Light background problem.

I recently bought a Nikon D70. Many pictures that are taken against a

light (white, light blue) background show a band of curves around the

picture center.

I'm uploading a crop from one of these picture. The background is a

white wall.

I don't remember but I might have used the built-in flash for this

picture.

 

http://www.photo.net/photo/2375196

 

(Uploaded picture shows more color distortion than the original one.)

 

I saw that light background looks patchy (specially sky) in many

sample images of Digital SLRs (D70 and Canon EOS 300D).

 

http://img2.dpreview.com/gallery/nikond70_samples/dsc_0110.jpg

 

http://img2.dpreview.com/gallery/canoneos300d_samples/030828-1006-

32.jpg

 

Is this a known issue or am I missing something?

If this is something that comes with digital photography then it's

quite disappointing!<div></div>

While banding is not an unknown artifact to get when shooting in JPEG format, the only artifacts I see here are jpeg compression induced blocking artifacts. This makes me wonder about your monitor and video card. Is your video card sending 24-bit color/32-bit color/True Color to you monitor? If you are using lesser color setting like 16-bit color that can also cause banding. <p>

 

Is your monitor reasonably calibrated? If your answer is no or if you have not calibrated it, then take a look <a href=http://www.normankoren.com/makingfineprints1A.html> here </a> to read up on the basics. Remember that working with images digitally is just as complex as working in a wet chemistry darkroom. <p>

 

hope this helps, <p>

 

Sean

Sounds like a big risetime issue with your monitor.

Must be your monitor. All I see is good continuous tone in the images you linked to.

Thanks everyone! Problem was with my monitor and video card. Video card was set to 16 bit color, now I set it to 32 bit and pictures look fine.