Gradient / Banding Test

A perfect screen renders these ramps as seamless transitions. Visible stripes — banding — reveal bit-depth limits, aggressive processing or a cable/driver issue.

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Recommended · 7 patterns · 5s each

Starts with the recommended setup. Nothing to configure.

Advanced timing

Change how long each pattern stays on screen, or turn automatic advance off.

Free · No download · No sign-up · Runs locally in your browser

smooth banding

Judging what you see

  • • Faint, evenly spaced stripes on the smooth ramps = banding.
  • • The 16-step slide should show sixteen clearly distinct bars.
  • • If the darkest steps merge into one, the display is crushing blacks.
  • • Disable night mode and dynamic contrast before judging.

Where banding comes from

An 8-bit panel has 256 levels per channel; stretched across a full screen, the steps between neighboring levels can become visible as stripes, especially in dark grays. But the panel is only one suspect: banding is just as often introduced by the signal path — a 6-bit+FRC laptop panel, "limited range" RGB over HDMI, aggressive TV picture processing, or a graphics driver set to a lower output depth. If banding appears here but not on another device showing the same page, check your display settings before blaming the panel.

Note that this is a visual aid test: a browser cannot measure your panel's true bit depth. What it can do is show you whether the end-to-end result — panel, cable, GPU and settings together — renders gradients cleanly.

Seeing stripes on flat gray rather than on ramps? That's a uniformity problem instead — run the screen uniformity test.

What this test checks

  • Banding and visible steps inside a smooth gradient
  • Grayscale step separation, including the two darkest steps
  • Per-channel ramps that isolate red, green and blue

Related tests

Screen Uniformity Test

Gray levels that expose bands, clouding and dirty screen effect.

5% OLED Gray Test

5% grey banding check, near-black steps and a 3×3 uniformity map.

Backlight Bleed Test

Dark slides plus an angle check that separates glow from bleed.

IPS Glow Test

A guided angle check that separates panel glow from real bleed.

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