Dell S2417DG colour banding

[3lackMamba]

Hello

I done a quick search on this forum and surprisingly found nothing matching this monitor and colour banding.. but take one quick google search and you will learn quickly these monitors are some of the worst for it.

I got this monitor a couple of months ago because on paper it seemed amazing for the price, which it is in every aspect bar one and that is the colour banding on this thing. I made another post today about looking for a cheap ISP monitor so that I can play particular games (horror) as the dark and gloomy nature of them look absolutely horrible on this monitor. I would love to find a calibration for this monitor so that I don’t have to spend money on an ISP but I have tried countless calibrations and nothing seems to work. My current testing game for this is Layers of Fear and Outlast, I havent found any settings yet that I would be happy to play the game in, it’s just too horrid to play through seeing blocks of black and grey etc, or if I mess with the contrast and brightness enough to fix the banding the game looks too washed out where blacks are grey and everything is cloudy.

I only kept the monitor as I play mostly competitive shooters and for that it is perfectly fine. But anything dark, even videos and pictures that has fades and transistions that involve black, band like hell. My 7 year old ASUS 1080p monitor doesn’t band anywhere near as bad.

There’s a good few discussions about this on Reddit but no solid fixes, at least not for me of course. One guy on the nvidia forums even posted some sort of fix that allows you to enable Dithering through the registery that I tried but states that it might not work for everyone, and of course I was one of those people.

I’m not sure if there’s anything else I can do about this, I feel like I’ve tried everything but if anyone has the same monitor with the same problems please comment if you ever found a fix. Post your Nvidia control panel colour settings and your monitor settings. I’ll try anything.

Thanks

 

[Martin Smith]

I have the Dell S2716DG and it also suffers from some banding issues in my experience. I play a lot of Elite Dangerous, and the banding can be quite distracting on that game.

I tried various settings, but could never get it to go away.

What I ended up doing was using ReShade's debanding option, which I find works very well. doesn't fix it 100%, but makes a big difference.

hope this is of some help

 

[Rroff]

I can't speak of the S2417DG but I have the S2716DG and it does have some banding but pretty minor in my experience - there are odd instances I notice it but they are fairly rare. I think it might depend a bit on which revision of the monitor you have as well though as some versions seem to get people reporting banding more frequently than others.

Personally I put up with it but then my main use is for gaming where I'd rather have the overall balance of performance, overall reasonable image quality and resolution even if I have to put up with a little banding and have a decent IPS alongside it for anything I care about image quality.

EDIT: To be fair I've kind of moved towards using my IPS for slower paced, darker games as often they are games with a lot of scene detailing, etc. and that is just a better experience on a more vibrant and saturated display anyhow so might be missing some cases of banding which might be more apparent on the S2716DG.

 

[3lackMamba]

What I ended up doing was using ReShade's debanding option, which I find works very well. doesn't fix it 100%, but makes a big difference.

What exactly is ReShade Debanding? I’ve never heard of that

To be fair I've kind of moved towards using my IPS for slower paced, darker games as often they are games with a lot of scene detailing, etc.

You see this is what I was thinking of doing, buying an IPS panel for these specific games, but in doing a bit of research, apparently blacks appear grey on a lot of IPS panels because of the glow? Which has now made me consider getting a VA monitor.. The game I’m testing on atm is Layers of Fear and it’s very dark and gloomy, literally holding off playing it until I get a monitor that’s suitable.

 

[Martin Smith]

What exactly is ReShade Debanding? I’ve never heard of that


.

It's a free post processing thing where you can apply various effects - https://reshade.me/

One of the standard effects is "deband," which is the one I use for Elite. you install reshade, and ask it to apply effects to the executable of the game you're playing - some of them are quite system intensive, but deband isn't. Once set up it does it automatically thereafter (although if the game is then patched you might have to set it up again.)

 

[3lackMamba]

@Martin Smith oh goodness I’ll have to give this a try, tyvm for posting about this! I’ll post later tonight if it makes any difference.

 

[Rroff]

What exactly is ReShade Debanding? I’ve never heard of that


You see this is what I was thinking of doing, buying an IPS panel for these specific games, but in doing a bit of research, apparently blacks appear grey on a lot of IPS panels because of the glow? Which has now made me consider getting a VA monitor.. The game I’m testing on atm is Layers of Fear and it’s very dark and gloomy, literally holding off playing it until I get a monitor that’s suitable.

With the poor quality control that seems to be the story these days far too many IPS panels that don't do great blacks - mine is a Dell UltraSharp that comes factory calibrated so fairly reasonable with good blacks. I've not yet seen a VA I like for gaming personally - the older ones are quite smeary on certain colour transitions and the newer ones have a kind of grainy trail on some faster changing stuff - which you might not notice at first but once you do you can't "unsee" it.

 

[bledd]

I have the S2716DG.

Check the response time is set to 'Normal' and not 'Fast'. I had terrible ghosting with it set to Fast.

 

[3lackMamba]

With the poor quality control that seems to be the story these days far too many IPS panels that don't do great blacks

What a shame.. I’ll have a look at this ReShade thing, hopefully I’ll have some luck with that!

Check the response time is set to 'Normal' and not 'Fast'. I had terrible ghosting with it set to Fast.

I’ll check, thanks.