diff --git a/VERSION.txt b/VERSION.txt
index 81f1e50a8b5..4f7907f346d 100644
--- a/VERSION.txt
+++ b/VERSION.txt
@@ -16,6 +16,7 @@ jetty-7.5.0-SNAPSHOT
  + 353563 HttpDestinationQueueTest too slow
  + 353862 Improve performance of QuotedStringTokenizer.quote()
  + 354014 Content-Length is passed to wrapped response in GZipFilter
+ + 354204 Charset encodings property file not used
 
 jetty-7.4.4.v20110707 July 7th 2011
  + 308851 Converted all jetty-client module tests to JUnit 4
diff --git a/jetty-http/src/main/java/org/eclipse/jetty/http/MimeTypes.java b/jetty-http/src/main/java/org/eclipse/jetty/http/MimeTypes.java
index 4916602dc92..5344863c3bd 100644
--- a/jetty-http/src/main/java/org/eclipse/jetty/http/MimeTypes.java
+++ b/jetty-http/src/main/java/org/eclipse/jetty/http/MimeTypes.java
@@ -293,7 +293,6 @@ public class MimeTypes
                 case TEXT_XML_8859_1_ORDINAL:
                     return StringUtil.__ISO_8859_1;
 
-                case TEXT_JSON_ORDINAL:
                 case TEXT_HTML_UTF_8_ORDINAL:
                 case TEXT_PLAIN_UTF_8_ORDINAL:
                 case TEXT_XML_UTF_8_ORDINAL:
@@ -363,6 +362,7 @@ public class MimeTypes
         
         if (state==10)
             return CACHE.lookup(value.peek(start,i-start)).toString();
-        return null;
+        
+        return (String)__encodings.get(value);
     }
 }
diff --git a/jetty-http/src/main/resources/org/eclipse/jetty/http/encoding.properties b/jetty-http/src/main/resources/org/eclipse/jetty/http/encoding.properties
index c3e5b7ecc82..311c802190e 100644
--- a/jetty-http/src/main/resources/org/eclipse/jetty/http/encoding.properties
+++ b/jetty-http/src/main/resources/org/eclipse/jetty/http/encoding.properties
@@ -1,3 +1,4 @@
 text/html	= ISO-8859-1
-text/plain	= US-ASCII
+text/plain	= ISO-8859-1
 text/xml	= UTF-8
+text/json   = UTF-8
diff --git a/jetty-server/src/main/java/org/eclipse/jetty/server/Response.java b/jetty-server/src/main/java/org/eclipse/jetty/server/Response.java
index 88c5bb8f74a..d1efa45da9c 100644
--- a/jetty-server/src/main/java/org/eclipse/jetty/server/Response.java
+++ b/jetty-server/src/main/java/org/eclipse/jetty/server/Response.java
@@ -657,8 +657,8 @@ public class Response implements HttpServletResponse
             if (encoding==null)
             {
                 /* implementation of educated defaults */
-                if(_mimeType!=null)
-                    encoding = null; // TODO getHttpContext().getEncodingByMimeType(_mimeType);
+                if(_cachedMimeType != null)
+                    encoding = MimeTypes.getCharsetFromContentType(_cachedMimeType);
 
                 if (encoding==null)
                     encoding = StringUtil.__ISO_8859_1;
diff --git a/jetty-server/src/test/java/org/eclipse/jetty/server/HttpServerTestBase.java b/jetty-server/src/test/java/org/eclipse/jetty/server/HttpServerTestBase.java
index 3b8dc76f8f1..8b1c982db7f 100644
--- a/jetty-server/src/test/java/org/eclipse/jetty/server/HttpServerTestBase.java
+++ b/jetty-server/src/test/java/org/eclipse/jetty/server/HttpServerTestBase.java
@@ -65,7 +65,7 @@ public abstract class HttpServerTestBase extends HttpServerTestFixture
     private static final String REQUEST2_HEADER=
         "POST / HTTP/1.0\n"+
         "Host: localhost\n"+
-        "Content-Type: text/xml\n"+
+        "Content-Type: text/xml;charset=ISO-8859-1\n"+
         "Content-Length: ";
     private static final String REQUEST2_CONTENT=
         "<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"ISO-8859-1\"?>\n"+
diff --git a/jetty-server/src/test/java/org/eclipse/jetty/server/ResponseTest.java b/jetty-server/src/test/java/org/eclipse/jetty/server/ResponseTest.java
index d9f57f06426..29ab7d91e03 100644
--- a/jetty-server/src/test/java/org/eclipse/jetty/server/ResponseTest.java
+++ b/jetty-server/src/test/java/org/eclipse/jetty/server/ResponseTest.java
@@ -114,11 +114,20 @@ public class ResponseTest
         assertEquals("foo2/bar2;charset=ISO-8859-1",response.getContentType());
 
         response.recycle();
-
         response.setContentType("text/xml;charset=ISO-8859-7");
         response.getWriter();
         response.setContentType("text/html;charset=UTF-8");
         assertEquals("text/html;charset=ISO-8859-7",response.getContentType());
+        
+        response.recycle();
+        response.setContentType("text/html;charset=US-ASCII");
+        response.getWriter();
+        assertEquals("text/html;charset=US-ASCII",response.getContentType());
+        
+        response.recycle();
+        response.setContentType("text/json");
+        response.getWriter();
+        assertEquals("text/json;charset=UTF-8", response.getContentType());
     }
 
     @Test