Plasma TV/360/default brightness

[walTer]

Yes, slow on the uptake but I am now the happy owner of a 360. It is hooked up to my 42 inch plasma and looks just fantastic...should have done this years ago.

Anyway, on what seems more games than not, the default brightness settings (generally set in the middle) are extremely dark-so much so that I need to maximize the brightness settings to actually see much of the game.

My question is - is this normal for many 360 games on a plasma to be defaulted so dark? Changing the settings of the brightness and contrast fix the issue- but I have never had to do such big tweaks on my pc games.

The TV is about a year old, and has no brightness issues when watching TV or with say any Wii game--just a majority of the 360 games.

[Reldan]

There is a sort of brightness output setting on the 360 itself which controls the greyscale range used.

Technical detail here:

There are two industry standards for black level, one which ranges from 0-255 in which 0 is absolute black and 255 means as bright as possible. This is what PCs output and what PC monitors expect. The other standard (used for home consumer-use products and most TVs) uses 16-239, where 16 (and everything below 16) all appears the same - absolute black, and 239 (and above) are "as bright as possible."

The 360 has three settings, one which outputs 0-255, one which outputs 8-247, and one which outputs 16-239. It's very important that the output is set to match the input your TV uses, otherwise stuff that your 360 is outputting that's supposed to look dark grey will simply be interpreted by your TV as being black, and in general things will appear way darker than they should. Call this an optical illusion, as technically the bright stuff should appear even brighter than normal if this is set wrong, but most sets aren't calibrated well enough that a person can tell much difference between "maximum brightness" and "near-maximum brightness" while it's blatantly obvious the difference between black and darker greys.

If I had to guess, your 360 may be set up wrong.

Also, the middle setting on the 360 makes no sense whatsoever and should never be used - there is no TV or monitor out there which uses an 8-247 range so it is never the right choice.

[walTer]

I have to say, I don't think I did any setting changes to the Xbox....great info- I will do some tweaking tonite ---thanks