Games are much too dark

Hi, let's try something. Power the console on by pressing the guide button on your contoller, as the console boots up press and hold Y and the right trigger on the controller. This will reset the display settings on your console.

Please try this first and post back here the result, thanks.

I have a feeling it may be a setting on the tv but resetting the console display settings will give us a base to start from.

Thank you kindly.

I pressed Guide and waited for the selection of this controller was ready - then press Y and RT. That worked - it rebooted once more.

I had it on Internediate and RGB before and is now reset to Standard and RGB. So you can see it's slightly less contrast in picture. It looks a little bit sluggish now - not bad but you feel it's not what you want.

My TV is HD Ready and is not full HD, and it has as default selected 1080i. I tried once yesterday running 720p to see if different. But since pixels are really 1366x720 I guess 720p would be natural - less flicker maybe.

Any more suggestions from this position?

Thanks.

Check in the display settings of your console for a setting called display discovery, if this is disabled then enable it, if it's enabled disable it. Reboot the console again and see if things improve any.

Also could you try these settings on the console if the display discovery doesn't help much.

Display HDTV settings 720p

Reference levels try all three options

HDMI color space source

Yes, I have enabled that before and I think it was on by default. It picked 1080i as max resolution which is correct.

I did a test with Alan Wake again - and used that screen and now I could turn down three steps from max to make it look as text says it should.

But the TV-settings are a bit on the bright side now(from experiments yesterday), you can see that some background that should be all black has a slight tint of gray to them and movies from dvd have too much of videonoise and you would really like to turn brighness down a bit.

I page in Xbox to display gray scales and corresponding controls for brightness and contrast would really be great.

I found this post where Zacabeb seems to know a little of this subject as well:

forums.xbox.com/.../171713.aspx

Thanks.

Unfortunately there is no way to alter individual brightness/contrast on the console as you have discovered. It looks like a case of trial and error to get the desired result I'm afraid.

I suppose you tried connecting the console to another HDMI port on your tv just to confirm that the resulting video is the same.

If you could post the model number of your tv here I may be able to find settings that other users of your tv model have had success with regarding the Xbox 360.

Thanks, I ran your other suggestions as well. Intermediate seems better than standard in my case, but should make adjustments to tv again to be fully satisfied if I can. Source setting will run RGB anyway as it's described - but maybe different firmware revisions handle this differently.

Having had the tv for 5 years, having different kind of DVB-T-boxes, for RGB and composite, dvd player with hdmi, dvd recoder with component, Playstation with hdmi and never had to adjust anything - it's kind of strange getting a xbox now 6 years on the market having to do anything, really.

As in the other thread I linked to, there are issues regarding this. Thinking of it I've seen some dumps from games output comparing xbox to PS3 where xbox always have been darker on the same scene. There might be something to this that MS has to look into - xbox is kind of darkish.

My guess is that there are other levels you can enter with some special codes where you can do more. I will contact MS support and see what they say.

Thanks again.

Ok well I hope you get this matter sorted to your satisfaction. Be safe and have a great day.

Thank you.

I continued looking for settings, and looking at dvd-recorder, standard nothing fancy, it has quite a lot of settings if I have to adjust tv-set to xbox.

So a standard dvd recoder has all the settings needed - but xbox not - why is that is my thinking. You have 5 standard settings for different purposes and a complete custom one. Custom makes you set brightness, contrast, gamma and a couple of others.

I guess MS is not so much used to making electronic consumers equipment and go about this in a unnecessary difficult manner.

Anyway trying the other non-rgb stuff seem to behave a little different. So standard definition video setting, and standard reference levels - and I'm pretty close. Alan Wake can now be set 6 notches from max, and black is black, not grayish. White could be a bit whiter but it's pretty good. Coloring a bit strange but ti will do for now.

Thats good news that you're almost there with your settings, to be honest you have more patience than I do. I plug things in and they either work or they don't.

Let's hope you get the quality of display you're looking for in the end.