Fascinating.
For as prevalent as it seems like banding is, esp in this transitional period where not everything is yet in HDR, you'd think that would be a more standard feauture.
So debanding is on the A1E?
I believe all of Sony's high-end TVs have had a debanding feature for several years now.
It may be called something like "smooth gradation" or "super bit-mapping" rather than "debanding" though.
The images I posted were run through a video player on PC (MPC-HC) using the "madVR" video renderer which can do debanding processing on your GPU.
But obviously that can't apply to things like streaming services or games which suffer from banding - which is why you would want it built into the display.
I can do interpolation on my CPU with SVP to smooth out video playback on my G-Sync monitor too, but honestly my current Sony TV does a better job of it, and it doesn't use up CPU resources to do it.
As with debanding, having it built into the display means it can apply to streaming video sources, while I have to download YouTube videos if I want that same smoothness on my monitor, and can't use it with services like Netflix.
Now debanding is not necessarily a solution to
all banding problems - for one thing, TVs often have limited control over features like that, but OLED displays in general seem to have difficulty with gradation near black.
They make compression more obvious than other displays near black because they don't seem to have as fine control over the brightness level when it gets that low. That seems to be a problem for most emissive displays.
They've been getting better every year though. If I recall correctly, the older OLEDs were dropping to about 6-bit when you got near black.
OLED does black very well, but has a lot of problems near-black that still need improvement.
While it's not going to compete in terms of absolute black, those 1000-nit 1,000,000:1 contrast IPS displays from Panasonic have the potential to be serious competition for OLED.
Response time will be worse, but they have the potential to be better in many other aspects of image quality.