Question about 1080p TVs.

[Shakes]

I currently have a flatscreen 720p. Nice TV, except when it shows dark images like a black wall for example, you can see "rings" of different shades of grey(ish).

My qeustion is does the 1080p TVs do that?

[Sunspace]

That's not related to the screen resolution (the number of pixels) which is what is denoted by the 720 and 1080. It's related to the number of colours the TV can display. Some TVs can only display a smaller number of colours, and when presented with a smooth gradient of colour, have no choice but to break it up into bands of the few colours they can manage.

This might also be related to the program source; if whoever was encoding it chose to make it a smaller file, one way they can do it is to remove colour and detail information, which can result in the same banding.

Look for something like 'eight-bit colour' or 'ten-bit colour' in your TV's specs. The fewer the number of bits, the fewer colours they can display.

[kanicbird]

As pointed out above it sounds like a encoding artifact, it is especially noticeable when viewing streaming TV from the internet such as Netflix.

[JoelUpchurch]

Sounds more like an encoding problem to me also. Things like the sky with many subtle color changes can cause problems. You can get another problem when their is too much motion on screen like fire or an explosion. You can get pixelization where gets blocky looking. Do you get the problem with DVD playback?

[Shakes]

Wow, encoding. I'm glad I ased. I never would have thought of that.

[astro]

An easy way to check if it's the TV or the source content quality is to run a DVD or blueray movie with a dark scene and see if you get the same problem.

[Crown Prince of Irony]

Originally Posted by astro

An easy way to check if it's the TV or the source content quality is to run a DVD or blueray movie with a dark scene and see if you get the same problem.

Good, repeatable scenes for this are the studio bumpers for recent Universal and Disney movies, since they are relatively static and won't be subject to motion artifacts (which are more a function of your video source than your tv).

The Universal title is the globe on a black background, during which any black "banding" indicates poor contrast handling, and the Disney title - Disneyland against a dark blue sky - may show blue banding which will indicate poor color gradation.