HDMI output to my TV worse than VGA. Help required.

Hi all,

I seem to have a weird problem. Up until sometime ago I was using VGA to connect my PC to the TV (42LW4500 LG LED TV). Last week I bought a HDMI cable and connected it to my PC using a DVI-To-HDMI converter attached to the Gigabyte 8500 GT Graphics card. This is where it all started. The quality of the VGA connection seems better than the HDMI one. When I play movies over HDMI to the TV is seems as if the picture is over-sharpened/over-enhanced and the colours don’t seem to blend that well (but it might be due to the over-enhancing which makes it seem this way). I also can’t look at the TV for too long as I start to get a headache.

I have tried changing the refresh rate and the resolution but it has not helped. Can anyone please provide some insight into this? It’s driving me insane as I have to swop from VGA to HDMI every time I want to watch a 3D movie.

Thanks in advance for the help.

Two words: PC Mode.

You can check through this thread, although it's for Samsung. http://mybroadband.co.za/vb/showthread.php/346013-Anybody-bought-the-LA32D550

Not sure how it works on LG, but you need to rename the source port to DVI/PC in the Menu, and remove all post processing/overscan. Sharpness should generally be at 0 too, PC Mode normally fixes this in place and removes post-processing. Following these rough steps will give you the same quality as VGA needed for PC use.

I had a huge headache with my nVidia card. Apparently their is a known issue with some TV's. I eventually had to hack the driver and edit the EDID values to manually enter them for my tv and then it all worked fine. Older drivers also worked, you could try a much older driver.

Excellent. Thanks for the info guys. I will try PostmanPot's method first and if that doesn't work I will have to get my hands dirty with the driver.

Thanks for the advice, PP. I had to set the input label for that particular HDMI connection to "PC". It turned off all post-processing and works like a charm now. I owe you one!