How to disable adaptive contrast on the Surface Pro and Surface Book

For those who own a Surface Pro (4 or 2022) or Surface Book (1 or 2), you may notice an occasional and subtle flickering of the display, especially at night with a dimmed screen. Some of that may be attributable to "adaptive contrast," which auto-adjusts aspects of the screen based on calorie-free or nighttime scenes.

In this quick guide, nosotros explain the difference between adaptive contrast and adaptive brightness, and more specifically, how to disable it.

What is adaptive contrast?

Adaptive contrast is very different than auto-brightness (or adaptive brightness) found under Settings > System > Display, which ramps upwardly and down the display backlight on ambience lighting conditions.

Adaptive contrast differs because information technology adjusts based on the current prototype on your display rather than the ambience lite in your room. It's like border-lit local dimming of specific zones due to what is on the screen. (This is as well different than High Dynamic Range (HDR), which is much more sophisticated and precise with more color-depth).

The feature is standard on modernistic TVs and high-end gaming monitors, just it can too be a source of frustration for some. The effect is most noticeable at nighttime when you lot tend to take a lower display effulgence considering you're in a dark room.

To simulate the upshot, go into a nighttime room, and open Microsoft Word (or annihilation with a white background) then switch to an app that is all black like Settings (if night mode is enabled). You should see the screen slowly and smoothly dim and shift contrast.

Unfortunately, while yous can easily disable adaptive brightness under Settings > Organization > Display > Change brightness automatically when lighting changes there is no easy way to disable adaptive contrast. While many users conflate the two, disabling machine-brightness won't solve this beliefs if information technology bothers you.

Notation: Some users install Intel's graphics drivers manually to enable the Intel graphics panel settings. While that will give y'all the option to disable adaptive contrast, the associated drivers – which are non approved for Surface – tin can have detrimental effects including BSODs, system crashes, and other instability.

How to disable adaptive contrast using the registry

Since Microsoft does non offer a style to disable adaptive dissimilarity through the Windows 10 Bone, the most direct manner to practice information technology is through the registry.

Warning: Modifying the organization registry can have dire repercussions if not followed precisely, including driver failures, organisation instability, or not beingness able to kick into Windows. Users are always encouraged to run a organisation backup before making any changes to the registry.

Luckily, the registry change to disable adaptive brightness is just ane key with a number change. The trick, even so, is finding it. Here's how:

From the Start screen search for regedit.
Right-click it, and so and click or tap Run as administrator from the app command.
Navigate to

Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\ControlSet001\Command\Grade\{4d36e968-e325-11ce-bfc1-08002be10318}\0001
Scroll down to mid-page, and and then find FeatureTestControl and double-click to edit the DWORD Value.
Alter Value data from 9240 (default) to 9250 (leave in base hexadecimal).
Hit OK to save the changes.
Restart the Surface Pro or Surface Book to enable the change.

This registry change efficiently kills adaptive contrast with, equally far as we know, no negative repercussions. To re-enable the feature, just retrace the above steps and change 9250 back to 9240, save, and restart.

Some users have noted that any time at that place is a significant Windows update this setting is reset to default (9240), so you lot may need to redo this edit once or twice a twelvemonth.