Using pcolormesh with logarithmic color scale and minor ticks enabled results in a cluttered-looking set of minor ticks, apparently because the linear ticks are not removed, just overplotted with the log scale ones.
FWIW, this issue is still present on Matplotlib 2.1 (and master 2.1.0.post357+g075618bb4). (@phobson's workaround is still fine though)
Basically, the issue seems to be that when using a logarithmic-locator like LogLocator or SymmetricalLogLocator, the minor ticks are emulated with non-labelled major ticks, while the minor locator of the colorbar Axes remains AutoMinorLocator but is not visible by default. Except for example when one asked to make every minor tick visible through rcParams tweaking 😈...
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phobson commented on Mar 21, 2017
Thanks for the detailed report. I can reproduce this.
For the time being, here's how you can somewhat work around this:
billtau commented on May 5, 2017
I just upgraded to matplotlib 2.0.1, and I still see the behavior described by PO.
afvincent commented on Oct 23, 2017
FWIW, this issue is still present on Matplotlib 2.1 (and master 2.1.0.post357+g075618bb4). (@phobson's workaround is still fine though)
Basically, the issue seems to be that when using a logarithmic-locator like LogLocator or SymmetricalLogLocator, the minor ticks are emulated with non-labelled major ticks, while the minor locator of the colorbar Axes remains AutoMinorLocator but is not visible by default. Except for example when one asked to make every minor tick visible through rcParams tweaking 😈...
Dih5 commented on Mar 23, 2018
This has been fixed by #9903.

Here is a figure obtained right now using the master branch:
jklymak commented on Mar 23, 2018
Great!