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

 

[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.

 

[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.

 

[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.