Screen "mottled" in IE

[Leon]

here's an interesting one...new T42 14"...Internet Explorer, the grey colored bars on the top (with Menu Items and Internet Icons, both have a "mottled" and "pixelated" look when looking at them from various angles... do others have this...why?

[Conmee]

I've seen this when 16-bit color is selected in the Display Properties. Change to 32-bit, reboot, and take another look.

Daniel.

[Leon]

even without reboot (I KNEW there was a reason I liked you guys!)

[ian]

That's one of the reasons we keep Conmee...!! Every forum should have one.

[Daniel]

Is there a good technical explanation for why that happens? Just not enough colors for an even, gradient display?

[benz]

You can barely notice it, but the toolbar at the top of IE actually has a gradient of greys (kinda blue in some areas). So I'm assuming that unless the colors are turned all the way up this gradient doesn't display very smooth.

[lilserenity]

In fact in 16bit colour depth (65536 colours if my power of 2s are right!) there is in fact plenty enough colours to do a smooth gradient, trust me on that.

The problem is namely that the gradient scheme used by IE is I think a DirectX shading method (could be wrong) which is, erm, a bit crap in 15/16bit (High Colour) but works fine in 24/32bits. If Microsoft wanted to, they could get that shading just a smooth on 16bit, but I really doubt they care

It does seem to be a wider issue on the whole, and the reason I use my T23 in 32bit colour is because Photoshop does exhibit such artefacts that are not good when editing images as you can get the colour horribly wrong. That said, I believe LCD displays can only show up to 18bit colour depth (256,000 odd colours or so). If it wasn't for my immense interest in image processing, and computer graphic creation, I'd use 16bit happily as its that bit slicker and faster on the SuperSavage/IXC16 in my T23.

Vicky