Frustrated with display settings

Today I got in my new Samsung S27D390H monitor for the sole purpose of running it on my PlayStation 4. The major reason I picked Samsung was for their notoriety of having great white and black balance as well as color accuracy, and the videophile of reviews I found we saying it is as accurate as some of the sub $1000 professional monitors with some tweaking.

I do not know very much about video or what I can do to fix my problem, but I will say I picked this monitor because it is a PLS panel which is suppose to be great. I play a handful of games, Final Fantasy XIV, The Last of Us, Watchdogs and in the future my library will contain anything from JRPG's to gritty shooters.

The issue: Playing Final Fantasy XIV I can have very rich, beautiful colors, lighted areas are still full of color and dark areas are completely visible, Switching to Watchdogs will result in slightly darker blacks that are borderline difficult to see through and shaded areas will lose it's texture fedility, but crystal clear lighted areas, Today I played The Last of Us Remastered and I have to spend 10 minutes making adjustments just to be able to see in a corner, this will make the rest of the game look very washed out just to be able to see in a dark spot that is well lit right behind you, the flashlight proves useless in lighting up the areas and appears as a layer of white color rather than a proper illumination of a spot.

In order to be able to see properly I have to disable the Playstation 4's Full RGB in system settings, change the Gamma setting on the monitor from "3" to "1" and turn HDMI Black Level from "Low" to "Normal", the HDMI black level alone is enough to make it brighten up, at the cost of making absolutely everything else on the system, included the lighted areas in the game, look like a CRT monitor, the colors are no longer rich and deep, the browns on wood turns into more of a popsicle stick compared to an oak look and you begin to lose sight of the small details such as the knots in the wood.

I am a little lost as to what to change exactly, right now I have Brightness 100 | Contrast 75 | Sharpness 60 | RGB are all at 50 | Gamma is Level 3 | Color Temp is Normal | HDMI Black Level is Low (Blacker Blacks/Whiter Whites) | Gamma Mode 3 | PS4 RGB [Full] |

EDIT: I want to note that my TV is a 60" 240hz Toshiba and I do not have these issues at all, every game looks incredible on my TV and I don't have to change anything.

Simply because playstation comes pre-calibrated to run on a tv and a computer comes pre-calibrated to run on a monitor. If you want to run play station on a monitor, you may have to re-engineer the settings on your your monitor menu and even that may not give you the expected results. One more thing is to try running the ps4 at monitor's native resolution which is 1920x1080 and you should get desired gaming experience if you run games at that resolution. Also have you tried both game mode and image size supported mode and off course normal/default mode?

I'm not sure I know the answer, nut can you link some indroamtion on your theory about pre calibrated systems and settings? I'm not sure I understand what you are sayin g as written. I plugged a ps3/4 into a monitor and didn't have to change a thing ...

What I said was that a tv comes with a post-processing capability and applies its own color, contrast, brightness, scaling/resizing etc. to the input signal whereas a monitor is by default displays exactly what has been input into it. Its not necessary if tv is better then monitor or vice-versa in any situation. But in some situations one is better then the other and vice-versa. For the links, just google it "difference between tv and monitor". You wont get all the differences but only some have been disclosed for reasons unknown.

Interesting... assuming that is true, why would different games look different from the same output if that were true? Wouldn't that be in the game and adjusting the gamma?

Because different games contains different scenes which have different values of color, brightness, contrast, gamma etc which is why you may have to change the settings for some games when some areas in them are just too badly rendered.

I believe my TV would be better than this monitor, I would assume, the TV is a 240 hz LED smart TV that even accepts DVI-D, they even proudly advertise 4k "upscaling" support, sort of like "HDMI Ready" in the past where it isn't truely HD/4k but it will still display it.

In terms of the settings and all that, it seems like the HDMI Black level on the monitor acts much like the PS4's Full Color Range, so having both on made everything over saturated and extremely dark, I turned the HDMI Black Level to normal and left the PS4 on Full and put the gamma level on 3 (Rich) and it darkened everything which countered the washed-out look. So now it looks amazing in some cases and in others it's ok, i'm happy with it for now but I think I am going to be hooking the monitor up to my PC to replace the ASUS 24" I have on it and put the PS4 back on the TV.

The downside to this is this monitor only has VGA and HDMI... my GPU only has DVI; So I ordered a DVI-to-HDMI cable but I don't know a lot about this conversion and I am afraid I may lose some image quality or run into some sort of issue, I have never done this type of set up so it should be an interesting learning experience.

Monitors and TV's are drastically different for the color they put off. There are ratings on monitors that can give it a good rating as a TV but don't expect it being the best.

Your more likely to have a better TV as a monitor than the other way around.

Case in point, I've hooked my PC upto multiple type of TV's, from Samsung, LG, Magnovox, Vizio. Out of all of them Samsung looked ok (1-4 year old sets) though the text wasn't crisp, kinda grainy. Visio one I have in my basement which is a 4 year old set 55" model that works pretty dang good. I just hooked it up this evening and I was actually pretty surprised with the colors with decent crispness on text on the desktop.

Mind you I didn't set a single thing except the Scaling, since it always under scales it by 7-8% all the time.