I seem to be experiencing "black crush" when passing HDMI video through my receiver. This happens with both my SA high def DVR and oppo bdp-83 blu-ray player. My TV is a vizio XVT553 which has excellent shadow detail performance but this is lost when hdmi signals come from the receiver. I have not been able to calibrate this out with the contrast/brightness/backlight settings. To avoid this problem I have been connecting all sources directly to the tv. I would prefer to take advantage of hdmi switching if possible. Has anyone else run into this problem? How did you take care of it? Thank you in advance for any and all help.

I assume all of the individual sources work well when connected directly to the TV? How long is the HDMI run between the receiver and the TV and is it any different when the sources are connected directly. Have you tried another HDMI cable from your receiver? It could be the settings in the receiver causing the issue. Go into its video menu and see what adjustments are available. Hope this helps.

Yes the sources look fine when directly connected. I have swapped and bought new cables. The lengths are between 6 and 8 feet each. I have tried adjusting the receiver video settings to no avail. I even set the receiver to video pass through and nothing eliminated the black crush issue.

Its sounds like some limitation with the receiver. Have you called Marantz.

No I haven't. I suppose that will be my next move.

Interesting. I'm trying to troubleshoot what sounds like a similar issue with my SR5007. Except I thought it was doing the opposite: That the receiver was *lightening* the deep black levels on my Panasonic TC-P65GT50.

All sources (cable box, Blu Ray player and Apple TV) are connected to the SR5007 via HDMI, with a single HDMI running to the TV.

As I switch between sources on the receiver, the picture goes from a deep, inky black that disappears into the TV's bezel to more of a 95% gray color. Shutting down and restarting the system, sometimes more than once, will return it to normal. I've tried every setting I can find on each component that might be automatically adjusting picture quality, video or color formats, etc., but so far I can't narrow it down.

I just got cables so I can run the components to the individual TV inputs instead of switching via the receiver. Hopefully that will give me a better idea whether or not its an issue with the receiver's video switching.

ampeg66,

I wonder if we don't have the same problem. I haven't done any research on it lately so nothing has changed in my situation. A while ago I spoke to marantz tech support and was told to check that the receiver upconversion feature was disabled. Any solution in your case?

I don't know if anyone will ever come back to this old thread but I did solve this issue. Once I turned the OSD overlay feature off on the receiver the video no longer seemed affected by using the HDMI switching.

Thanks for the follow-up, rangler. It's always nice to see what resolves an issue. You never know who it might help out in the future!