HD300 Color/Saturation over Composite Video

[reggie14]

My HD300 was delivered yesterday, which I intend to use to replace my old HD100 which is hooked up to a 19inch SDTV in my bedroom. The main reason I upgraded was to get something that could play back DTS audio tracks.

I hooked it up with composite video since that's all the TV has, and I noticed the colors were completely off. It appeared over-saturated with a definite pink/red tint to everything. After adjusting the saturation and tint settings on the TV it looks OK, but now video from the DVD player looks awful. Now I realize that you generally have to pick one video device to optimize the TV settings to (unless you have a nicer TV that remembers different settings per input), but video output from the HD100 and the DVD were sufficiently close it wasn't a big problem.

Has anyone else noticed this?

Also, this is less of a big deal, but the video doesn't quite look right when there's quick movement on the TV. It almost looks like when I would play back interlaced video on my computer using a decoder that doesn't deinterlace well. I have no idea if that makes any sense, given that the HD300 is outputting an interlaced signal to my TV.

[JetreL]

I've noticed my colors seem darker and a bit more saturated. I was thinking there was an option to adjust the colors in the settings. I'm not home so I can't check. Also you may want to confirm all the plugs are plugged in correctly and firmly. Hope this helps!

[reggie14]

I made sure the breakout connector and the composite connectors were securely plugged in. I would try a different cable, but I think its a proprietary connector (and even if its not, I don't have a cable like that).

I looked through the menus and through the manual and I didn't see anything related to color settings. That doesn't mean they're not in there somewhere, but I didn't seem them. I'll look again tonight.

[GKusnick]

For complicated reasons I won't go into here, I have the composite output of my extender plugged into the input of a PVR500 capture card. When I did this with the HD200, it worked fine. With the HD300, the colors are completely off. My suspicion is that the HD300's output voltage is slightly too high and is overdriving the PVR500's input (although it works fine connected to a regular SDTV). You may be experiencing something similar.

[reggie14]

GKusnick-

It sounds like a similar issue. I tried hooking up the HD300 to the composite input on my Samsung LCD HDTV and the colors looked fine. But as I said, they look awful on my old 19 inch RCA SDTV.

I looked around the menus a bit and I couldn't find anything that would change the color settings on the HD300.

[GKusnick]

I don't think it's a case of the HD300 putting out bad color info, so there really isn't anything to adjust there. It's more a matter of the TV being unable to sync properly with the HD300's signal (due to over/undervoltage, impedance mismatch, or whatever), so the color info gets decoded incorrectly. Or at least that's what it looks like to me. The solution in that case would be some sort of attenuator or impedance-matching transformer to make the signal compatible.

[reggie14]

I just started having a new problem. Now the video displaying on my TV from my HD300 occasionally gets darker (or lighter, sometimes) for a moment, then goes back to normal. It's fairly distracting.