So a question was raised in the Panasonic plasma (PX75U owner's thread I believe) as to whether or not cut and drive controls can cause, promote, or minimize banding.

Disclaimer: I do not understand the truly technical details behind calibration. I have read guides to doing so and used HCFR in my own time. That hardly makes me an expert and I do not wish to be attacked for any misunderstandings I have on the subject.

That being said, the way I understand cut/drv controls is that they behave as individual brightness/contrast controls for each primary color. If for instance, the television comes with RCut set to 80, and RDrv set to FC, does that not give more of a 'dynamic range' (for lack of proper terminology), to your red gradients and thus present less opportunity for banding than having RCut at 91 and RDrv at C8?

I believe you are correct. I don't know how much of an influence it actually has though.

The drives/cuts and contrast/brightness (and a bunch of other settings) are all used by your TV's drive circuitry to translate a set of digital values, i.e. the signal received over your DVI/HDMI interface into light.

Think of it as one big transfer function with a lot of different coefficients.

So, you pass the TV a "PERFECT" grayscale gradient starting from reference black (digital 16) to peak white (digital 235).

The transfer function now takes the RGB value of each pixel and converts it to a light intensity by either modulation a mirror or a sub-pixel or whatever. Depending on how the transfer function is defined, there may be rounding errors (for lack of a better term) introduced into the digital to light conversion. This will appear as banding.

Now, the rounding errors can either be introduced because of the maximum value of one of the main parameters (brightness/contrast) or one of the fine tuning controls (cuts/drives) or even something else (gamma controls, theater mode).

The only way to know for sure it to throw up a gradient pattern and look for banding. I can see this effect very clearly on my plasma when I start to change the values of contrast/brightness but it is also evident with the some of the cuts/drives.

So if one wishes to avoid banding as much as possible, is it better to have DRV/CUT controls be set 'aggressively' and have the overall contrast/brightness set to lower values, or better to set brightness and contrast properly and let the DRV/CUT fall wherever they happen to?

The cuts and drives are also brightness and contrast controls. Adjusting the cuts and drives will interact with your main brightness and contrast controls to a degree.

Right - I understand that much. It is better however, to have DRV controls set high (assume that they are set properly for D6500) and overall Contrast low (for proper grayscale), or better to leave the service menu DRV controls 'wherever' and have user menu Contrast higher to compensate.

I don't think there is a universally correct answer to that question.

Right - I understand that much. It is better however, to have DRV controls set high (assume that they are set properly for D6500) and overall Contrast low (for proper grayscale), or better to leave the service menu DRV controls 'wherever' and have user menu Contrast higher to compensate.

Set black and white point with the contrast and brightness controls.
Set grayscale balance and linearity/gamma with the RGB bias and gain ( low and high , cut and drive).

Use each control for the specific job its designed for , don't try to fix one parameter based on limited secondary interactivity with a control for another.

Once you have grayscale calibrated verify your black and white points again ( 9 times out of 10 you won't have to readjust).