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
    2015-01-20T04:26:56+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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  2. 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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  3. Anonymous
    2015-01-28T13:36:41+00:00

    Well I was able to resolve it by downloading the following driver: https://downloadcenter.intel.com/confirm.aspx?httpDown=http://downloadmirror.intel.com/24596/a08/win64\_153614.zip&Lang=eng&Dwnldid=24596

    Unfortunately you need to download the zip file, extract it, then manually force Windows to install the driver. As soon as that is done the banding issue is resolved. Apparently this same fix several months ago broke Adobe CS applications but they seem to work on my machine at the moment.

    Now let me just finish with WHAT THE HELL! This thread was started in November. Other threads like this date back to July, and the simple fix is to install Intel drivers? Now 3 days ago a firmware update came through windows update which broke wifi at my home.

    Does Microsoft do any QA on their releases at all or respond to customers at all? Having problems like this on a close platform like the Surface which is a flagship product is unacceptable. 

    /Last Microsoft product I'm buying.

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