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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?
I did something that fixed it somehow. Here's a workaround guys:
Since you're in the March 2014 update you should now have the Intel control panel thing available to you.
Go into that, go into display, then color.
Move the gamma slider to whatever (like 2.5), click apply, then restore the defaults.
After I did this the color banding was instantly gone (!)
This also persisted after a reboot.
Let me know if that works for you guys.
Thank you so much!
I recently changed back to the Microsoft optimised drivers because I do believe my battery life has been impacted since changing to the official Intel drivers, but didn't realise that Microsoft started bundling the Intel Control Centre with it as well.
I'd never have known that would fix the issue, for me the colours after setting them back to 'default' in the Intel Control Centre are just as they used to be, both before the dreaded December update and also after changing to the generic Intel drivers, banding is gone and nothing looks ridiculously oversaturated (the pink in OneNote appearing as purple has been driving me insane recently).
One thing that is suspect: the "natural" setting in the gamma scale under "advanced" in the display and colour section for the Intel control panel is what makes the display look ridiculously oversaturated and 16bit (with the banding), yet setting it to Vivid (which is what the default moved it to for me) makes the colours look natural again, as they should be appearing as? Is this a bug? I was originally going to be cynical and suggest the oversaturated colour setting in the update was to make the display look better to consumers in the shop (like how AMOLED displays are rarely calibrated properly) but maybe not if Intel's control panel slider is going against what it is saying.
Can anyone with the generic Intel drivers let everyone know what setting their colour profile is set to? Below is what clicking 'default' moved the scale to, which is supposedly 'vivid' but in fact displays the colours as they should be (the natural end of the scale shows me what the colours were like when they were a problem). Thanks!
This problem was reported back in December last year. We are now in late April and there is still no official fix in sight. I stumbled upon this thread yesterday and it seems I'm also affected by this problem (though having all the latest official drivers installed). Softwarewise the SP2 is just awful! I've owned this device for almost half a year now and the most basic things don't work (such as using bluetooth simultaneously to wifi).
Could someone in charge please get in touch with Microsoft making them aware that they should be looking into this?
Hi,
I have been looking all around the internet to find an answer to the same issue as you describe. I have exactely the same problem with video quality on My surface pro 2. The dark colors are not persistent and moving, especially at the edges when playing movies on the web or in xbox 360 video mode. For example the trailer of the Hobbit. I hope Microsoft has a solution soon. I find It hasn't been mentioned in the reviews of the product. Right now i am pretty dissapointed about it...
It actually worked for me. Here is what I did:
- Download the March driver pack
- Get my SP2 into airplane mode
- Uninstall driver and check the option to remocved saved driver. Reboot.
- Repeat step 3 until reverse back to Microsoft Basic Driver.
- Install the March driver. Reboot.
- Perform the Gamma trick.
- Turn off airplane mode.
I had done the remove driver thing a week ago.. except back then Windows Update would only show the February driver. The March update showed yesterday out of the blue and that's when I started messing with the driver options again.
