colour depth setting on the computer.
 
The likely cause of the color banding issue is the monitor's LCD panel. Athough I remember seeing some color banding issue in some games on my CRT way back when... probably during cut scene which was probably due to an inferior video compression like Bink.

Most LCD monitor sold are built around a TN panel which can only really produce 256k colors. Thru a process called dithering the remaining 16m colors can be estimated. This is the cause of your color banding issue. TN panels are inexpensive and they have the fastest response times as part of thier perks. These are known as 6-bit monitors because they only use 6-bits to create shades of each primary color.

S-PVA, P-MVA and IPS panels can truly produce 16.7m and do not have color banding issue (unless the source itself has color banding). They are more expensive and have slightly slower response times (6ms). These are known 8-bit panels since 8-bits are used to shades of each primary color.

In the 22" LCD arena there are only two monitors that uses a S-PVA panel, they are the HP LP2275w and the Lenovo ThinkVision L220x. The starting price is around $350.

In the 24" LCD arena monitors using the S-PVA, M-PVA and IPS start at $550 and goes up from there. The least expensive is probably the HP LP2465 probably because it is being phased out due to it's successor, the LP2475w.
 
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