How to disable adaptive contrast in Windows 10 on your Surface PC

Microsoft’s Surface PCs ship with an adaptive contrast setting that automatically adapts the contrast on the screen to provide the best image depending on the environment.

While adaptive contrast is a useful and desirable feature, it doesn’t do much for you if you desperately need your PC to retain the same level of contrast throughout and would prefer it to not change aspects of the display. Perhaps you’re an artist or someone who’s really picky, we don’t know. Microsoft doesn’t surface a user option to disable adaptive contrast like it does with auto brightness, nightlight, HDR and other Windows display optimisations, but with a few tweaks to the registry, users can disable adaptive contrast and have their PCs just as they want it.

Like with all registry tweaks, only attempt if you are confident, and to revert the change, simply reverse the steps.

Here’s how to disable adaptive contrast on your Windows 10 PC

1. Open the registry editor as an admin for elevated privileges by typing “regedit” into the search bar, right-clicking and selecting run as admin.
2. Copy and paste this into the address bar to navigate to this location: Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Control\Class\{4d36e968-e325-11ce-bfc1-08002be10318}\0001
3. On this page/location, look for “feature test control”, and Right click on it to edit the DWord value.
4. Change the Data from 9240 to 9250, without changing anything else, and save changes.
5. Restart your device to apply the changes.