Color Banding on Panasonic Plasma

Question

Level 1

0 points

Color Banding on Panasonic Plasma

Hello

I've connected a Panasonic VT25 Plasma TV to my Mac Mini via HDMI with Mini DisplayPort to HDMI Adapter. I have a Dell computer monitor connected via MiniDVI to DVI. I am getting color banding on the Panasonic Display and not on the Dell display. The Panasonic display will not display color banding with other input sources such as Blu Ray Player or ATSC Tuner. I had created a simple Adobe Photoshop file with a Black to White gradient and When I drag it from one monitor to the other, the effect appears and disappears. The issue looks like a low color depth on the Plasma Display. Is this a problem with the Adapter?

Mac Mini Late 2009, Mac OS X (10.6.4)

Posted on Feb 10, 2011 1:56 AM

Reply

Answer 1

brxxthe Author

Level 1

0 points

Feb 10, 2011 12:56 PM in response to brxxthe

Just as a quick review...

Mini DisplayPort -> MDP to HDMI Adapter -> HDMI to VT25 Display
Mini DVI -> MiniDVI to DVI Adapter -> DVI to Dell LCD Display

Late 2009 Mac Mini. Apple Adapters. Here are some notable EDID specs from the TV.

RGB 4:4:4, YCrCb 4:4:4, YCbCr 4:2:2 Color Encoding Formats
Default Color space is not sRGB standard

Reply

Answer 2

BSteely

Level 5

7,643 points

Feb 13, 2011 9:17 AM in response to brxxthe

Is there an option to set color bit depth for the Panasonic within Displays Preferences on the mini? If so, make sure it is set to 24-bit, a.k.a. Millions of colors.

The Panasonic display will not display color banding with other input sources such as Blu Ray Player or ATSC Tuner.

Banding can be difficult to see using regular TV content. On the mini you are using a static gradient pattern to make the assessment. Without having the same on a Blu Ray player, it's not really a good comparison.

Plasmas aren't particularly great at continuous tone rendering because the pixels can only be on or off. Intermediate tones are done by time slicing and dithering. What you see may be the best that the technology can do. It can't really be fairly compared with an LCD, a technology which is capable of continuous tones.

Reply