So throughout this entire generation of playing my Xbox 360, I have used VGA. VGA for me has been excellent. Superb colours, full HD resolution and it was an easy way to hook up my stereo speakers to my console. Recently, I have been experimenting with HDMI, considering both of the new consoles now force HDMI on us.

When I first plugged in HDMI, I was appalled at how shitty the colours were. Dull, muted and gray. Colour is present but it is faded, to say the least. VGA looks so much better than HDMI for me right now, it's unbelievable.

I know all about the HDMI colour space options, all which seem to do jack. I am also using my TV in "PC Mode" for a better picture and no overscan but this seems to be the reason why this colour issue.

If anyone has any suggestions, that would be great. I have Googling this stuff for a while and I have seen that a few folks have the same problem as me but I haven't seen any answers.

Thank you.

Based on experience, there might be a problem with the T.V. Once, I had a T.V. that had great HDMI quality when hooked up to a laptop. Eventually, that T.V. was replaced by a similar model at a lower price point, but it had horrible picture quality compared to the previous one I owned. So, that T.V. had to be returned and now I'm back with the previous model.

@vod_crack: If you have your TV on "PC Mode," that probably means that it's expecting full-range RGB signals. That means you should choose the "expanded" black level option in the 360 display settings menu.

If you've done that, I'm not sure. Maybe the HDMI inputs on your TV aren't working properly?

This more or less. Drop those reference levels down. Also judging by the behaviour your describing I'm to guess that your using a Samsung TV? Samsung are infamous for setting the colour values incredibly muted in PC mode and almost always require some level of saturation judgment after the fact (either though driver level saturation adjustment on a PC or manually changing the values through the service menu). I've had to do this with both of my Samsung panels.

Of course the easier option would simply be to not use PC mode and instead put the output into game mode and disable any signal processing options.

@korwin: I am actually using a LG TV but I have also seen that Samsungs tend to suffer from the same problem. I do have "Expanded" turned on, which does help slightly compared to Standard but it still doesn't look great. My TV doesn't have any Game Mode options. When not used in PC mode, overscan occurs and the image quality is a bit sketchy, particularly with text.

@duder_me: That seems totally possible, there doesn't seem to be many others in this boat.

Looks like I am buggered then. I will either settle with dull colours or slightly degraded picture quality, not sure which. Disappointing though. They just had to take away my precious VGA, didn't they?

Surely the screen has over scan adjustment?

Yeah, when I had my old Vizio LCD, the VGA input looked soooooo much better than the HDMI.

That changed when I upgraded to a better TV.

Yeah I found that older TVs have shit colors no matter what you do. Once I bought a newer TV that was actually decent, they all looked the same on all inputs with the right configuration settings.

@korwin: The only thing I can do to solve overscan is sticking it into PC mode :(

pff just a buy a new TV, obviously