It may well just be me, but what I find valuable about syntax highlighting isn't the colours per se, but the differentiation between different kinds of token in the language (comments, keywords, argsb etc.) Therefore I don't really notice the individual colours, I notice when the colour changes.
This is what I'm talking about. It's that comments are one color, function/method/class/struct definitions are another, keywords are another. And it's the same, no matter what language I'm programming in. Heck, I can open up a language I haven't touched in years (or ever) and just start to get a feel for the structure based on the syntax highlighting alone.