Xbox One S picture output

Booga81

Greetings to whom maybe reading this!

I recently purchased a Samsung 55" UE55MU6400 4K tv & have been really happy with it. Great picture, gaming looks fantastic on the Xbox one so I decided to pick up a Xbox One S & this is what's brought me here.

Before I get into it I have looked/searched & I see this is an issue but I want to make sure I'm not missing something e.g. A setting/hardware fault.

So the picture output via the S is dull, washed out & lacking in detail. It really stood out to me playing Mass Effect multiplayer, it just looked so drap & flat. Video play back the same, dull ect. What I've currently tried to correct this.

TV:

Game mode onBacklight-contrast-brightness-sharpness settingsColour tonesEnhanced dynamics (this seems to help)HDMI black levels (this will tie in with a setting on the Xbox)HDMI colour turned on
Basically ran through everything advised online & tweaked myself to at least try something else.


One s:


All option in the tv detail are mark green, 4K, HDR ect so all ok here.Calibration ran & everything fine until the open/closed eye section. Open eye visible but the closed eye I could make out after I stared for a time. Only altering the HDMI black level can I see it, think the setting was changed to low. While the open/closed eyes won't look 100% like the example boxes they're close. I'll run the rest of the calibration issue free. But I when I fire up a game the picture is just bad,eg FIFA which has some decent colours palettes. Kits look washed out, lacking detail (players faces the same) so I end up altering the TV settings to get them looking better....making the calibration section pointless.Turning off game mode for video playback doesn't really help here either, switching from dynamic/movie ect modesI've streamed 4K content on the TVs Netflix app & it looks fantastic, had a tweak of the settings for my personal tastes & loved it. When I jump to the one s Netflix app & steam it again it  just looks dull ect even again altering many picture related settings. Streaming the same content on the original one in hd looks far better in my opinion.I've even gone into the games settings to make sure I'm not missing an "enable HDR" option but on games that play in HDR I'm not seeing one....even so it doesn't tie with the dull video playback.
Am I missing something here? I know the inner workings of the one s is upscaling games so it's not true 4K, I get that. But it doesn't tie into 4K steamed content also looking the same....anyone have something to try before I send the one s back?

Thanks very much

next010

That is weird alright, from your description it sounds like the HDMI black level is being incorrectly set, that is what gives washed out picture in most cases.

Samsung have a completely insane HDMI black level system that doesn't operate under any kind of normal logic were you can manually set it with a clear idea this is the correct setting, many have tried to explain the Samsung system and very few produced a sensible concept of how it works.
But why the auto setting isn't working with the xbox one s is a mystery it should be.

HDMI black levels
16-236 = RGB low aka low range, this is whats used for TV's and game consoles.
0-255 = RGB High, this is whats used by PC's.

However Samsung have Auto/Normal/Low that don't correspond to the above and a separate PC mode on top that can only be activated by changing the input label.

Basic things to try;
* change HDMI cable & try changing input Xbox is plugged into but not every input on Samsung TV's supports game mode so check if you can still enable it.
* make sure firmware on TV is up to date, check Samsungs website for USB download instead of built in checker as sometimes they only push updates a while after they have been released.
* reset Xbox and TV to factory defaults

My suggested TV settings (I have a samsung but not the same model, older 6300)
* Game mode on
* HDMI black level = auto
*Backlight 17, Contrast 100, Brightness 47, Sharpness 0-20, Colour 50 (increase a little if you want things to be more vibrant), Colour Tone Warm 1, all the dynamic contrast/black tone stuff should be left off.

That may or may not work for your TV if your ever in doubt that the HDMI black levels are not displaying correctly hunt down a copy of Marvels Agents of Shield season 4 episode 14 the opening sequence of that episode is an excellent test, if it looks washed out then somethings wrong you can compare it against playback on other devices.

Another option is to use the PC mode, to do that set source input label to PC then in Xbox settings change the display mode to PC monitor, but if you do this you will lose HDR support I would guess.