
LG C2 42" OLED + Decklink MiniMonitor 4K + Banding
Hi all,
I want to preface that I'm not a professional colorist, but I really don't know where to go for advice / feedback at this point.
I'm using the LG C2 42" OLED connected to my Mac Studio the Blackmagic Decklink MiniMonitor 4K in a Thunderbolt PCIe box. I got this back in 2022 to use as a poor-man's reference monitor.
I calibrated it with Calman Home. Maybe a year or so after I started using it, I realized that the monitor had quite a bit of banding. I first noticed it when grading a shot of a sunset from a wedding. I thought it was my footage at first. I checked it on my MacBook M1 Pro, and LG IPS screen, and no banding was present.
I honestly had to ignore it. I didn't have the time to troubleshoot. Here we are, 4 years later and it's really starting to bother me.
Here are the things I've done that make my believe it's a panel issue and nothing to do with my Resolve / Decklink or HDMI settings.
I created a short video using the grayscale gradient in Resolve. The image just pans left to right. I exported it as an H265 10bit file, and confirmed no banding on the export with my IPS and MacBook Pro (XDR Mini LED). I loaded that onto a USB stick, and put it into the TV. The banding is very apparent on the TV.
I've done all of the normal things: Pixel Cleaning multiple times, sharpness to 0, all processing off, HDMI Deep Color on etc. I even reset the entire TV to make sure my calibration LUT from Calman Home wasn't wonky.
My question is...Has anyone else experience this, and is it just the way it is? Did I get a bad draw in the panel lottery and should I just move on? Is there anything else you can think of that I haven't tried?
Comparison images: https://imgur.com/a/RVwpsM0
Photos obviously make it look worse than it is, but you get the idea.
Thanks!