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Banding Issues with Artificial LED Lights

Started 3 weeks ago | Discussions thread
Victor Engel Forum Pro • Posts: 20,968
Re: Banding Issues with Artificial LED Lights

Shooters on My Squad wrote:

Since two years I’ve been fighting banding issues on the Canon EOS R5 with artificial LED lights.

The basic theory is easy: Use a shutter speed 1/x for a frequency y of the PWM LEDs where you can divide y / x with no remainder.

Let’s take Philips Hue as an example where the light bulbs operate at 1 kHz. In this case shutter speeds of 50, 100, 125, 200, 250, 500 & 1000 should work without any banding at all. But I still get banding e. g. at 250, which shouldn’t be the case here as 1000 / 250 = 4. The banding gets better at 250, compared to let’s say 400, but it is still visible, usually in burst shots with uniform backgrounds.

It doesn’t matter if I have “Anti-Flicker Shooting” on or off (which accordingly to the manual only works for 100 & 120 Hz, so no wonder), and when I press the Info button when checking for flicker it doesn’t detect any.

The first thing that puzzles me is why the formula doesn’t work for the R5 body.

The second important thing that I want to mention is that I use several bodies from different manufacturers like Fujifilm, Ricoh, Olympus etc. but only the R5 exhibits this behavior.

How do you deal with uncontrollable LEDs on your camera bodies? Do you see any difference between manufacturers, or even different bodies by the same manufacturer?

That formula should work if the camera's idea of frequency exactly matches the LED's idea of frequency. Especially for cheap LEDs, I bet there's a mismatch. And that's probably the main source of your issue. Unfortunately, your camera probably is not very tunable (there are discreet values you can choose from), and the LED lighting probably has only one frequency, which, if you're lucky, is constant. But there's likely to be a mismatch.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdToSNgPnO8

Notice in this video that when the frequencies match (60 Hz) the light gradually changes. That's because they're not both at exactly 60 Hz.

Then there are light sources like with some of the new M1 Macs that vary the frequency of the display to save on battery (maybe it's not the light source but the pixels that vary in frequency). Such is probably not the case for LED lighting, though.

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Victor Engel

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