1.4.2.2 I'm getting color banding in the image

"When I make an image with POV-Ray, it seems to use just a few colors since I get color banding or concentric circles of colors or whatever where it should not. How can I make POV-Ray to use more colors?"

POV-Ray always writes true color images (ie. with 16777216 colors, ie. 256 shades of red, 256 shades of green and 256 shades of blue) (this can be changed when outputting to PNG or to B/W TGA but this is irrelevant when answering to this question).

So POV-Ray is not guilty. It always uses the maximum color resolution available in the target image file format.

This problem usually happens when you are using windows with 16-bit colors (ie. only 65536 colors, the so-called hicolor mode) and open the image created by POV-Ray with a program which does not dither the image. The image is still true color, but the program is unable to show all the colors, but shows only 65536 of them (dithering is a method that "fakes" more colors by mixing pixels of two adjacent colors to simulate the in-between colors).

So the problem is not in POV-Ray, but in your image viewer program. Even if POV-Ray shows a poor image while rendering because you have a resolution with too few colors, the image file created will have full color range.