I boot the computer and the color depth is low in the sense that gradients don't look impressive as you can see banding in them. That is they don't appear to be dithered. I know this is a sign of low bit depth. I close the laptop lid and reopen and voila! Now it's normal?
Laptop:
Macbook Pro 2012 (Non retina)
i7 2.9 GHz
8GB 1600 DDR3
Intel 4000 GPU
Best Answer
This seems to happen to me on the identical machine when booting in UEFI mode. A temporary workaround is to replace grub-efi with grub-pc and use refit or refind to boot. Of course, that is subideal, as the boot process takes much longer.
I suspect that this needs to be fixed in the i915 kernel code.