Black screen on wake from time-to-time with custom color profiles (fix: disable color table adjustments) #4607
Replies: 12 comments 19 replies
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Hi there, some questions:
The power management assertions are normal, they are there after any display configuration operation for about 10 seconds and should not interfere with display brightness. |
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It doesn't appear to be a brightness issue, because the brightness buttons don't do anything once it goes into this state. The entire display just goes black, as if it was disconnected entirely from the system. Keyboard/mouse presses do nothing, I have to just restart the entire laptop to get it to work. |
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Did you update anything (app or the system) lately? Or this is just coming from nowhere? You can try resetting the app and the system display subsystem. Maybe something just went wrong which happens with a complex system from time-to-time. https://github.com/waydabber/BetterDisplay/wiki/Safe-mode,-app-reset,-app-removal |
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I hadn't updated the app or the system lately, it seems like it just came out of nowhere. After turning off "Enable software-based video adjustments" I haven't seen the issue for the past ~24 hours. It's not ideal, but it does seem like it worked. I'll try doing a hard reset on the app using your script on that link and then reinstall the app. Will let you know if I continue seeing the issue after that. |
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You should also try using the reset the display system settings stuff, maybe that helps as well. |
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Ok, I've done that as well. I'll update if I see any issues again. |
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I have the same issue M1 Air. |
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Following. I experience this exact issue on my Macbook Air M2, all the time. Was having the issue at v1.x; updated to 3.x, persisted, updated to 4.x today, persisted. |
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I am experiencing the same issue: When waking from sleep, the built-in monitor which I use as secondary monitor, wakes perfectly up and functions as a normal secondary monitor would. The issue is only with better display, not with lunar pro or display pilot 2. |
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I'm having the same issue, how can I go about diagnosing this? As far as I can tell I have image adjustments turned off on the virtual display, and I even tried turning the virtual display off last night before i put my displays to sleep (I'm on a Mac Studio) For context, this issue has started recently since setting up a virtual display to share to a second computer. I've been working on a personal fork of Deskreen to stream the virtual desktop. When I wake my displays in the morning, my main display is black and I have to force restart. Sometimes if I wait long enough (a minute plus) the login prompt will eventually show, but when I log back in all my applications relaunch because the system logged me out. To be safe, last night I disabled my virtual screen in BetterDisplay before putting my displays to sleep, and this morning I still got a black screen. It was only 15 seconds this time before seeing the login prompt, but I still was completely logged out and my applications had to relaunch. After digging into the crash logs it appears WindowServer is crashing each time. The main thread hangs and the system eventually kills it. Here's a summary of the information I have currently, this is from the most recent crash with the virtual screen disabled: System Info
Spin dump/Library/Logs/DiagnosticReports/WindowServer_2026-01-07-131118_Mac-Studio.userspace_watchdog_timeout.spin Call stack from the hung WindowServer thread: BetterDisplay's VirtualDisplayListener appears to have been active: I can share the full |
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Hi there, I've been struggling with the black screen 75% issue for the past couple weeks and just discovered that it's this same issue that's causing it. I recently bought a BenQ MA270U monitor specifically designed for Macs with.....you guessed it....custom color profiles. That's actually the main selling point of this monitor is that they created perfect color profiles to mimic every single MBP display, so you choose your MBP in the color profile list and you get amazingly accurate color matching (which I can concur is great) but you also get the black screen on wake issue. Even "reinitialize display" in BD will cause the external display to go black most of the time. Specifically, the backlight of the display stays on but there is no image, as if the brightness were turned down to 0. Display is still recognized by Mac the whole time. Disconnecting the display for at least 10 seconds and reconnecting it usually fixes it. Solution as mentioned above is to either not use the custom color profile or turn off "Enable color table adjustments" in BD. I did the latter and am finally breathing a sign of relief. In case it helps, I also turned off "Enable DCC Control". Hopefully anyone else who searches for BenQ or MA270U will find this post (and the great debugging job you guys did above!). |
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Found this thread after a few days of debugging. I've had a black screen out of sleep consistently since upgrading from MacOS 15.6 to 26.2. The machine is on, it's just as if the internal display is completely off. The keyboard backlight is also off. I have to hard reset and reboot in order to turn it back on. M4 Max. I've confirmed that resetting my display settings and quitting BetterDisplay solves the issue. Fwiw, I didn't have this issue on 15.6. I primarily use BetterDisplay for Flexible Scaling on my internal display, and set a
I've disabled |
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This just started happening yesterday, 8/25/2025, on a 2021 Macbook Pro 16in w/ M1 Max running Sequoia 15.6.1 (24G90) (Latest).
I am experiencing this at least 75% of the time when waking the laptop from sleep. Happens both when waking from sleep caused by lack of use while laptop was open, and when waking from sleep by opening lid when laptop is closed. Happens whether I am plugged into a dock or not, doesn't appear to affect anything. Restart did not help.
It is purely a display issue, if there was audio playing when it went to sleep and I open the laptop back up the audio will start playing again - it's only the display that stays black. The only thing that works is force restarting the entire machine very time this happens.
I am pretty sure BetterDisplay is the culprit after some investigation. Here is an example from the latest system logs:
❯ pmset -g log | grep -Ei "Sleep|Wake" | tail -n 100
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2025-08-26 06:32:24 -0700 Assertions PID 2155(BetterDisplay) Created PreventSystemSleep "Prevent system sleep during an operation" 00:00:00 id:0x0x7000082e7 [System: PrevIdle DeclUser kDisp]
2025-08-26 06:32:24 -0700 Assertions PID 2155(BetterDisplay) ClientDied PreventSystemSleep "Prevent system sleep during an operation" 00:00:00 id:0x0x7000082e7 [System: PrevIdle DeclUser kDisp]
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If I disable BetterDisplay I no longer experience the issue.
Happy to share are anything else that will help with debugging.
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