Surface Pro 3 Rear Camera Driver is dated 2006

 

I’m one of the people who is unhappy with the ability to use my Surface Pro 3 to take a usable, in focus, photo of a document, due to Microsoft’s decision to change from a great working variable focus camera in prior models to a dumbed down fixed focus camera. There’s a thread on Microsoft Communities about this, http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/surface/forum/surfpro3-surfhardware/surface-pro-3-camera-quality/52a2b69b-aa2e-49bb-8287-55dd37f60c6a with no real answers from official Microsoft support personnel.

I was looking around in device manager today to see what drivers the cameras were using and when they were issue and nearly went into shock. While the front camera has a driver from 2014, the rear camera, on my Surface Pro 3, is reporting a driver from 2006.

2006

Now, it may be that the default driver date for ALL Windows drivers is 2006 (Vista era), but the front camera shows 2014. This is just sloppy. I took alook at the details for this driver and there were two. The ksthunk.sys driver reports a driver from a year ago, 8/22/2013.

thunk

I wish someone from Microsoft would comment on the poor decision to use the fixed focus camera and respond to unhappy customers in the Communities forum.