OK still new here with the flatscreen stuff. Everything looks good except dark scenes. Is there anyway to fix?

LCD TVs inherently have low contrast, and cannot produce a true black. All you can do is lower the Brightness setting on your TV. (You may then need to raise the Contrast a bit to compensate for lighter scenes.)

All HDMI cables are the same as long as they're 1.3 or later. Doesn't matter if it's gold-plated or not, $7 or $70, it will work just fine. Since it's a digital video and audio signal, a cable with greater insulation does not translate to better picture quality.

Many Sonys are set to the Vivid viewing mode out of the box. Set it to Standard. Change color temperature to Warm. Probably lower sharpness from 15 to 10. You might look into one of the calibration discs available for cheap or consider having an ISF certified technician calibrate the set.