When am I going HD? Sorry, not yet interested.
For me, one of the most annoying video artifacts is posterization, where gradual transitions of shades and color are rendered as bands or stripes.
I was hoping that the higher resolution of HD video would solve it, but it seems that HD has not given us much of an improvement.
The posterization in the underwater scenes of Supreman Returns DVD is particularly bad. Did HD video eliminate the posterization?
After a google search for HD reviews, it turns out that the posterization/banding is present even on the HD discs. Home Theater Spot's David Vaughn says:
"I really had high hopes for this one on HD DVD, and for the most part it delivers. Color saturation is outstanding on the VC-1 encoded 1080P transfer, but heavy posterization is evident in a lot of the underwater sequences. In fact, this is the worst posterization that I have seen on HD DVD." Here's an example of HD posterization from avsforum.com (pls. click to enlarge):
Planet Earth, VC-1, HD-DVD/Blu-Ray, provided by avsforum member "House"
This kind of an image cannot possibly encourage me to go HD at this time.