Blur Busters Forums

Does there exist a test for checking whether a monitor is real 8-Bit?

I imagine it is hard to determine true 8 bit from 6-bit-with-temporal-dithering, unless you had a very good oscilloscope. There is at least one other potential way, but it is tedious, and requires multiple measurements with an accurate luminance meter.

You can check visually if a monitor is *6 bit* (262,144 colors) vs 8 bit by a simple greyscale gradient test (especially if you expand the test to full screen), and it's rather obvious.

6 bit+FRC (16.2 million colors) vs 8 bit can also be tested visually by zooming in greyscale tests to fullscreen.

6 bit+HiFRC (16.7 million colors) vs 8 bit is almost impossible without specialized equipment, except at the very end ranges.
Having a true 8 bit monitor (Asus Rog Swift) wont stop the banding problems you will get through skies like in GTA 5. Pretty sure you need a 10 bit monitor and a 10 bit aware OS for that.

Falkentyne wrote:You can check visually if a monitor is *6 bit* (262,144 colors) vs 8 bit by a simple greyscale gradient test (especially if you expand the test to full screen), and it's rather obvious.

6 bit+FRC (16.2 million colors) vs 8 bit can also be tested visually by zooming in greyscale tests to fullscreen.

6 bit+HiFRC (16.7 million colors) vs 8 bit is almost impossible without specialized equipment, except at the very end ranges.
Having a true 8 bit monitor (Asus Rog Swift) wont stop the banding problems you will get through skies like in GTA 5. Pretty sure you need a 10 bit monitor and a 10 bit aware OS for that.

Can you provide some easy to perform tests for comparing a 6 bit+FRC with 8 bit without any margin of error? The test only needs to prove if it isn't 8 bit and not whether it is 6-bit+FRC/HiFRC.

You need equipment. Which I already said.