Color banding test
Full-screen gradient ramps in grayscale, red, green, and blue. On a good display each ramp looks perfectly smooth; visible stripes mean banding. Click or press → to change gradients, Esc to exit.
Color banding FAQ
- What is color banding?
- Visible stripes in what should be a perfectly smooth gradient. A gradient asks the display for hundreds of nearly identical shades in a row; when the panel or the signal path can't distinguish enough of them, neighboring shades collapse into the same value and you see discrete bands instead of a smooth ramp.
- Why does my screen show banding?
- Most banding comes from bit depth: an 8-bit panel shows 256 steps per channel, and cheaper 6-bit panels simulate that with dithering (FRC). 10-bit pipelines show far fewer bands but need support from the panel, the cable, the GPU, and the operating system simultaneously. Aggressive contrast or 'vivid' picture modes can also crush shades together — try a neutral preset.
- Is the banding from my monitor or the content?
- This test generates gradients on your machine, so any bands you see here come from your display pipeline, not compression. Banding you notice in streamed video is usually the opposite: heavy compression quantizes dark scenes, and even excellent monitors will faithfully show those encoded bands.