Surface Pro 2017 Backlight Bleed

Hideous. Are you returning it?

I've got a fifth one coming in via UPS today.

I will return it and I don't see the reason to try for another one. All three were pretty much identical. I have never in 20 years been so frustrated with a laptop purchase and never seen such dishonest practices. It's obvious that they knew about these issues and are moving defective stock. It would all be ok if there was a physical store here and I could see 2-3 machines in a matter of minutes, walk away and go spend my money elsewhere. But I lost almost a month between replacement requests and paypal ping pong. 

Taking your customers for a ride is completely shameless. Any honest company would try to locate the defective batch and eliminate it from circulation as soon as these problems become evident. Which leads me to believe that there is no "batch". This is the product.

Yep, I'd be willing to bet that every single 2017 Surface Pro in the retail channel right now has this problem. Come on Microsoft!!!

(I know Brain&Force believes the problem is "dark bands", but that's mostly an optical illusion combining the effect of excessive brightness on the edge, and the dimming due to viewing angles.)

I don't think the dark banding is an illusion. If anything, I think backlight bleed is not the real issue here, but the dark band is. My Surface Pro 2017 has less light bleed than my Surface Pro 3. The light bleed on either device does not affect regular usage either - this is with the screen on max brightness and a completely black background, which isn't normal usage.

The problem, at least for me, is certainly the brightness variation of the screen. At normal viewing angles it's very visible, and it's visible on backgrounds which aren't black and at full brightness.

Yes, the dark bands look worse at the edges, but even still, it's something I consider unacceptable. Without the dark band, the screen would look more uniform.

B&F, see here, this is your same photo with only the bright part cut-out.

You don't see any dark band anymore, do you? Not any more than what you have at the top, just rotate the picture around or flip it upside down. Because the "dark band" part of the image is actually the same shade of gray as the part above it. Your eyes tell you it's darker in the original, because there's the bright area just below. You can try the same thing in MS Paint (bless its soul, it lives!). Or go ahead and try in real life to cover the bright area of your screen with a notepad or a book or something (just half an inch or so, only the bright area), and you won't see any dark band. I think the reddit thread is very misguided in this regard.

There are two reasons why people are confused about why the problem mostly appears at mid-brightness:

1. There's almost no light bleed when the screen is black because this Surface seems to have rather smart dynamic LED dimming, where it practically turns off the backlight for dark content. So the issue disappears.
2. When the brightness is turned all the way up, we are in high-exposure mode and the contrast is less perceptible to the human eye. You can emulate this with the camera (at any brightness) by increasing the exposure, and the camera won't "see" / your pictures won't have the non-uniformity. Conversely, even at 100% brightness, if you set your camera at very low exposure, it will see the same non-uniformity that your eye fails to see. It's just how we perceive things in bright contexts versus dark, it's complicated.

Bottom line: There is no dark band. It's non-uniform backlight in the form of excess brightness at the edge, aka bleed.

Whomever reads this: please download and test the following compensation patterns in full screen in Paint and tell us, does it "fix" your non-uniformity? (See my earlier posts for explanations). It's not a cure yet, but may signal a possible cure. Thanks.