Hmmm - I'm not sure I've seen that before. At least the blacks are black, but that orange looks really off - which could be due to the camera.
Let me get a couple of through-lens pics up to compare. It might help us to choose a standard test scenario so we both have the same location, ship, etc for easier comparison.
https://s12.postimg.org/in3oqyn9p/IMG_0523.jpg
Plugged in normally
https://s11.postimg.org/3wrabp7gj/IMG_0524.jpg
With sync cable disconnected
And yeah - it's really awkward to try and take pics through the lens
Your pics look beautiful and I understand what you are looking for with the sync cable disconnected problem. But this is not it. If I cover/disconnect the camera while using the rift, I see how it changes the image.
OK, when I open the mission panel, you see that black bar with circling loading animation and "Stand By"-text in the center. Black bar has gradients to transparent in both ends. Before, it was smooth gradient, now I can clearly see "steps" and I can count that there are just four or five shades, when there used to bee seamless gradient and it was impossible to tell how many different shades were in that gradient. Space looks the same, pics I have above may be over exposed, but they don't lie about those gradients, it looks bad when that "dust cloud" all around you is using only three or four shades. Space looks like it's from 8-bit game, it really does. Now, after trying almost everything, I'm almost certain they changed something in the 1.8 Oculus update (they actually promised some color corrections for cv1 in 1.8), and those corrections made dk2 image to look like this, while it maybe improved cv1 image quality.
What do you have your gamma set at? I'm guessing it's at 0.
I always played with gamma at 0 on my monitor. On the Rift though, I need to use a few clicks of gamma or it looks like crap. it's brighter with the gamma set higher, but overall it looks a lot better. Btw, the banding I saw when spud was disabled was very obvious. The banding I see now is very subtle, and it makes me wonder if I had it all along and just wasn't paying enough attention. Easy enough to check that I guess.
Gamma is one klick above center, so no where near 0. If I set it to 0, it looks even more bad. By the way, how I enable Spud? It is not very clear to me what that even is... If I understood correctly, it removes red tint in cv1?