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
    2014-03-21T12:20:13+00:00

    It actually worked for me. Here is what I did:

    1. Download the March driver pack
    2. Get my SP2 into airplane mode
    3. Uninstall driver and check the option to remocved saved driver. Reboot.
    4. Repeat step 3 until reverse back to Microsoft Basic Driver.
    5. Install the March driver. Reboot.
    6. Perform the Gamma trick.
    7. Turn off airplane mode.

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  2. Anonymous
    2014-03-21T11:56:13+00:00

    Thanks but unfortunately that doesn't work for me. Neither did the uninstall/reinstall of the drivers as suggested by lordwinkevin.

    This is a significant issue and totally undermines one of the key experiences of the Surface.

    ____

    UPDATE: Actually the above DOES work. When I had tried the gamma change first time, I had an external monitor connected. Just retried it directly on the Surface without an external monitor, and the banding seems to have gone!

    Thanks for finding this simple but effective work around.

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  3. Anonymous
    2014-03-20T07:57:35+00:00

    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.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dFjdsDl6oQ

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  4. Anonymous
    2014-03-20T07:38:43+00:00

    Hello YuQiuUA,

    Sorry to hear you are having issues when playing videos.

    We would like to help, do you have the same problem when playing videos on other applications? 

    Any issues when playing videos on the browser?

    Does this only happen on desktop apps?

    Please let us know.

    Best regards.

    No offense meant... but do you realize that this isn't a problem with playing videos but a

    SYSTEM-WIDE COLOR ISSUE

    I really wonder if Microsoft moderators / staff know how to read posts here, it's really frustrating that in every thread about issues that users have thoroughly diagnosed and investigated all by themselves, the only answer from MS that you get is... useless questions. Not even useless answers. Useless questions.

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