What causes un-smooth gradients?

[grapemac]

When watching a film/video on my MacBook, gradients (such as skies) appear as lines of different shades of the colour as opposed to one solid smooth gradient.

Is this due to the poor graphics or the encoding of the video or something else?

 

[spinnerlys]

Most probably the encoding and the angle of the display.

 

[vistadude]

It's the poor graphics or something related to the macbook. It's not the encoding of the video because if you watch a dvd version on a tv, you won't see the strange shades of color.

When watching a film/video on my MacBook, gradients (such as skies) appear as lines of different shades of the colour as opposed to one solid smooth gradient.

Is this due to the poor graphics or the encoding of the video or something else?

 

[grapemac]

Well, the videos I mean are those bought or rented from iTunes, such as an HD Planet Earth (or Life, i can't remember) episode or the trailer on iTunes for that Disney film about flamingoes (Crimson Wing?).

 

[Bengt77]

Maybe it's because TV-screens are more forgiving in their colour representation? I have no idea. Some gradients cannot be displayed accurately using the CMYK colour specification, as opposed to the RGB colour spectrum. Of course, CMYK is for print. I see these distorted gradients a lot when working in Photoshop. The same thing might be true for NTSC (the US standard), though, as opposed to PAL (the European standard), the latter of which, I believe, has a wider colour gamut. Could that have to do with it?

propaganda

This is completely off-topic, but I just visited your photo blog and couldn't help but notice this image:



Really cool how you added in the Godspeed You! Black Emperor reference. I absolutely love their F# A# ∞ album. Very nice pictures, by the way.