Has anyone else experienced a "banding" problem with images after they are downloaded to the PC from the CF card? I have been troubleshooting this problem for the past several weeks and can not determine what is causing this problem. I have tried downloading video drivers, O/S drivers for the graphics cards.... tried different CF cards, different CF card readers. ALL of the images have discoloration, banding and loss of data issues! The downloads work just fine on my laptop but on my business PC.... the problems are always intermittent and killing me!!!!!
Is this a feature in Microsoft Vista? as my laptop is running XP and my images are fine.....!
5 computers at home running 2 different variations of Vista and no color issues with either Canon, Nikon, olympus, Minolta both raw and jpg. various image programs that work excellent with it too. i cauldn't go back to xp.
so now that we have eliminated vista as being the real problem there is a fair chance that there might be something loaded in vista that maybe causing it.
when you got your vista based machine did you load the os clean or do you still have most of the shovelware that came with it installed?
now
what camera maker?
raw or jpg or both? you are aware that both nikon and canon have codecs available allowing you to view their raw images natively in vista
what reader are you using?
what program are you using to observe the images that giving you the issue?
The cameras are a Canon 40D and an XTi. the reader is off the cameras directly or via a USB 2.0 generic reader from Circuit City. All of them work great to my laptop and all seem to not work so great to the PC. in any USB port? Some images get banded and other dont.. There is no consistency about it either.
I downloaded the current CODEx for the cameras and the problem still is there.
As far as viewing the images. I use Adobe Bridge, the factory supplied Canon image viewer and windows image viewer. All are the same results on the PC.
What really weird is that it seems to destroy at random, images that were once good on the PC too. not just during the download session!
I basically cant trust ANY of my images on this thing.
the first rule of computing reinstall the basic OS and make sure the crap is removed. the codecs have nothing to do with your situation and neither does vista at this point
how many imaging programs came installed in the computer?
are they still there?
are you using a built in reader or your own USB or FW reader?
to this day i have never lost an image to any OS anomoly.
Have you ruled out a video cable problem? Ideally swap the cable with one you know works.
Did the problem begin after installing new software? (It need not be a image related program to corrupt image display.) If so, it might be cured by restoring Windoze to an earlier restore point saved prior to installing the suspect program. If you can rule out hardware and don't have a safe restore point, sjms' reinstall suggestion might be the next logical step.
I've seen some odd banding issues with Vista as well. Using the built-in viewer, images would have messed up blacks and areas that were shaded are just gone and there's no detail. It seems to go away once I calibrate my monitor, but it freaked me out at first.
Opening the files in Photoshop seemed to get rid of the problem. Thus, I don't preview anything in Explorer. I just use Lightroom and Photoshop for my browsing. I don't use Bridge, so I can't comment on that. I would go check, but like I said, once I calibrated my monitor, all banding issues went away.
Strange, I know! It's one (of the many) reasons I'm transitioning to Macs.
This seems like a problem with your SENSOR rather than with any other ludicrous suggestion such as that Windows Vista is causing banding in your images.
