[ahgee2]

It does not. Could be a known feature by your TV ... "optimizing Contrast" or something. Try xbmc Limited option unset and keep your hdmi on limited (remove the xrandr hack) and compare.

Good point fritsch, as you say it's probably the TV. Mine's a recent Panasonic LCD, what's yours xbmcuser? I'll experiment with xbmc full RGB, X11 limited RGB (though this will presumably mean it's doing the nasty stretch-then-shrink luminance operations), as well as TV settings, and report back if I discover anything that might be of use to anyone else. Though we're really splitting hairs here, basically the image looks lovely and everything is working great since the kernel XHCI bug was patched.