Doesn't seem that way to me. Because I got my camera late in the day, and had to charge the battery for three hours, I was messing around with it in the dark. I could make it band (and I could mostly clean up the banding without too much trouble) but I took a lot of shots outside in the dark, around a well-lit supermarket, that had no banding whatsoever.
I said someplace else, but I repeat it here, it seems to me that to get banding, the bright light has to be massively over-exposed, and must be relatively large compared to the size of the frame, and, I think, fairly much in-focus. Out-of-focus lights don't seem to band so badly. The shots inside the convention center that show all the banding probably could have avoided it if he hadn't taken pictures of the ultra-bright lights on the ceiling. And ceilings are something that I often don't take pictures of. 😎
I think, but I'm not sure, that if you were shooting film in, say, a concert setting, where you were in the crowd looking at the front of the band, with the spotlights behind you, you would not get banding, no matter how brightly lit the band was. If you took pictures of the spotlights themselves, you'd get banding. If you took the same shots with film, you'd get fog or light contamination. Some levels of brightness can't be held by anything; as somebody on the Lecia forum said, he can force the 5D to band in extreme conditions. You simply work around it.
JC
