Unwanted visible effects, created by disturbances in the transmission or the video processing. Examples can be "moving points" or "hanging points" in analog pictures or "pixelation" in digital images.

Unintended and unwanted distortions or other aberrations in reproduced audio or video due to transmission errors or signal processing operations. Artifacts often result from the use of lossy compression algorithms at high compression ratios. Artifacts in video images can manifest as jagged blockings or a tiling effect known as aliasing, banding of colors, white spots, and even dropped frames.

Each technology has advantages over the other, and neither is perfect. LCD and DLP both have the potential to produce undesirable artifacts in the picture. LCD can have vertical banding and DLP can produce rainbow artifacts.