Bad image quality from HDMI connected PC to Samsung LED LCD

So, we finally upgraded our old CRT TV to a newer, Full HD Samsung LCD TV (ue37c5000). Since we have a media-center PC the first thing I did was of course hook it up and test a few full hd clips to enjoy the new TV. Everything was nice and well until I switched the tv from the VGA cable I had lying around to a HDMI cable I just bought. To my surprise the quality got worse significantly.

I expected good quality over HDMI but in turn it was noticeably bad.

I tried everything that came to mind (minus reading the manual of course 🙂 ): upgrading the video drivers, trying different HDMI ports various settings in the ATI Control Panel. Absolutely nothing helped. I decided to give up for the moment.

Playing around I found than on my TV I can name inputs: for example I have PC (for the VGA and DVI inputs, STB for the scart input and so on). I decided to name the HDMI1 input to PC just to have a proper order and to remember where the pc is connected. Oh joy and happiness the screen blinked and the quality went to normal! This time it was indeed better than over the VGA cable.

It seems that the name setting is there not only for labeling. Probably different profiles are applied to HDMI ports depending on the name associated with them. I don’t know if other TV’s behave the same but my Samsung sure does.