2015-09-24, 15:14
In that scene, I don't see any difference whether I have dithering enabled or not. Not sure why, but I'm not that keen to "add a small amount of noise" to the picture.
Anyways, my TV has a feature called "smooth gradation" that does a rather good job of smoothing out that kind of banding until you can't see it at all. Unfortunately, it also has a habit of smoothing away fine or subtle detail. Like in the screenshot of the girl in front of the building with the "X" architecture, a good number of the vertical window dividers vanish. Also, even though the whole image is blurry there (another complaint Blu-ray reviews have had), you can tell that her hair is reddish... but with the smoothing feature enabled, her hair goes basically black and white. So I keep it off.
Guess I'll just live with that kind of banding. It's better to assume that the video mastering on discs is more often good than bad, because if you assume they're always bad and mess around with the picture too much, you'll only end up wrecking the quality of the good ones.
Anyways, my TV has a feature called "smooth gradation" that does a rather good job of smoothing out that kind of banding until you can't see it at all. Unfortunately, it also has a habit of smoothing away fine or subtle detail. Like in the screenshot of the girl in front of the building with the "X" architecture, a good number of the vertical window dividers vanish. Also, even though the whole image is blurry there (another complaint Blu-ray reviews have had), you can tell that her hair is reddish... but with the smoothing feature enabled, her hair goes basically black and white. So I keep it off.
Guess I'll just live with that kind of banding. It's better to assume that the video mastering on discs is more often good than bad, because if you assume they're always bad and mess around with the picture too much, you'll only end up wrecking the quality of the good ones.
