Hello everyone this is my first post as I have just registered as a user on AVS. I have been coming on here for years and never thought to register. I have been an A/V salesman for 3 years and I really love this stuff. My issue here is with the PN50A650 Samsung plasma. I purchased this about a week ago and am none to pleased with a few issues I am having. The picture quality is excellent with most blu ray dvd's and regular cable hd shows. However, with certain sports shows like baseball and football, I am noticing extreme amounts of flickering in the grass, especially when the camera pans and does close-ups of the players. I am also noticing quite a bit of moire' pattern when looking at the surrounding stadium from a distance, and the white lines on the field. This is something that is very irritating to me, because when I am in the store it looks fine.

I have been tweaking the settings for days going with professional calibration settings and still something does not seem right. Even though I have been working in the field for a while I would still consider myself an average viewer when it comes to settings and tweaking them. This tv does offer an array of calibration settings.

I am also having an issue with the tv shutting off on me occasionally which has prompted me to swap it out, but I still don't think that is going to help the jaggies, flickering, and moire' pattern. It has got me thinking about switching to a panasonic th50pz85u since they are both in my price range. So if anyone has any advice or has seen this type of thing I would love to hear from you, Thanks.

May want to address Doug Blackburn directly, or PM him. He has calibrated both displays as well as Tom Huffman, (and likely others...) the 550 to be exact, but they are virtually the same.
May want to read both their reviews...here's Huffman's

http://displaycalibrationonline.com/

and Doug's is in the latest issue of Widescreen Review. Might want to check their recommended settings.
I don't mean cal adjustments per se, but 'modes'..like cell light at 10, movie, warm2, all enhancements off, etc.
Also 'AtomHeart's posts on his calibration and settings.

This will not help with it turning off..maybe a timer is activated or no signal present?

Thanks for the info I am going to contact them. No timer is on or anything like that, it seems to happen when I am changing channels. Also sometimes I get a pop of red, green, and pink snow when changing channels, which is most likely caused from the hdmi.

More than likely they will want to change out a card which will likely solve the problem. I hope it goes quickly and painlessly for you! Let us know what you find out!

I have had mine for a couple of weeks, and have none of the above issues - get some warranty help. You also might try the firmware update, but I don't think it would fix any of those issues. Good luck.

Reminds me of some issues that I had that turned out to be signal related. Interesting enough, for me the signal ending up being too "hot" (the technical term used by the CATV folks).

You say DVD's look OK? Go to Walmart; you can buy a "Best of ..." DVD with football on it for about five dollars. It will only be regular DVD quality, but it could be a good test. Of course, if you can find a BluRay Football game so much the better, but I couldn't find one with a quick search.

Then call your cable/satellite company.

I have looked into the matter and studied various programming. The issue is only on certain channels, and I found that turning the sharpness all the way down helps significantly. Seems to be channel 7 sports, and Nesn thats have the most issues. Thanks everyone

I am also having an issue with the tv shutting off on me occasionally

My new PN50A650 was shutting off occasionally, I think when I was changing channels but I wasn't sure exactly. I loaded the new firmware (which mentions only film mode processing) and the shutoffs stopped, so I'm guessing there were several unlisted fixes in the firmware also (which is probably common). The new firmware is v1004.1, available from the Samsung site. I was very careful to follow directions (so as not to kill the TV) and based on advice on this site, also accessed the service menu and did a factory reset before putting settings back in.