Color Range Test
Check how faithfully your display reproduces color. Full-screen, pixel-accurate test patterns — per-channel gradients, a full-spectrum hue sweep, a grayscale ramp, saturation ramps and solid primary and secondary fields — reveal color banding, color cast and the effective bit depth of your panel. Each gradient is quantized to true 8-bit steps so banding shows honestly, without the browser smoothing it away.
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What to look for
Visible stripes in a gradient instead of a smooth blend. Fewer, softer bands mean higher effective bit depth and better dithering.
A tint across the white, gray and grayscale patterns — often blue, green or pink. Neutral gray should look truly grey, with no color.
8-bit shows 256 levels per channel, 10-bit over a billion colors. Cheaper 6-bit panels use FRC dithering to approximate 8-bit.
- Checking your tone curve? Use the Monitor Gamma Test.
- Looking for stuck or dead pixels? Try the Dead Pixel Test.
Color gamut and bit depth
Two properties decide how well a display shows color. Gamut is the range of colors it can produce — the sRGB space covers most web and everyday content, while wider gamuts such as DCI-P3 and Adobe RGB reach more saturated reds and greens for photo, video and HDR work. Bit depth is how finely the space is divided: 8-bit gives 256 levels per channel (about 16.7 million colors), while 10-bit gives 1,024 levels (over a billion) for smoother gradients. Many affordable panels are natively 6-bit and use Frame Rate Control (FRC) — rapidly alternating between adjacent levels — to simulate 8-bit, which this test can help expose in the darkest gradient steps.
What color banding is
Banding is the visible stepping you see in what should be a smooth gradient — distinct bands of flat color instead of a seamless transition. It appears when there are too few distinct levels to render the gradient, so neighbouring pixels snap to the same value and form a stripe. Common causes are a low panel bit depth (6-bit without good dithering), an aggressive display or GPU gamma curve, heavy compression in the source content, or an ICC profile and OSD settings that stretch the tone curve. The per-channel and grayscale gradients here step through all 256 8-bit levels, so a well-behaved 8-bit or 10-bit panel looks smooth while a weaker one shows clear rings.
Color cast and calibration
A color cast is an unwanted tint across the whole image — often a blue, green or pink bias visible on the white, gray and grayscale patterns. It usually comes from an uncalibrated white point, an unusual color-temperature preset, or a per-channel gain that is off in the monitor menu. The solid white and gray fields make a cast easiest to judge: a neutral panel shows clean, tint-free gray, while a cast pushes it toward a color. The solid primaries and secondaries (red, green, blue, cyan, magenta, yellow) check color purity — each should look clean and fully saturated, without patchiness or a shift toward a neighbouring hue.
Improving your monitor color
- Set a sensible starting point in the OSD: choose the sRGB or a "standard"/"custom" color preset and a color temperature near 6500K (often labelled "Warm" or "Normal") rather than "Cool".
- Apply a good ICC profile. Many monitors ship with a factory profile, and calibrated profiles for common models are widely available; a hardware colorimeter gives the most accurate result.
- Enable 10-bit output where the panel, GPU and cable support it, and turn on any dithering option to reduce banding on 8-bit and 6-bit+FRC panels.
- Give the display 20-30 minutes to warm up before judging color, and evaluate in consistent, moderate ambient light rather than a very bright or very dark room.