Stretching screen duplicated to Surface Hub 2S

Iron Contributor

We recently installed a 50 Inch Surface Hub 2S.  People are noticing that when they duplicate their HD (1920x1080 resolution) laptop to it, there are large dark bars all around the image and it's not as large as it could be.  I Imagine this is because the native resolution of the Surface hub is a 3:2 aspect ratio 3840x2560.  Is there a way to get the surface hub to stretch the duplicated resolution to 3840x2160 to maximize the picture screen and minimize the black bars?  Thanks.

5 Replies

@Alex Carlock 

 

It has to do with the resolution projected from the source. When projecting, go to Display settings and chose the resolution you want. You can also use Extended mode and it will automatically select the best resolution for the Surface Hub device

 

Thank you,

Cezar

Thanks @Cezar Cretu.  That's what we figured and the workaround we came up with.  Our end users don't like changing the resolution on their systems because it moves everything around, and some of them don't like extending (I wasn't personally available to fully understand why not).  This wasn't an issue with our old surface hub because it's resolution is 1920x1080 which matched more of our systems or was lower than the laptops.  I'm still hoping there's an option burred in the surface somewhere to stretch the input to mostly fill the physical screen.

@Alex Carlock, this is not a workaround but rather a natural limitation. I personally can't see any other solution without cropping the picture. It will select the best fit by the largest margin.

When you duplicate the screen, it will remain at the same ratio. The same goes when you Miracast your phone onto another screen. Since it's duplicate, it will choose the best fit.

You won't be able to perfectly different ratio paper sheets into the same envelope without having to fold one of them. Another example is a 4:4 movie on a wide screen TV.

To fill the entire screen you can either extend it or project to "second screen only" but that might not be the best solution.

 

Best regards,

Cezar

 

@Cezar Cretu, I spoke with our team in the office with the Surface.  They say that it's windowboxing the image (black bars on both the top and sides).  If the surface worked like a Projector, I'd expect it to only have bars at the top and bottom when duplicating a 1920x1080 screen.  Doubling that resolution gets the full 3840 width of the surface, and doubling the height yields 2160 high so we'd get some back bars top and bottom to fill the Surface's 2560 height.  It seems like something is preventing the surface from stretching the image to fill as much of the screen as possible.  I'm still hoping it's an option we just haven't found yet (or maybe a bug with the Surface software that'll be fixed soon).

 

By modifying some options on a 4K (3840x2160) TV, we can duplicate a 1920x1080 screen to it, and have it fill the screen.  It's a little blurry because it's stretching the image, but that's still better than a small image in the middle of the screen with black bars on all 4 sides like the surface is doing.

@Alex Carlock , how are you projecting? Miracast or by cable? If the later, are there any video switches or extenders? If so, can you bypass them and see if there's a difference? I'm asking as some will have their own EDIDs and this can influence the resolution

 

Thank you,

Cezar