anyone have a picture of banding? (and is it worse than clouding??)

Banding and clouding are issues that are thrown around this site and there is some misinformation. Clouds are non-uniformity in the LCD that shows up on black or very dark screens. People here think that it is tied to the brand of TV and therefore the components that it uses. Non-uniformitty is caused by external pressure from the case onto the actual LCD cell. It is annoying but no brand is immune to it. It is a manufacturing issue with the enclosure and not an inherent weakness in LCD technology. You can minimize it by reducing the backlight and/or adjusting the black level on the controls. Some on the site have eliminating it by backing off the screws that hold the plastic onto the LCD cell. They are actually fixing the cloud issue but after spending $2000 for a set, do you really want to do that much effort.

Banding is caused when 4:3 screens are shown on the 16:9 screen. Especially visible on black screens, the black level of the bands are the TV scales level of black (digitally generated and they are really "black"). The 4:3 screen's "black" is the video signal being interupted into black (sometimes not really as "black as it could be"). The black level are different so the "bands" on the sides look odd. NO IT IS NOT BURN-IN or any other phenomena. It is just two levels of black.

LCD screen use incredible bright backlights. With 500 nits out the front, did you know that on 4% of the brightness gets through to the front. 500 nits is 4% of what??? The poor LCD is trying to block all that light with twisting LCD molecules and linear polarizers. You know what? They leak and the do not block light uniformly across the area of the display.

Clouds and bands are the nature of the beast. But are they REALLY that BAD? Come on... quit looking at an LCD with a black screen in a dark room and watch the set on a real channel with the lights on.

DB

Personally, I think it is just another point people like to complain about because LCD technology is not perfect. But then, no display technology is perfect. If you don't have an issue with it, ignore the talk about it an enjoy the show.

Here is the banding on my new LC52D92U that is going back to the store as soon as possible.

This has nothing to do with 4:3 material. These bands are a defect in the panel themselves.

I had a Sony that had bad clouds. If you adjusted the TV, you can minimize the appearance, but they are still then when the picture is dark or black. Space does not have clouds.

That is a picture of a 30IRE gray field. Watch a movie with a foggy scene and they are there. If the picture stays still, then it is not bad, but if there is a horizontal pan, you see the bands as ripples. I saw the vertical banding in the begining of "The Two Towers" (Frodo and Sam in the hills) and in the 5th Element (Police cars in the fog & the quick camera pan when the Shuttle flys to Floston)

*EDIT* I forgot to mention that these were the only two DVDs I watched on the TV so far *

I used to have a bad screen for my front projector system and the picture looked great until there was a pan, and then the ripples in the screen are clearly visible.