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

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.

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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
    2015-03-05T01:04:26+00:00

    Yes, this did help and thank you for taking the time to respond so quickly, I think this may be a situation where Microsoft would say the root cause is with the hardware driver but, the graphics supplier might not realize the issue even exists. Communication gap most likely exists between Microsoft engineering, Microsoft support, and graphics hardware supplier. Microsoft has hundreds of thousands of support calls a day. Hard to prioritize attention to everyone's liking. Hopefully this will be corrected properly in the future.

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  3. Anonymous
    2015-03-16T15:18:40+00:00

    that's why people chose Apple products. Microsoft is always advertising surface products to be better than certain Apple computers, which is actually mostly true. But they have a horrible customer service.

    if you have a problem with your device, you are on your own.

    For me the solution in the last page worked. However, as you have a SP3, I suggest sending it back to microsoft for warranty service, if you have warranty left.

    If every ppl having the problem, starts sending their device back, they have to listen.

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  4. Anonymous
    2015-03-16T17:01:31+00:00

    Thanks for the tips and the banding issues seem to be resolved after following the instructions on how to manually update the graphics drivers.

    However, according to the device manager the driver version is still stuck to 10.18.14.4080 (01-05-2015). Is that normal?

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