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Author Color banding in gradients
Yeah

2006-01-18, 6:43 pm

I just bought a 19" Samsung 930B LCD monitor, and I use it with my ATI
9600XT AGP video card. The drivers for both are fully updated. I have just
noticed color banding in my gradients, using Paint Shop Pro 7.

My color is set to 32-bit in Control Panel - Displays (as high as it goes).
Is there any other way to fix this? Should I replace my video card?


Fred Hiltz

2006-01-18, 10:50 pm

Yeah wrote:
> I just bought a 19" Samsung 930B LCD monitor, and I use it
> with my ATI 9600XT AGP video card. The drivers for both are
> fully updated. I have just noticed color banding in my
> gradients, using Paint Shop Pro 7.
>
> My color is set to 32-bit in Control Panel - Displays (as
> high as it goes). Is there any other way to fix this?
> Should I replace my video card?


Probably not for that reason, although if your card does not have
the Digital Video Interface (DVI) connection, one that does would
work better than the old analog VGA connection.

It depends on the gradient. If the starting and ending colors are
close, then banding is expected. A simple example has, say, a pure
red gradient from value 105 to value 115--10 values--spread over
1000 pixels. Each value will occupy 100 pixels, resulting in visible
bands. The standard cure is to add a small amount of random noise to
the gradient.

The 930 series has another problem. I have not seen one myself, but
McGrandpa writes in the Corel forum that these monitors use only six
bits per channel, compared to the eight bits you are used to. With
only 64 possible values per channel, banding will of course be worse
than with 256 values.
http://compreviews.about.com/od/mul.../a/LCDColor.htm has more
about this.
--
Fred Hiltz, fhiltz at yahoo dot com


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