Xbox 360 washed out VGA fix for 2405fpw.

Joey · *Last edited by Joey; 01-07-2007 at 01:38.*

This should work with a variety of Dell displays if they have roughly the same service menu. Probably Samsung ones as well.

Disclaimer: If you just mess with the service menu willy nilly you could break your screen, that is if you can't remember what the numbers were before you changed them. The changes you do to make this work will mean that a regular PC VGA input will be all wrong. Write down the numbers beforehand.

First.
Get/make a black jpeg and a white jpeg big enough so they fill your xbox's display when you look at them in the picture viewer. You could just pause a video when the screen is black. That will probably do. But I found that flipping back and forward between the white and black was useful.

If you have already put your settings to crazy colour levels to try and improve the washed-outness a bit, it's probably best to put them back to default. Same for the brightness and contrast.

Now you need to get into the service menu. Turn off the monitor and turn it back on whilst holding down the menu and the "+" button. Open the menu and you should see the panel version number at the top.
Now go down to the "factory reset" menu at the bottom. In there is now an extra page at the bottom "factory".
Which looks like this. Sorry about the camera phone.

Don't worry about most of that. Mess with it if you want, I'm not your wife/mother and don't care if you break it.

If you have a WB option on there somewhere, apparently you can fiddle with that and it will auto set your "white balance" you need the black and white pictures to do that. Put up your black xbox screen then press "WB". It should say 1 somewhere. Then press it again while you have a white xbox screen up. And that's a 2 I think. That should be it.

If you don't have "WB" anywhere on the page......
What we need to play with is the "Offset 1" and "Offset 2". I found that bringing down the offset 2 values to zero (from 50 something, I didn't write them down) and putting the offset 1 values up to around 100 works the best.
edit: You might not have to change Offset 1, see how it goes.

The screen colour can jump about from very red to very green and
blue for no reason. Once it did that I just went back a value and moved the other values in the row closer. I really messed it up at one point, luckily I got it back. So take note, these values don't reset when you press reset. The numbers go back but the picture stays the same.

When you like what you have, inky black and a good bright, colourless white. (don't worry about fine tuning the colours too much, do that from the normal colour menu). Make sure when you leave the menu you don't go over the preset colour settings highlighted in the red box. Just go straight up to the exit button. If you move the selection over them they flip the colours to the presets again and it throws off what you have done, leaving you with a bright red picture and things like that.

When done you will have better colours and blacks than the component cable with pin sharp 1080p.

dan428 · 01-06-2007, 02:06 | posts: 1 | User is Offline

Oh damn.. I don't own a Samsung or Dell. This won't work for me..

Thanks for the info though.

The Kyle · 01-06-2007, 19:00 | posts: 4,113 | User is Offline

Damn, Guru3d is gonna get pwned, someone dugg this and it's on the first page...

rewen · 01-06-2007, 23:57 | posts: 1 | User is Offline

Colors seem quite amazing on my Dell W3207C 32" LCD TV, I just turned the brightness down from 50 to about 45. Had to do that for every input tho, even satellite TV was too bright.

However, we also have a Samsung 40" LCD TV (the 3000:1 dynamic contrast one, I guess 4 or so generations old) and the picture is dull/dark via VGA for the Xbox 360 (nice and colorful via component tho). Might try this out on that TV. Thanks.