At Utah State University, we have placed Surface
Studios in classroom systems over the past few months, currently with around 38
units installed. Faculty response has been positive, with users commenting on
the ease of use and responsiveness of the pen interface.
Another aspect
In my initial evaluation, I mentioned the
challenges encountered with using an external display with the Studio,
considering its unusual 3:2 aspect ratio. The most common display aspect ratio
in our classroom systems, whether projector or flatscreen, is 16x9. Using the
3:2 Surface Studio in the classroom system requires allowing the external
display to pillarbox if the Surface is set to its native 4500 x 3000
resolution, or setting the Surface to a lower resolution with a 16x9 aspect
ratio and allowing the internal display to letterbox.
Choices
The video driver for Studio makes available only
one choice for a resolution using the native 3:2 aspect ratio, 4500 x 3000. Neither
this resolution nor aspect ratio is supported on any standard display. This
means when mirroring the desktop to an external display, you must either
externally scale the image or set the Surface internal display to a lower
resolution setting which doesn't match the native aspect ratio. Most classroom
systems on our campus support a 16x9 aspect ratio at 1920 x 1080, so a double
issue with the surface - we must scale the video so it does not exceed 1920 x
1080 and we must stretch, squeeze, or somehow manipulate the aspect ratio or
live with an image that won't fill the screen. Stretching the image can be
problematic, circles become ovals and the display can look unnatural and
sharpness suffers.
Scaling and manipulating
First adjusting the resolution to a manageable
value, we could use a scaler to reduce the 4500 x 3000 resolution to 1920 x
1080, but we use mostly Crestron devices, which will scale up to 4096 x 2160,
but not quite 4500 x 3000. With no other resolutions available from the Surface
at the 3:2 aspect ratio, it was time to try to create a custom setting. Using a
freeware utility, I created new settings for the Surface and wrote the settings
into the EDID table in the Surface's Windows registry. Now the Surface has an
additional setting available: 1800 x 1200.
Minimal distortion
Our Crestron devices can scale 1800 x 1200 to
either our standard 1920 x 1080 - 16:9 setting, or 1920 x 1200 - 16:10, which
is less common for us but is actually the native resolution of our standard projectors.
Our best solution would be an external display with a 5k resolution and a 3:2
aspect ratio, but short of building a custom LED wall that just isn't
available. The custom LED display is a bit pricey for a classroom.
Scaling to 1920 x 1080 works but will slightly
pillarbox on our Sony projectors. Setting the Surface Studio to 1800 x 1200 and
the scaler to 1920 x 1200 to match the projector’s native resolution produced the
best results in our testing. The surface display is fullscreen, and the
external display matches with minimal distortion since the image is only stretched
120 pixels side to side.
