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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
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
Locked Question. This question was migrated from the Microsoft Support Community. You can vote on whether it's helpful, but you can't add comments or replies or follow the question.
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?
Hi,
I tried to install the latest Intel drivers but my surface pro 2 declined them as "not being validated for this computer". Any idea what to do next? The banding is really bad when for example streaming video with dark scenes.
BR,
Kari
Hi,
I also had this problem return after the latest updates.
Sigh.
I bought the surface because of the wacom pen and the nice screen.
The wacom software has always been flaky on every pc I have used it on, as well as the surface. And now the surface screen has colour banding.
It makes it hard to recommend this device to people when they ask about it.
Fix from Microsoft please.
Tim
I like that Microsoft removed the control panel to reduce driver bloat, but there were color controls in the Intel Control Panel.
My hunch is that with the previous release, they left the control panel intact and baked in the correct settings to neutralize any stupid "color vividness" settings. Now that the control panel is gone, we're left with the default Intel settings which make the display more pleasing and contrast, but are actually very inaccurate.
I'm tempted to install the latest Intel graphics driver (15.33.22.64.3621) and see if I can tweak the color back to normal...
This is what I did right after the June firmware update.
Guess what? The "color vividness" slider thing is gone. Now it shows "this display doesn't support advanced settings".
However, restarting after having manually installed the latest Intel driver via .zip method ("have disk" etc.) fixed the issue for me once again. No more banding.
It's really hard not to believe that the Surface software engineering team isn't incompetent when there's been dozen of small firmware updates and they still can't get this right. but hey, i guess it's not a windows product if you don't have to do weird fixes yourself
Just done that myself and experienced the same issue (the advanced tab no longer has the slider), but like you it fixed itself anyway back to normal. Still can't believe Microsoft hasn't even attempted to fix this problem since it became an issue via that flawed December firmware update over six months ago...
I can't believe they don't notice this issue! I mean it seems wide spread...and obviously fixable on their end... This is a serious handicap since I do visual work on the Surface...
