[CitizenTony]

I got my new MacBook yesterday and have been setting it up. Played around for a while with the standard 1GB of RAM then switched it out for 2GB and it made a huge difference. Well worth it.

Anyway, I think my display is fubar. When displaying whites and other brighter colors, you can see a grainy pattern. Most apparent when I pull down a menu. I think the term is dithering and reminds me of the really old days when you'd look at a picture that had too many colors for your monitor. If I set the background to a solid white, the shadows from the menu bar and windows aren't smooth at all. They band and then just end abruptly.

I'm going to send it back and ask for a replacement, but is this a common thing? Some googling pulls up a bit, but mostly on the matte MacBook Pro model. This really is the worst screen I've ever seen and I'm a bit worried that the replacement will have the same issue. Is Amazon usually pretty nice about these things?

[chucker]

Originally Posted by CitizenTony Anyway, I think my display is fubar. When displaying whites and other brighter colors, you can see a grainy pattern. Most apparent when I pull down a menu. I think the term is dithering and reminds me of the really old days when you'd look at a picture that had too many colors for your monitor. If I set the background to a solid white, the shadows from the menu bar and windows aren't smooth at all. They band and then just end abruptly.

Try it on a store model. I think what you're seeing is just that, dithering. As is quite common for laptops, the MacBook display is likely only 18-bit interpolated to 24-bit.

[Brad]

And for what it's worth, sadly, this is nothing new and someone even took a lawsuit against Apple over it last year.

[Mugge]

From what you guys are saying I suppose this is the case for all MBs and MBPs, but I'm not really seeing anything like that, even though I'm looking really hard at the screen right now.

[PB PM]

I don't notice it all the time on my MBP, but when I watch some videos, or when I used to use bootcamp on it, I noticed it a lot with Windows (when it was set to 32bit colour).

[chucker]

I notice it the most on Vista, because its has a few subtle gradients in ranges my display doesn't represent well.

[julesstoop]

Originally Posted by chucker Try it on a store model. I think what you're seeing is just that, dithering. As is quite common for laptops, the MacBook display is likely only 18-bit interpolated to 24-bit.

As far as I know these screens [the video hardware driving them] use a temporal dithering algorithm. The colors are supposed to switch so fast, that the actual color represented by the pixels stays somewhere in between (to the eye) and is actually pretty close to its 24 bit representation.

[CitizenTony]

I never had the time to go to an Apple store, but I did order a replacement from Amazon. It arrived yesterday and the difference is like day and night. It's still a cheap laptop display, but it's usable.

The old one must have been of a bad batch. It banded so badly that I wouldn't have been able to use it.