How to see banding

Your friend is weird, that's what I can say. Because there's no "actual" banding in the "banded" image, which looks debanded already. And the "debanded" just looks more dithered. As for the banding example, it clearly has a lot more banding going on, since for all I can see the originally un-debanded version seems to use lots of grayscale gradients. And let's just say that 256 colors stretched over a big area is going to lack colors quite often. :P

Try the following: In a crowded street, point in the air, cry "THERE! THERE!", then walk away.

Perhaps it's your friend who has a physical banding problem with his TFT monitor, requiring more dither/noise to conceal ...

I guess it could be my friend, he seemed to insist that his monitor was pretty good though: "there's 3 monitors i have access to in the house, all use default settings. 1 is a brand new LED, which is god amazing, then 2 other lcds, and for banding testing i just use mine, which has average specs in terms of colors. either way i could probably see it on all of them. it's not terrible banding like the stuff steins;gate has, it's just generic banding that 8bit has, not super powerful or anything." But then he claimed "it may just be eye experience or something? (lol)," so I don't know what to think of that xD. Either way I'm glad that it's not just something I wasn't able to see and it may be a problem on his end. Should I still deband this "debanded banding" then? And/or is there any harm in doing the dither I did? Also, these two examples aren't banded, right? It is an effect they used on purpose? , . Double also: I hate to bother you guys, but I feel that starting a new thread will just be more of a bother, there isn't chroma-shift on the columns , it's just shadowing/lighting, right? If it is chroma-shift then it is the only place where it exists in the video. (And thank you guys for your help so far :D )

Histogram (mode="luma")