[shifuimam]

I recently got one of these:

http://us.toshiba.com/computers/acce...obile-monitor/

Main reason I got it was for a third monitor at work to hold all my chat windows and other random things. I chose it over the AOC for the size and matte finish on the display (I hate, hate, hate glossy LCDs). Lenovo's option was just too expensive.

So far, it's awesome and I love it and it does exactly what I want it to do. HOWEVER, I noticed today when doing a YouTube test (to see how HD video played on it vs the regular monitors attached to my desktop) that gradients band terribly on it.

Is this fixable? IIRC this is related to the true color depth of the monitor (6-bit vs 8-bit vs 16-bit) and is a physical limitation of the display...

Photos to try and show what it's doing are below.

Toshiba monitor:




Dell monitor (for reference):

[P]

The 6-bit versus 8-bit doesn't really matter as much as it once did (it is 6 bits per color, ie 18 bits in total, as opposed to the 3*8 bits required for real 24-bit "millions" colors). Current 6-bit monitors achieve the extra colors though temporal dithering (flicking the brightness really quickly between two adjacent brightnesses) which works quite well unless you need extremely accurate color reproduction. I think that the banding you see is due to the compression required to squeeze a realtime video signal over USB.

[shifuimam]

I have a couple DisplayLink adapters at home - I'll try them with a real monitor that I know is capable of Truecolor and see what I come back with. I'm not looking for super-accurate color - I can even see a color temperature difference between this Toshiba and my Dell displays. I'd just like to get rid of the banding if possible...

[shifuimam]

Okay, so boyfriend has a DisplayLink adapter hooked up to a monitor at home. He has three identical monitors. There is no gradient banding on the DisplayLink monitor, so I think that probably rules out an issue with it running over USB.

I'm going to guess it's the display...I might email Toshiba and see if I can get more details on the hardware.

[cgc]

You're positive the display adapter is set to 32-bit? I don't know how to change it but you can view it by opening up About this Mac from the Apple menu, then clicking the More Info button, and finally selecting Graphics Displays. Should be labeled "Pixel Depth".

[shifuimam]

I'm using Windows 7 x64 since this is at my job, but yes, the color depth is set to 32-bit across the board (all three monitors).

I'll take it home this weekend and hook it up to my desktop - my work machine has a really shitty video card in it, so that may be part of the problem (DisplayLink piggybacks off whatever the host machine has for a GPU). My home desktop has a GTX 550Ti, so if that IS the problem, that should take care of it.

[shifuimam]

The issue is still present with a much better GPU, so I'm going to have to assume that it's just the color depth of the display. Or something. Ah, well...it was cheap, so I suppose I can't expect too much.