Your HDMI ports don't support 1680x1050?
Yes, apparently so. I have the Display Discovery setting of the dashboard enabled, and in the list of supported resolutions for HDMI, 1680x1050 is there. 1080p is correctly greyed out, because my TV doesn't support it, and the allowed resolutions based on the information of the EDID thing -whatever that means-, which automatically retrieves your video settings, are the correct ones.
For HDMI the supported output settings according to the X360 dashboard are:
480p, 720p, 1080i, 1024x768, 1280x1024, 1680x1050.
however, I can only select the ones that end with a letter. Either the "i" from interlace or "p" from progressive.
when I select 1680x1050 the TV screen turns blue and a message appears "Mode Not Supported". Letting the console automatically select it using the Optimal Resolution option, produces the same result. Blue screen and mode not supported message.
I am not quite sure, I can't recall exactly but Digital Foundry created a brief article about this.
If an expert or an engineer on the matter doesn't explain to me what to do, step by step, with a trail of stones, so to say, to find a solution I don't know the reason why this happens.
that EDID feature is beyond my understanding.
@cyan thats more of an issue with that display of course image quality is going to suffer if the image is being stretched to 16:10
i have a samsung 1080 hdtv, default 1080p though hdmi is terrible for games, cuts overscan, does alot of image processing which is fine for broadcast but terrible for games, jacked up sharpness and contrast. you have to remember that display defaults are set the way they are because thats how they are going to be demoed in bright electronics stores. and because customers are generally pretty stupid they simply equate brightest = best picture.
edit: i dumb i should read the entire post. samsung sets generally have good scalers.
of course, I can tell you that regardless it is the console or the TV the device upscaling the image, it looks fine to me in both cases. No artifacts or bad quality in any case.
I wonder if, when switching from HDMI to VGA after like 3-4 years I tested both and seeing everything a little smaller because of the black bar at the bottom, I was so surprised that I have lost sight of the point so completely I thought VGA looked a lot better.
now that I am playing games under HDMI again, I love the richness of the colour and it looks amazing too. I think my Sharpness settings were too high before.
Concerning what you mention about Factory settings, I can tell you that the factory settings for Samsung HDTVs is Dynamic. It's very colourful and so on, but it tends to look green, the colours are way off and everything looks excessively bright.
I prefer Movie settings by default, Just Scan enabled, backlight 7, Contrast 80 -Turngrap was right on this, I think, 100 is too high for Contrast-, colour -default or 57-, brightness, between 45-50.
the xbox is probably using the same 400mhz dac that has been in ati cards for years, so really it should look excellent provided its hooked up to a properly calibrated crt.
in terms of iq, that vaselination could otherwise be described as film-like, a quality ascribed to dlp's and to a lesser extent plasma sets. its subjective but many people, myself included would prefer over lcd, which could also be described as being "harsh".
but for a fixed pixel display its pointless to convert it to analog at the source, and then back to digital at the display.
the simple, logical truth to me is that analogue can look as good if not better than digital sometimes, especially VGA. The vaselination effect, or blanket of mist is one of the most notable differences. even so, it was most obvious when I enabled Home Theatre PC on the tv settings.
Component output doesn't look that great though, and in fact I remember that the red using component looked like pink, and was indeed very harsh.
There aren't extreme differences between VGA and HDMI -but a DF article would be a great idea to help people out- but everythings is turning digital, taking into account the changes we are seeing lately.
VGA reminds me of my PC gaming days, time ago, and I loved the picture quality.
The quality of my VGA cabe is okay -it's the original MS VGA cable for the X360-.