Laptop colors darken when unplugged [not brightness]

[Pining4A]

I've recently picked up a Samsung ATIV Book 9 Plus (first windows 8 experience) and have come across a display issue whenever the laptop gets unplugged, namely that the colors become incredibly dark as it the contrast takes a dive.

Here is a recreation.
http://i.imgur.com/CCIb6pQ.png

Specs from amazon:

• Intel Core i5-4200U Processor
• 4GB (4GB x 1) DDR3 Memory (1600MHz)
• 128 GB Solid-State Drive SATA3
• 13.3" LED QHD+, 3200 x 1800, 16:9, 10 Point Capacitive Touch Screen, Intel HD Graphics 4400
• Windows 8 (64-bit)
  
  Any help in resolving this issue will be greatly appreciated

 

[Ztruker]

You say it's not brightness, but have you tried using the brightness keys to see if it makes any difference?

 

[Pining4A]

It really has nothing to do with brightness at all. I'm used the brightness keys on my keyboard and adjusted them in the power options while the laptop was unplugged to no avail. This really is just the colors on-screen darkening heavily

When I unplug my laptop I can see that the contrast starts gradually increasing until all the colors show up like in the picture. I've heard that this might be something related to power-saving but I haven't found anything of the sort in the Intel Graphics Control Panel

 

[popeye]

So changing settings here has no affect?

 

[Pining4A]

So changing settings here has no affect?

View attachment 28435

Huh, my Intel control panel looks nothing like that. I've scoured through it and couldn't find a tick-box for the display power saving technology.

Mine looks like this:
http://i.imgur.com/Uu0TcGL.png

Or is this a different control panel?

 

[SebasSmits]

Have you tried activating in stead of brightness your LCD background. Most laptops got that with a fn button. My fn combination for LCD background On/Off is fn+f7. f7 shows a small icon with a crossed screen.

 

[Pining4A]

Have you tried activating in stead of brightness your LCD background. Most laptops got that with a fn button. My fn combination for LCD background On/Off is fn+f7. f7 shows a small icon with a crossed screen.

My Laptop does not appear to have the function + F[1-12] for that feature. At this point I have concluded that all I have to do is turn off Intel Display Power Saving Technology but I have no idea how to access this.

 

[caperjack]

So changing settings here has no affect?

View attachment 28435

Huh, my Intel control panel looks nothing like that. I've scoured through it and couldn't find a tick-box for the display power saving technology.

Mine looks like this:
http://i.imgur.com/Uu0TcGL.png

Or is this a different control panel?

they may not look the same but should perform the same , popeye has max performance checked off ,you have balanced checked off ,try checking off max performance ,and make adjustments, just a thought

 

[fafhrd]

Have you tried going to the Control Panel Power Settings and editing the Balanced Power Plan for Battery?

There is a setting to dim the display.

Your machine is factory optimized for long battery life if unplugged, and these are chipset features, controlled thru Windows, reducing consumption through the CPU, rather than just the GPU display features, controlled by the Intel Graphics control. You may also find Advanced Power Options has an option to maximize battery life thru the Graphics system when unplugged, which you can modify. There are features for Dimmed Display Brightness, Display Brightness and Adaptive Brightness as well. At least on my highly unsophisticated HP Compaq Presario, compared to your high-end Samsung ATIV-9 Plus, these features are available.

It is another instance of having multiple ways to control the system features, hidden behind layers of windows and menus that is making Windows so much less intuitive.

 

[Wullail]

Your control panel DOES have 'display power saving technology' , 3rd tick down,...and it's toggled ON.

 

[nuvolari7]

I have the same laptop (Samsung ATIV Book 9 Plus) but I ordered from Amazon UK. I think the darker colour is related to power saving but I can't find where to disable it. It's definitely nothing to do with the screen brightness. Playing with the settings in the Intel HD Graphics Control Panel, Samsung Settings app and the Power Options doesn't make any difference.

A solution I came up with fixes the problem but if you restart or shutdown the problem comes back. I just put the laptop into sleep mode when I'm not using it.

The steps for my solution are outlined below:

Export graphics driver

1. Go to the Start Screen
2. Type SW Update and launch the program
3. Click Save Setup Files on the bottom left
4. Make sure only the Graphics Driver is selected
5. Click Export and choose a location to save the driver

Uninstall the graphics driver

1. Right-click on Computer and select Properties
2. Go to Device Manager
3. Find Display adapter and expand that tree
4. Right-Click on Intel(R) HD Graphics Family and select Uninstall
5. Follow the wizard to uninstall the driver and restart when prompted

Reinstall the graphics driver

1. Go to the location of where the Graphics Driver was exported
2. Launch Setup
3. Uncheck Automatically run WinSat and enable the Windows Aero desktop theme
4. Follow the wizard to install the driver
5. Do not restart when prompted or else the problem will come back

I think after restarting, something is loaded which makes the colours darker in order to save power. Hopefully in a future software update, they will give the user control over this feature.

If you need to restart because of updates or a program installation, it would require the graphics driver to be uninstalled and reinstalled again so it's not really the best solution. I'll keep you updated if I find a better way to fix it.

 

[Pining4A]

they may not look the same but should perform the same , popeye has max performance checked off ,you have balanced checked off ,try checking off max performance ,and make adjustments, just a thought

Your control panel DOES have 'display power saving technology' , 3rd tick down,...and it's toggled ON.

Alight so I set it to Maximum performance and unticked Display Power Saving Technology but the contrast still takes a nosedive everytime unplug my laptop

Have you tried going to the Control Panel Power Settings and editing the Balanced Power Plan for Battery?

There is a setting to dim the display.

Your machine is factory optimized for long battery life if unplugged, and these are chipset features, controlled thru Windows, reducing consumption through the CPU, rather than just the GPU display features, controlled by the Intel Graphics control. You may also find Advanced Power Options has an option to maximize battery life thru the Graphics system when unplugged, which you can modify. There are features for Dimmed Display Brightness, Display Brightness and Adaptive Brightness as well. At least on my highly unsophisticated HP Compaq Presario, compared to your high-end Samsung ATIV-9 Plus, these features are available.
View attachment 28448
It is another instance of having multiple ways to control the system features, hidden behind layers of windows and menus that is making Windows so much less intuitive.

I went into the advanced power options and threw absolutely everything into high-gear, setting everything to max performance on battery, no dimming or adaptive brightness. Nontheless, upon unplugging my laptop I still see the screen slowly losing contrast...

I have the same laptop (Samsung ATIV Book 9 Plus) but I ordered from Amazon UK. I think the darker colour is related to power saving but I can't find where to disable it. It's definitely nothing to do with the screen brightness. Playing with the settings in the Intel HD Graphics Control Panel, Samsung Settings app and the Power Options doesn't make any difference.

A solution I came up with fixes the problem but if you restart or shutdown the problem comes back. I just put the laptop into sleep mode when I'm not using it.

The steps for my solution are outlined below:

Export graphics driver

1. Go to the Start Screen
2. Type SW Update and launch the program
3. Click Save Setup Files on the bottom left
4. Make sure only the Graphics Driver is selected
5. Click Export and choose a location to save the driver

Uninstall the graphics driver

1. Right-click on Computer and select Properties
2. Go to Device Manager
3. Find Display adapter and expand that tree
4. Right-Click on Intel(R) HD Graphics Family and select Uninstall
5. Follow the wizard to uninstall the driver and restart when prompted

Reinstall the graphics driver

1. Go to the location of where the Graphics Driver was exported
2. Launch Setup
3. Uncheck Automatically run WinSat and enable the Windows Aero desktop theme
4. Follow the wizard to install the driver
5. Do not restart when prompted or else the problem will come back

I think after restarting, something is loaded which makes the colours darker in order to save power. Hopefully in a future software update, they will give the user control over this feature.

If you need to restart because of updates or a program installation, it would require the graphics driver to be uninstalled and reinstalled again so it's not really the best solution. I'll keep you updated if I find a better way to fix it.

Thank you for the detailed reply. I have tried uninstalling the graphics driver prior to the creation of this thread and It DID work, the contrast would remain the same whether I unplugged my machine or not but then I couldn't control the brightness of the screen which is a huge inconvenience.

Nonetheless thank you very much, your method does not involve me having to go to the intel site and looking for the driver every time. Maybe I'll just keep on doing your method whenever I need to keep the colors the way they are whenever I travel. It baffles me that this feature cannot be turned off.


Edit: I just had a thought, is it possible to trick my laptop into believing it's plugged in when it's actually running on battery?

 

[nuvolari7]

Laptops require a suitable graphics driver for the brightness controls to work. It would be best to use the driver from Samsung to ensure the best compatibility. I thought I was only one with this problem until I found your post.

 

[Pining4A]

I think that the only way I can run this the way I want it to is to continuously uninstall and reinstall the graphics driver unless there is a way to make the laptop stay "plugged-in" even when it's running on battery

 

[nuvolari7]

I think that the only way I can run this the way I want it to is to continuously uninstall and reinstall the graphics driver unless there is a way to make the laptop stay "plugged-in" even when it's running on battery

I think closing the lid to put it into sleep mode is not what you want to do. It does keep the colour but some battery is used during sleep mode.

Hmm..I doubt it's possible to trick it into thinking it's plugged in. Maybe an external battery pack would work. I haven't tried it before but I think it will need to have decent capacity to power the laptop.

 

[XweAponX]

Do you have your Desktop Theme set for "Auto Colour"? - If you do, the taskbar and explorer windows will change colour depending on which Wallpaper is being shown, if you have rotating Wallpapers. Does it do this at all when unplugged? When a laptop is unplugged, it stops the wallpaper rotation.

 

[XweAponX]

It sounds like you have your Auto-Dim set for 1 minute. The controls for this are in your Power Configuration, you can get into it via Control Panel, Power Options. IN Advanced Power Options you can set the dimming for different time values and brightness values.

For Battery, I set the brightness at 80 percent, dimming at 75 percent- Plugged in, I use 100 percent and 80% dimming. For battery, I would set the Auto Dim to 5 minutes.

 

[nuvolari7]

I've been disabling the graphics driver before shutdown/restart and enabling the graphics driver after I login. This is inconvenient but I found it does make the screen colour ok when running on battery.

The steps below show how to do this

Included are two bat files, each can be run to either disable or enable the graphics driver. Make sure to extract devcon.exe to the same location as the bat files. Also, set the properties of devcon.exe to run as administrator.

1. Uninstall the graphics driver and restart
2. Reinstall the graphics but don't restart
3. Modify the bat files using notepad to set your graphics driver hardware ID (More details below)
4. Now you run disableGraphics.bat before shutdown/restart and enableGraphics.bat after you login.

Setting the hardware ID:

For example, disableGraphics.bat has the line:
devcon disable"PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_0A16&SUBSYS_C0EF144D&REV_09"

The part in quotes is the hardware ID which you may need to change. Do this for both bat files.You can find the ID when you go to the properties of the graphics driver in Device Manager. It will be in the Details tab, the Hardware ID is in the drop-down menu. I chose the most top ID.

I've been trying to use Task Scheduler to get these bat files to run automatically but I haven't got it work reliably. So I've just been manually running the the files when I need to shutdown or restart.

 

[nuvolari7]

Samsung released a download to fix the problem. I've tested it on Windows 8. Hopefully it works for Windows 8.1 as well.
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