Severe banding and dark greys display as black

Anonymous
2013-12-17T00:58:57+00:00

Hi there,

I've had a Surface 2 Pro for a month or so.  Haven't done anything funky with the display that I know of but recently I noticed some really bad things going on in the dark areas of images on the screen.  This is a big deal to me as I use this computer for work in visual effects and photography.

There is severe banding in the dark areas of the image and more worryingly, the display does not seem to be showing any pixels with a brightness darker than 14 out of 255 in the sRGB scale.  It just comes out black on the screen.  That's 5% of the brightness range gone.

The most basic demonstration of this effect is to go to this page:

http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/black.php

For me, all the swatches from 1 to 13, instead of being many shades of grey, are all 100% jet black even with the screen on maximum brightness.

It is certain that the colours are there in the image itself.  This can be demonstrated by plugging the signal from the Surface into a separate Dell monitor via HDMI.  Presto - you can see all the shades of grey again.  But on the screen of the Surface

  • just black.

I've tried fixing the problem by applying different ICC profiles etc.  The sRGB IEC61966-2.1 profile gives the best image, but the best image is horrible as described above.  There is severe banding when displaying this image (http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/gradient.php)

The most interesting fact is this.  My workmate also has a Surface 2 Pro, bought months earlier at a different store.  I asked him to check his display using the same web pages and he sees exactly the same errors as me.  Lots of banding.  All greys darker than 14 are crushed to black.  Is this a systemic problem with the display driver?  A LUT applied by the bios?

Problem might be the same as mentioned here http://www.surfaceforums.net/forum/microsoft-surface-pro-2/7270-recent-update-killed-video-quality.html

I have applied all Microsoft's recommended updates including the most recent one.

Look forward to any tips, hints, fixes, etc.  Cheers,

Stuart

Surface | Surface Pro | Power and battery

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Anonymous
2014-03-19T19:33:12+00:00

Hi again all,

After rebooting my Surface, I noticed that all the banding is gone and my gradients look perfect again.

I believe the problem was that the display driver had crashed and somehow put the display into 16-bit color. Has anyone tried rebooting and checking the gradient again?

http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/gradient.php

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  1. Anonymous
    2016-02-23T20:42:51+00:00

    Are you joking? iPhone 5's and 5s's have worse banding than anything I've seen before.

    We are not joking. The problem was fixed when i manualy updated the graphic drivers like , but when they released a new firm ware update of their drivers, it was all screwed up again.

    I am very dissapointed that this thread is already running from 2013-2016 and people still have this problem.

    Altough i love my surface, watching a video is now very annoying with the wash of black and blue (big pixels) and it is very dissapointing Microsoft is not here for us to help. 

    Best regards, 

    Jan

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  2. Anonymous
    2016-02-03T17:08:03+00:00

    Are you joking? iPhone 5's and 5s's have worse banding than anything I've seen before.

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  3. Anonymous
    2015-06-11T12:51:12+00:00

    I wish I found one to tell you about. Ive tried a few things but nothing seemed to have work. It sucks because I only really bought the surface pro for PhotoShop. Sorry

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  4. Anonymous
    2015-06-11T06:02:59+00:00

    Hi there,

    I am currently experiencing the exact same problem as you and was wondering if you have come across a solution.

    As soon as I update my firmware my colors get washed out. Bothers me so much and I had to delete my games that took me days to download to fix it, only to happen again by updating the firmware. 

    Please help.

    Ken

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