After working at a software company this summer where all of the developers had huge (24 or 30 inch screens), I decided that I just had to have one. I bought a Gateway 24" flat screen (the slightly better-reviewed Dells were out of stock), and I ended up having to buy a new graphics card to power the larger screen (an NVIDIA 8600 GT).
The new screen is great, with two exceptions. The first I’m going to describe as gradient banding. Whenever there’s a gradient displayed on the screen, the gradient has visible bands. But not only that: the bands also move for a few seconds, eventually settling and becoming static a few seconds later. This is hugely distracting; for example, when I switch to Word 2007 (which has that gradient background), the screen is practically in motion, making it hard to focus on the text. I also do a large amount of graphic design on campus, and the other day I was working on a design that featured a large number of subtle gradients. I had to take a break because I was getting a little dizzy!
The other problem shows up in areas with extremely high contrast. Say that I’m using InDesign and I’ve got a guide (which by default is pure cyan) running through a box that is colored crimson. The guide is supposed to be exactly one pixel wide, but it ends up displaying as essentially three: the cyan line in the middle with two 1-pixel lines straddling it, each of which are a much darker version of the crimson. This problem pops up a lot when I’m dealing with high-contrast edges, and can make text on a colored background look somewhat muddy on screen.
I can’t remember ever having problems like this before. I’ve looked at all of the video driver settings, which are all at their defaults. In addition, any settings that mention anything like ‘sharpness’ are set to none or off, and contrast is at 50/100. I’m using a DVI cable, if that matters. Unfortunately, my old screen is back at home, and I don’t have another screen on hand to plug in and test with (all of my roommates have laptops).
Has anyone seen anything like this? Is it likely my video card or my screen? Is there a way to fix it? I’ve Googled this as best I could, but was never able to find anything very helpful or in-depth. Then again, embarrassingly enough, my Google-fu is a bit lacking…