Insignia NS-27HTV (360) brightness?

[shaboody]

Just got an Insignia NS-27HTV and I am, in general, very happy with it. However, when using my xbox 360 I find the colours to be overly saturated and the brightness levels in general to be far too low. I've tried the obvious, i.e. turning up the brightness and/or contrast but to no avail. I currently have the brightness set on max (i.e. "100") yet the picture is still far too dark. (I'm using the component cables that came with the 360)

In addition to this, I find that the more you turn up the brightness and contrast, the less sharp the image becomes, almost to the point where it becomes difficult to differentiate between SD and HD images. So at the moment I have a kind of catch-22 situation - either have the picture way too dark but sharp, or the picture considerably less sharp but still far too dark.

Anyone have any ideas and/or advice? I've seen a number of folks on here that use a 360 with this TV so anything you guys could suggest would be appreciated.

[57U]

Please see the HDTV FAQ "What you need to do to your new HDTV". Many newer TVs have automatic contrast, brightness, colour, etc which need to be turned off for the manual controls to actually have much effect.

I have recently set up some TVs for clients where the user colour and/or tint controls have absolutely no effect, or are greyed out on certain input types too.

[shaboody]

thanks for your response. I read the FAQ you directed me to and turned off 'SVM' as advised (any idea what that stands for?) but that only made the picture less sharp and did nothing to the colour (or the colour settings). Any other advice anyone?

[57U]

SVM is an edge enhancement and turning it off usually increases the accuracy of the picture. For example, if you've got some nice skinny writing on the screen and turn on SVM or increase sharpness dramatically you will see "ghosting" or "noise" around the writing. The ghosting may appear to make large objects more sharp, but they are poor for writing or fine detail

The sharpness comment you made is exactly why they add it to TVs, because it makes things appear to be sharper, when in fact they just add noise. You can see this very clearly if you bring up the sharpness test pattern from the Setup DVDs I mentioned in the FAQ.

My clients are always amazed when I bring up that pattern, turn down sharpness, turn off edge enhancement and all the ghosting and noise disappears.

As to the other auto settings, they may or may not be on your TV, some have auto brightness, auto colour, etc, as mentioned in my first post. One needs to turn these off and use a setup DVD (or hire someone) to get the TV looking good.

So far you've only gone about 5% of the way, if that.

[Crazybob]

Shaboody,
SVM stands for Scan Velocity Modulation.
I don't have any problems myself with adjusting the Custom settings of Brightness, Color, Etc.
There is an option in the service menu called Burn In Mode & on my set is set to '0'. I wonder if this controls limiting of the custom controls & yours is set to '1'? Any thoughts 57U?

Bob