BUMP, over 150 views and not one answer Hmmm
Probably because SOME of us have already replied in those "other threads" you mentioned and you created a new one instead that some of us didn't know existed (I usually stick to news items unless looking for something or seeing something in the side bar of interest).
Washed out colors still sounds like a calibration problem to me. Almost every computer (Mac or not) I've used looks "washed out" when I first connect it to a new monitor. The display output must be calibrated for that monitor and flatscreens, IMO need it more than older CRTs. Some monitors need more attention than others, though, it seems and I think this (along with precision matching) is why there's an "advanced" calibration available. Personally, I think NVidia's calibration tools for Windows are SO much easier to calibrate quickly and accurately, but it can be done with some squinting and a light headache on the Mac as well.
My Insignia combo HDTV/Monitor looked AWFUL with BOTH my TB/MDP output and my HDMI output until I used ADVANCED calibration (and it took a few tries to get it to match another brand monitor in terms of color exactness and it's still not 100% for blue, but I blame this on the monitor as it's kind of cheap). Regular calibration looked good on my AOC and LG monitors with either output, but they looked BETTER with advanced calibration.
My 2012 Mac Mini had random momentary blackout problems with HDMI (not sure if TB/MDP did as well as I got my adapter in the mail long after I did the firmware update and I haven't seen a blackout happen since the update. Color calibration remained constant throughout and output from both ports are exactly the same as each other on each monitor I tried (three in total). Text is sharp and colors are accurate after calibration and setting fonts to LCD smoothing in the General Preferences. In short, it's rock solid/sharp/accurate on HDMI and TB/DP outputs here and I have two monitors connected at the same time as well.
Connection wise, I've used/tried HDMI to HDMI, HDMI to DVI adapter, TB/MDP to HDMI adapter and TB/MDP to HDMI adapter to the HDMI to DVI adapter (i.e. two adapters combined together to get to DVI from TB/MDP) and all combinations worked fine. I can also confirm that mirroring over WiFi to a generation 2 AppleTV worked perfectly as well.
I'm running 10.8.2 with 8GB of Apple memory with the 2.3GHz Quad Intel i7 Server edition. I haven't had a SINGLE kernel panic/crash yet on this thing. It has been running now 25 days now continuously without a reboot and that last boot was only because I shut it down while away for a week). That's not bad for a brand new computer running a fairly new version of OSX. I did obviously have to reboot for the firmware update as well.
In that regard, so far it's possibly the most stable Mac I've ever owned (although my PowerMac PPC machine was probably just as stable when it had a stable verison of iTunes running; a bad version would cause it to panic almost daily and I so I learned to save/revert when that would happen to a stable version since towards the end they didn't pay a lot of time debugging the PPC builds, although the final version released for it was rock solid. Certainly it ran for months at a time without any reboots under those conditions, but then I regularly run VMWare and other harsh conditions on the new Mac whereas the PPC one mostly just ran a browser, e-mail and the iTunes server for the past few years, being largely out of date for other things. But that was also the most stable version of Leopard we're talking about, not an early version of it like Mountain Lion 10.8.2 is here).
