Is it just me or does the 5102 TFT have awful colour banding?

I've recently got an Acer Aspire 5102 to replace my 5 year old laptop which is dying on me. And for £490 it's an amazing buy, the dual core chip is lovely and speedy for coding and I can play the odd game on it.

But the LCD has absolutely awful banding. My 5 year old compaq laptop had an OK screen and my 17inch Hitachi TFT is stunning, but this thing is pretty much the worst I've ever seen in in terms of levels.

Looking at this image http://www.imagesocket.com/view/testcard.pnga07.png I see about 60 distinct grey levels and really obvious banding in the red green and blue, I'm not expecting perfect colour from a cheap laptop but this is dire. If I look at say the front image on http://www.anseladams.com/ the dark black/gray is a massive mix of 2 dark grays in a really blocky pattern. On my old laptop and my desktop it's smooth dark shadows.

http://www.imagesocket.com/view/banding041.JPG (excuse the white balance but the blockyness/banding is easily visable)

I am running in 32 bit mode, changing to 16 bit is actually better as it dithers colours! From what I can see I think the screen is almost 18 bit (64 red/green/blue levels)


edit: Don't get me wrong the screen itself is crystal clear maybe sharper than my dsktop and so nice on the eyes, just it's no good at displaying photos. It's not the ATI card as on my hitachi, colours are smooth

So is this normal for the 5100 series or should I send mine back to Acer?

 

Weirdly after being on for 12 hours the mid grays to white no longer have banding, but the deep grays and blacks do.

 

Yes, I have the same problem. I turned the background image off, so it is not so annoying...