I've noticed some very obvious color banding on the screen of my Dell Precision 7750 laptop while watching video (same in every video program; VLC, built-in Windows video player, etc.) Not only does this not happen for the same video on other computers, but also when I plug in a second monitor to the laptop and play the video on there, it looks find on the second monitor. So it seems like it's something to do with the color profile on the main laptop monitor. Here's what the banding looks like:
I took a screenshot and pasted it in GIMP to check the actual pixel values. Zooming in on a particular banding edge as an example, there was a very noticeable difference between pixels of colour #040404
and #050505
:
I then made a #060606
pixel and as you can see, it looks almost identical to the #050505
, so something is causing #040404
and #050505
to look quite different when they should be almost indistinguishable, but this doesn't apply to most small changes in pixel colour:
What could be causing this effect on the laptop screen? A screwed up colour profile? The system has onboard Intel graphics, but is using the installed nVidia Quadro RTX 3000 graphics card.