My apologies !
I compared blur and gradients results in Inkscape devel and Xara Pro 4.0 and didn't notice any difference in banding. It's there but it's hardly visible as you told it.
However banding is allways very visible in glows around objects while using filters with specular light. A lot of bevel filters and some materials and textures show this banding. But this is annoying only for illustration design while objects sizes in web design don't allow to notice it.
ivan
________________________________ De : Niko Kiirala <niko@...1267...> À : inkscape-devel@lists.sourceforge.net Envoyé le : Samedi, 21 Mars 2009, 19h45mn 24s Objet : [Inkscape-devel] Colour banding in filters? (was: Inkscape 0.47)
Sat, 21 Mar 2009 17:16:09 +0700 "Preben Soeberg" <prsodk@...400...> kirjoitti:
If there is banding visible with blur, moving to higher bitdepth is not going to help (unless there are some quality-loss bugs in blur rendering): even if Inkscape internally used 16-bit colours, they must be converted to 8-bit to be displayed on screen. Some kind of dithering might help, though.
The banding comes mostly from contrast manipulations, and having 16 bit representation of colors would alleviate that.
Yes, that's true. And it's not only blur and contrast manipulation. Most filter combinations would benefit to some extent from using 16-bit colours.
However, as there have been claims that banding can occur even with blur only, I've tried running some tests. And well, I've found nothing. All blurs are as smooth as they can be. Naturally, as we are producing images with 8 bits per channel, the quantization error is inevitable but that's hardly visible at all. (OK, it's inevitable with any bitdepth, but a lot smaller with higher bitdepths)
Could someone provide a small example file (SVG) exhibiting banding with simple blur? Or any pointers whatsoever for finding them.