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Monochrom Banding Normal?


jffielde

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I have a Leica Monochrom that produces horizontal banding in the shadows to the level visible in the attached file when I raise the shadows / exposure by any combination of 3 stops. The banding is easily visible at 1.5 stops of raising exposure / shadow, which I do regularly to preserve highlights. Any idea whether this is normal behavior and, if not, what's wrong? Thanks.

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This is at base ISO and the banding is easily visible pushed 1.5 stops. Does that also match your experience?

 

I'm happy to post more samples, but they all look about like this. I'm also happy to email a DNG to anyone interested for analysis.

Edited by jffielde
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From what I have read on this forum before, in order to be sure there is nothing wrong with your camera, I would have Leica take a look at it.

 

Memory card wise I would suggest a Panasonic from B&H.

 

Panasonic 16GB SDHC Memory Card Class 10 UHS-I RPSDB16GB1K B&H

Edited by k-hawinkler
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I found this interesting article about the MM DNG and banding:

 

ChromaSoft: The Leica M Monochrom's lack of DNG compression options

 

I've see this happen to my MM when pushing over 3 stops (using a 16GB Sandisk and a 32GB Lexar Pro), Now, how much can this be blamed on the SD card alone? I wonder if a final, non-beta firmware could help fix this, I recall when the Nikon D200 was first released, it had a terrible banding problem that was fixed later on). I'm afraid Leica is probably devoting all time to get the new M finalized and launched rather than fixing some known issues of the MM.

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Jaapv,

 

To be clear, you are now suggesting that this behavior is most certainly not typical, correct?

 

What is the most compatible card I could select?

 

Well, I only see this when I push the camera to its limits.

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I found this interesting article about the MM DNG and banding:

 

ChromaSoft: The Leica M Monochrom's lack of DNG compression options

I think you are misunderstanding what this article is about. ‘Banding’ can mean different things in different contexts. Within the context of this thread, ‘banding’ refers to a certain kind of non-uniformity in the behaviour of sensor pixels: some rows or columns of sensor pixels may appear brighter or darker than their surroundings. Some small deviations (i.e. noise) are inevitable and increasing the signal gain at higher ISO settings amplifies those deviations, so when you select the highest setting and push the shadows to boot, there might be some banding of this kind (although personally I have seen none).

 

What Sandy writes about in his blog post is quite another kind of banding, namely a phenomenon properly called posterisation. When you have gradient from black to white and gradually reduce the number of tonal values, the formerly smooth gradient will eventually dissolve into visually separate bands. Now since the lossy compression scheme of the M8 and M9 reduces the number of tonal values from 14 to 8, one might fear that posterisation/banding could be an issue. But in practice it isn’t since as Sandy points out, whatever danger of banding might be lurking in the compressed data, the demosaicing step in raw conversion takes care of that. But with the M Monochrom there is no demosaicing step, so applying the same kind of lossy compression wouldn’t be advisable. Consequently, Leica doesn’t even offer this option.

 

But again, this has nothing to do with the kind of banding discussed above.

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Wrong SD card?

 

what cards do you use for your MM? I am getting an M and I have been recommended 35mb/s Panasonic's

 

I was using Hoodman RAW Steele and got banding, Now I use Panasonic Gold 8g and the issue is resolved.

Edited by swamiji
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I think you are misunderstanding what this article is about. ‘Banding’ can mean different things in different contexts. Within the context of this thread, ‘banding’ refers to a certain kind of non-uniformity in the behaviour of sensor pixels: some rows or columns of sensor pixels may appear brighter or darker than their surroundings. Some small deviations (i.e. noise) are inevitable and increasing the signal gain at higher ISO settings amplifies those deviations, so when you select the highest setting and push the shadows to boot, there might be some banding of this kind (although personally I have seen none).

 

What Sandy writes about in his blog post is quite another kind of banding, namely a phenomenon properly called posterisation. When you have gradient from black to white and gradually reduce the number of tonal values, the formerly smooth gradient will eventually dissolve into visually separate bands. Now since the lossy compression scheme of the M8 and M9 reduces the number of tonal values from 14 to 8, one might fear that posterisation/banding could be an issue. But in practice it isn’t since as Sandy points out, whatever danger of banding might be lurking in the compressed data, the demosaicing step in raw conversion takes care of that. But with the M Monochrom there is no demosaicing step, so applying the same kind of lossy compression wouldn’t be advisable. Consequently, Leica doesn’t even offer this option.

 

But again, this has nothing to do with the kind of banding discussed above.

 

Thank you for clarifying.

 

The banding I see in my MM is the one being discussed here. Only in extreme conditions, however.

 

I had the same problem with the D200 back in the days. If I recall it correctly, I had to send the camera back to Nikon to have it fixed. The problem, however, was visible banding without any image manipulation and at ISO as low as 800, if I'm not mistaken.

 

Raf

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