what IS banding?

It's a digital imaging artifact - patterns of lines in the image. (Like digital 'noise', but in a repeated line pattern instead of a random display.) Can be vertical or horizontal, long or short. I don't know which affects the M8 sensor as I do not have one.

But, I have to think Leica will be able to fix it fairly easily.
 
The 1D suffered banding when extreme level tweak is applied to the image.

Pulled from fred miranda's site:

http://www.fredmiranda.com/1D_review/

D4DA0502.jpg


banding.jpg
 
ah, ok, ive only used one about 5 times...and i wasnt really shooting anything that required a massive contrast bump...thanks for the clarification though :)
 
Strike up the band

Strike up the band

Shoot the moon, for instance. Not art by any stretch of the imagination, but I think this nicely illustrates the issue. ISO 1250
 

Attachments

  • MoonISO1250_sm.jpg
    MoonISO1250_sm.jpg
    181.5 KB · Views: 0
ClayH said:
Shoot the moon, for instance. Not art by any stretch of the imagination, but I think this nicely illustrates the issue. ISO 1250

Clay

Your moon picture shows all the artifacts. Notice the biaxial symmetry and the negative moon.

This is something that can probably be fixed pretty easily in firmware. In any case, for most of us it doesn't affect a lot of pictures. However, when you know about it, it drives you crazy. I find myself looking for it in every M8 file I see. Its turned into a sort of "where is Waldo" game for me.

Rex
 
Back Alley: banding, in a general sense, is, as already mentioned, any digital artifacting that reveals the underlying bands, or rows, or columns, of pixels on a digital sensor. As opposed to the random speckle artifacts one gets from noise or grain.

There have been several instances of banding issues with new cameras, each slightly different in form and (as it turned out) often with different causes.

The 1Ds - as already demonstrated. Also the Nikon D200 (cause was some kind of readout imbalance between alternating rows of pixels). Also the Canon 5D (cause was determined to be EM interference when the AF drive motor was running in "continuous" mode when the exposure was made).

In the case of the M8, the proximate cause is a bright light source against a dark background that spills brightness into surrounding dark pixels in a band across the frame. Several theories as to the technical reason this happens have been bounced around, but none is confirmed.

Best I've seen so far is: a timing issue that leaves some of the silicon "gates" between pixels open at the wrong times in the process of reading the individual pixels' brightness in the instant after exposure. Sort of like a canal with all the lock doors left open - instead of each lock having a discrete level of water in it, all one sees is a continuous rushing river through all the locks downstream.
 
Back
Top Bottom