24-bit color sucks

Missing wood for trees. RGB displays are deliberately made to be 'good enough' rather than 'great'. None of them can display whole areas of the visible spectrum [1]. Before taking issue with tiny amounts of visible banding, just maybe it would be better if monitors could actually display a reasonable amount of the visible spectrum...

[1] For a reasonable graphic example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:CIExy1931_srgb_gamut.png where grey is the entire visible spectrum and the coloured areas are the standard RGB colour space.

> Academics have told us that human eyes can't distinguish between the 16,777,216 colors provided by 24-bit depth, so we believe that even though it can't be true.

This is a fallacy. That the human eye cannot distinguish N different colours does not imply that a given colour space of >N colours contains every colour that the human eye can distinguish.

To give an equivalent example that is easier to understand, consider a colour space with 16.7 million shades of red. 16.7 million colours is more than the human eye can distinguish, but there are clearly many colours that the human eye can distinguish that are not in that colour space (notably shades of green, shades of blue, and combinations of red, green, and blue).

"No. No, no, no. (Points to a section of a wall.) That's the new Military Grey bit there, and that's the dowdy, old, nasty Ocean Grey bit there. Or was it the other way round?" -- Rimmer, 'Red Dwarf'

Me neither. I can't see the gradient break. Not even after tweaking the brightness of my monitor.

Edit: I can't see it because my config does automatic dithering. See my other posts.

I see banding in gradients quite often; more often in dynamic scenes in games than in more tightly designed static content online.

Of course much of the media we consume has quantized colour, streamed videos especially don't really stand up to any kind of close examination using today's displays, never mind futuristic ones. Banding from limited gamut is not the big problem here, there are much bigger elephants.