Reality is: If Digital was around for Charlie Chaplin... what would he have done?
Besides: this topic is about 'banding'... any more insight into this issue...? @Vitaliy_Kiselev ? Do you have any more info? Considering your advanced 'journey to the centre of the Earth' with MJPEG & AVCHD?

I found 35mm a bit frustrating in my younger days, as by the time I got my slides back I couldn't remember what had gone wrong (or right). Later I did some B&W developing and printing, but never anything really satisfying just because of the time it all took.

Where I agree with dkitsov is that limitations can be great. Using Hi8 or SVHS was an education, and I haven't forgotten that certain things can be made to look really good on those formats (for example, subtle reflections on glossy surfaces, and careful use of lighting to control the image) and that's something I've kept with me. I had a colleague who taught video and he got me to just do some simple experiments and then stories. For example, I had to go and shoot "circles" as a subject, and that can create some amazing stuff (I remember a simple landscape which revealed a circle when I moved the camera, as the glass I was shooting through had a circular distortion which was only evident when you moved). Or "making a cup of tea" (the latter I set to music, and put a mirror in the sink so I could get a "kettle's eye view" as the water poured down into it). Playing around with these silly ideas, using what were then quite expensive cameras (but still Hi8) was a real education.

It would have been amazing to have a GH2 all those years ago, but I wonder what I would have missed out on discovering for myself? Or maybe I'd have discovered different things. But a brilliant camera won't make you brilliant any more than a brilliant instrument will make you a virtuoso - in the end, surely it all comes down to having good ideas and working really hard at them.

5DMkII? If only...

No, it actually is not an abstract idea. And yes, it does work in reality. For starters it worked for me. After years of being an early adopter of digital photography I started to notice an increasing prevalence of mylnitsa-style (mylnitsa being a Russian term for a cheap consumer Kodak or alike camera) images I would produce. I guess it came from the fact that the recording media being abundant I did't have to think quite as hard about how and what I am shooting. So I made a decision to go back to the roots, partially to remove myself from the immediacy that digital allows and partially to explore a different temperament of approach to the image creation. And I think it helped.
The other reason that I believe it is still a good advice for the community college students is that shooting with cheap manual 35mm camera is almost the only affordable way to experience a large "sensor" style of images and all the perks that they have for many of the students. That is of course to be discussed - what looks good to whom. I for once enjoy "filmic" images and don't enjoy "video-y" style of images.

That is exactly the point: it happens slower. It does slow one down and prevents one from having a bunch of jerky nervous reactions and instincts. When there are not a thousand buttons to push one has nothing in the way of actually thinking before doing.
With digital they all just put it in a green mode and shoot away without understanding why things happen certain way.
With a zoom lens they just become lazy in the way they frame their shots. When one has nothing but a 50mm lens one has to "zoom" with their feet in a process discovering angles they wouldn't otherwise.
With auto-focus they ignore a creative device of shifting one attention to something subtly, and then again the green mode would put camera into f/11 so everything is sharp. Good for ENG, not so good for film-making and telling stories.
I do love digital it does make things easy and fast, it's just when I watch student film festivals I can tell which ones of them had a traditional b&w or film background and make beautifully looking images with a $300 cam-coder provided by AV desk at college and which ones of them are "Jimmy wants to be a film-maker" (ie. sucks in math and everything else) and produce "local news at five" looking stuff with a $30K RED kit.
There are of course exceptions.

Anytime one of the young kids on any production I am involved with ask me about what can they do to become a better filmmaker I say "Go buy a cheap 35mm camera with a 50mm lens and take an introduction B&W photography at the community college"

@xsa

What do you think about making topic for 4x5 and other medium and large format film cameras?
It is interesting to see real difference and talk about it.

donf,
This situation is not true with film. It is actually the opposite but for completely different reasons. For all intents and purposes, with film it is impossible to change the dynamic range of the emulsion - you have to use a different sensitivity film to do so. (changing the development time of the film (push/pull) doesn't count).
The lower film sensitivity the lower it's dynamic range, the higher the film sensitivity the higher it's dynamic range. Although for certain reasons (ie photographic emulsion non-linear response to light) the effect of ISO on the dynamic range is not very pronounced.

Is that situation true of film as well? As you go higher ISO does the exposure lattitude narrow and noise increases? I guess it doesn't really matter since no one uses film anymore. Just curious. I never played with varying ISO films to understand the tradeoffs.

How are you going to get the kittens to walk in slow motion. :)
don

@Mark_the_Harp

thanks for the test.

Thanks for that link. Really useful. While I've intuitively tried to do this anyway when shooting, the explanation makes huge sense to me. Relating it to audio, it's like recording at a high enough level that you hit max without distorting anything (and you can get away with the odd bit of clipping on transients). So you use all the bits you can. It's probably an exact equivalent.

A big plus is that the GH2 clips in a pretty good way, so there's no excuse not to keep that histogram going all the way up to the right hand side.

Since we can't increase the sample size, the only other way the banding could be improved would be to have more dithering. Basically you need 1 bit's worth of noise prior to being encoded into 8 bits per channel, which then effectively removes the banding but at the expense of image noise. We do the equivalent with digital audio, but in audio we have at least 16 bits to play with so we're not sacrificing significant S/N ratio.

Here's some stuff about video dither: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dither#Digital_photography_and_image_processing

With audio, some cheaper systems don't add dither because the self-noise in the system is enough to act as dither prior to A-D conversion, so if there's a video equivalent, maybe the fact we're noticing banding in these cameras is down to both the low (8-bit) sample sizes and also the low sensor noise / lack of dither. I'm only speculating - audio I know about, but not video! Anyone know?

Exposing to the right is not a euphemism for anything. It is a name of a technique that allows one to employ the maximum dynamic range of a linear sensor. While the technique came from the digital photography world it is especially important for digital SLR video as we have only 256 step of gray to work with as opposed to possible 4096 steps possible with some still cameras.
There is a good write up on the exposing to the right on the luminous landscape. http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/expose-right.shtml

Hey - my 2 cents: when the 5d2 first came out I scoured videos online to see if it was worth buying, and it was then that I first noticed banding in DSLRs as it was obvious in quite a few 5d2 videos I saw. I've seen banding in my GH2 in one shot. So I guess they're similar.

Edit: 2 shots. Both of them were areas of plain, light (not white) wall.