Banding on a new Eizo - is this common?

[mnp]

For quite a while now, I've been looking for a flat screen monitor to replace my old CRT for photo-editing and finally I decided on Eizo S2411W. It seemed to offer good enough color reproduction at relatively reasonable price. However, having now tested the monitor myself for a couple of days, I'm not 100% satisfied and I'd appreciate comments from other owners of similar Eizos, especially regarding the following behavior:


If I create a black-to-white gradient in Photoshop (using the gradient tool), there's quite clear banding visible in the gradient, i.e. the transitions between the tones are not smooth, and there's also hints of colors along the gradient.

However, if I save this same image as TIFF or JPG and view it on any non-colormanaged software, the gradient is displayed smoothly and without color toning. And again if I open the same image in any other colormanaged software than Photoshop (say ACDSee), the same banding and coloring issues appear again.

The only way to get a smooth gradient displayed in Photoshop, is to switch off color management - which of course is not a reasonable option in photo-editing.

The same issue persists if I use the pre-made default profile shipped with the monitor or    personally created profiles (via Eye One calibrator). I've tried profiling with different settings in the monitor, but the results are basically the same with every variation. I've updated to the latest version of grahpic card (ATI Sapphire Radeon 9600 Atlantis) drivers and Eye One software.


To my understanding, this is what's going on:

- The monitor's panel in itself is of reasonable quality, and *is* able to produce smooth tonal transitions, since that is what I get when viewing the gradient in non-colormanaged enviroment. So we are not talking about lacking capabilities of the panel here.

- In colormanaged enviroment the gradient is displayed using the display profile which includes modifications done on the graphic card and these modifications cause the banding and coloring as a side effect. This is as such a known issue, but I wasn't expecting to see it in a 1.000+ € Eizo (which is among other things supposed to have a reasonably nice color reproduction, hence not needing that much tweaking in the profile anyway).


So the question goes:

Is this reasonable behaviour for a monitor of this price range (1000+€), or especially with this model of Eizo (S2411W)? Or could it still be some kind of individual hardware malfunction? I would very much like to hear someone else with the same series monitor to try out the gradient in Photoshop and let me know how it looks.

Of course I didn't buy the monitor just to view grayscale gradients, but I was really expecting that nowadays you could get a monitor capable of even that for a 1000€. But then again, I'm willing to pay a little extra just to know that the monitor I'm using is capable of passing this test as well (which in turn indicates something of the general quality level).

I'm very probably sending back this S2411W (thanks to 14 day return policy), and I've thought about the Eizo CE240W as the next choice. It's pretty much the same monitor but with support for hardware calibration, which to my reasoning should offer a solution for the mentioned banding since the tweaks needed in the profile are done on the monitor with 14bits (instead of the 8bits on graphic card). But I would still love to hear from CE-series owners as well - how do your monitors behave with gradients in color managed enviroments?

[eronald]

As you realize, if a gradient displayed in monitor-space (ie. with color management off) is clean, then the monitor itself is ok, and indeed neutral. Your problem is then with the profile.

I would recommend trying the Coloreyes software, with its free demo, and getting Derrick or Jack Bingham  to help you.

If things are working ok in Photoshop then I would leave well enough alone.

Edmund

[ato]

i don't think you can get a display with smooth image when CMM is on,this is gamut convertion issue, forget it.

or find a monitor color gamut 100% same as adobeRGB/sRGB

edit: my way to fix this problem,find a monitor can emu other color gamut,like my CG221.

[alain]

Hi

The banding issue is probably comming from the 8-bit DVI computer - display interface.

I suggest trying the following :

Use normal callibration/profiling with you're eye-one and try to get the display settings on the screen as good as you can  (aka those on the EIZO OSD itself - either the preset color temperature or the rgb settings + brightness).  

After the calibration/profiling you get a graph displayed which gives the correction the profile has to to in de videocard, for the EIZO's that I have seen those are only minimal corrections.  In fact those EIZO's where much better than other displays I've seen.

If that's the case, recalibrate/reprofile with the eye one settings in "native" (name can be a little bit different), without changing the display settings (I even would write them down should you need them later).

You get quite good colors with the color temperature you want and you shouldn't get banding.

This is an own adaptation from the sugggestion from Jeff Schewe in "camera to print".


BTW. If money isn't a problem, with monitor hardware calibration you should get even - a little bit? - better colors.


Alain

[pobrien3]

Just to state the obvious... you do have the monitor colour quality in the Displays / Monitors control panel set to highest, 32 bit output I assume?  You didn't mention whether you're running it on Mac or PC.

Peter

[digitaldog]

What you need to do is assign the display profile to the document you're testing (or use the soft proof Monitor RGB). That sends the numbers to the display without the profile and you can now see if the banding remains (if so, its the display). Then its trying to figure out the best settings to avoid this IF possible.

[mnp]

Just to state the obvious... you do have the monitor colour quality in the Displays / Monitors control panel set to highest, 32 bit output I assume?  You didn't mention whether you're running it on Mac or PC.
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Yes, the color depth is at highest level (32bits) on the Windows XP.

[mnp]

What you need to do is assign the display profile to the document you're testing (or use the soft proof Monitor RGB). That sends the numbers to the display without the profile and you can now see if the banding remains (if so, its the display). Then its trying to figure out the best settings to avoid this IF possible.
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Viewing the gradient without the profile is exactly what I'm doing by viewing it in non-colormanaged softwares (say, Irfanview or Firefox) - and in that case there is no banding, like stated in my original post. Also turning off the color management in Photoshop gives the same result. (But for some reason proofing on monitor RGB in PS doesn't give exactly the same result: the banding diminishes but doesn't go away totally).

[digitaldog]

Viewing the gradient without the profile is exactly what I'm doing by viewing it in non-colormanaged softwares (say, Irfanview or Firefox)

You still need to view it in Photoshop this way since its the host application you hope to view the resulting images in when using the profile.

Did you build a matrix or LUT profile?