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
    2015-01-27T12:28:57+00:00

    Has anyone had any update on this. I'm experiencing the issue as well very badly. The posterisation issue is incredibly bad on any dark screen. All colour values below RGB(14,14,14) all display as the same shade of black. From there up to RGB(20,20,20) are all the same shade too.

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  2. Anonymous
    2015-01-20T04:26:56+00:00

    The CPU makes no difference; both the 4200U and 4300U have the same GPU and use the same drivers. You have to install the generic Intel drivers if you want proper color reproduction.

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  3. Anonymous
    2015-01-20T04:25:40+00:00

    Here we go again. I had the latest Intel driver (10.18.14.408) installed and my color reproduction was just fine. Then this January Firmware update installed an older driver and ruined it again. Thanks a lot for listening to your customers, Microsoft!

    How hard is it to hire a QA person to test your freaking driver settings before you ship an update!?

    I should have just bought a MacBook and been done with troubleshooting every little detail. Apple wouldn't let a system out of the factory with obvious banding.

    Using a Surface Pro 2 or 3 as a machine for photo editing, printing, or graphic design is officially a joke.

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  4. Anonymous
    2015-01-19T20:29:52+00:00

    Hello,

    I really cannot believe that Microsoft still hasn't fixed this with the latest firmware update (15-1). I had my Surface pro 2 replaced to see if that would help. I got one back with the newer 4300 chipset but the colorbanding processor is this there! I've tried installing Intel drivers manually but I can't get them to work.

    Hopefully with windows 10 this will be finally solved....

    Gr, Thomas

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