In game mode on my Xbox One X (and now Series X) SDR content has been a nightmare to deal with. For some reason it makes the black levels way too bright, to the point that setting brightness all the way down to -5 barely addresses it. Setting black level to “low” helps, but crushes the blacks. The “large closed eye to the right” in the Xbox dashboard calibration guide is always invisible on this black level setting. And then I still have to set the brightness down to about -3 or -4 to make everything else look right. Setting the Xbox to PC RGB and TV to Normal black level has an identical effect. Movie mode doesn’t have this issue.

On top of this I also have color/tone banding issues in seemingly every mode - HDR/SDR and game/movie. Gradients seem like they have no dithering whatsoever. I’ve tried all the HDMI ports on this TV and it’s all the same issue. Two different Xboxes with different HDMI cables and both have the issue. I haven’t tried any other devices because I don’t have any.

If I do this weird trick where I go into the connection guide > game console > HDMI troubleshooting menu and disconnect/reconnect the HDMI cable so that the TV no longer recognizes it as XBOX and calls it an “unknown” source, then that also lowers the black levels back down to something better (but still not good enough), but then creates even worse banding. I’ve thrown Input Signal Plus into this mix and frankly it’s so complicated that I can’t figure out the pattern that’s going on here. Switching into and out of ISP causes no change until I switch my Xbox to 120hz, upon which it irreversibly sets it back to a much lighter black level until I do the trick again. At least, I think?

For individual games I can just set the in-game brightness down lower, but it doesn’t look right. The mids are too bright when you put the darks to a correct value, so I again have to create black crush to make the rest of the picture look right.

Something makes me think there’s a software bug with the TV. I just don’t know if it’s mine or all of them. It’s almost like both the TV and Xbox are trying to compensate for low black levels of each other and it drives the brightness way up. I have no idea.

(for reference I don’t turn on any of the extra features like contrast enhancer or dynamic black equalizer, etc.)