Well, I've read all the posts where people bitch and moan about how Orion makes this Sharp LCD flat screen instead of Sharp making it and what a sell-out that is. And I have to admit to being pretty unhappy with this set myself because I just could NOT get decent images from it with the User Controls because of the factory setup. This is a secondary TV for us and guests to use in our Study. It shows compression artifacts on standard def programming so bad you almost can't watch it (well other people don't seem to mind but all the macroblocking drives me nuts). It does look fairly good on HD programming - except for 1 thing.

The 3 color temp settings are "way too blue" "too blue" and "yellow-green" also known as Cool, Neutral and Warm (HA!). Neutral measured OK at 0% and 10%, but it jumped to 9500-10500 degrees for 20, 30, and 40% then drops slowly back to about 8000 at 100%. The Warm setting tracked 5400 degrees REAL well, almost a straight line. But it makes images putrid looking. Tonight I finally found the trick to getting into the service menu. It was in a message in the AVS Archive, but I never found it in a Google search before. Just in case anybody else has been looking for it:

Hold Volume- on the TV set down while you press and hold "9" on the TV remote. It takes several seconds of this before the service menu appears. To navigate through the 40 or so parameters, you use the up and down selectors above and below the Enter button on the remote and to change the value of the setting, use Volume + & - on the remote. Turn the TV off to save service menu changes --no keys to press, it saves everything you change so WRITE DOWN all the factory settings!!!! Be warned!!!!.

Anyway, I did a gray scale calibration with ColorFacts Pro and a Spyder2 Platinum for the Neutral and Warm color temp settings and HOLY CRAP! Now I have a TV I actually LIKE to watch! What a HUGE improvement. It tracks 6500 degrees so well, you'd swear it was some kind of Pro product. So much for the Oriion-manufacture origin meaning it is a piece of crap. But too bad a TV that sells (usually) for $1300-$800 or so is setup SO WRONG by the factory - to the point that you MUST get into the service menu to do a gray scale adjustment to get what you paid for - a watchable HDTV.

Gains are called Drives in the service menu. Cuts are called Cutoffs (aka Bias). There are Gains and Cuts for each color temp. The color temps are universal... when you calibrate one of them, every input using that color temp will have the same calibration. So best to calibrate all 3 color temps to a different input/source so you can have 3 separate calibrations to use.

When I tried to use Green Gains and Cuts... the green channel did not change at all. Instead, the Red and Blue would go higher or lower together when you adjust Green. Luckily ColorFacts lets you lock any color that behaves that way so all adjustments are forced onto the other 2 colors.

My calibrations are still a work in progress because my calibration of Neutral is bluer/cooler than my calibration of Warm even though I used the same source (DVD player with Datacolor's DVD with grays, primaries, etc.) so the 2 calibrations SHOULD have been the same, though the numbers for each are quite different. It may have something to do with when I locked the green channel (took a few tries to figure out what was happening the first time, second time I locked it right away). At any rate, I'm stoked that this TV now looks so good.

It's a shame owner's need grayscale cal to make a TV like this perform as it should - an ISF cal would cost 1/3 or so what the whole TV sold for. Buying a calibration solution... you could easily spend way more than you spent on the TV. Not good.

Mind posting a step by step to how you adjusted your grayscale (and to what value)? Don't want to screw up my set. ;)

And any color temp. guides you could give would also by helpful.

I've had my set collaborated to the basic menu level with Avia, but your improvements sound a bit better than mine.

Mind posting a step by step to how you adjusted your grayscale (and to what value)? Don't want to screw up my set. ;)

And any color temp. guides you could give would also by helpful.

I've had my set collaborated to the basic menu level with Avia, but your improvements sound a bit better than mine.

Unfortunately, without something at least the level of SpyderTVPro ($1199, discounts available) you won't be able to fix the worst problem. You just can't do it by eye and a setu disc like Avia won't help without having a device to measure the color/color temp for you. There may be ways to add software to the SypderTV package ($229, discounts available) to let you use the Spyder sensor to measure gray scale. The SpderTV software does not include the ability to measure grayscale which is what you really need to solve the worst problem for this display. You may be able to add a shareware software program for about $100 that would let you measure gray scale using the Spyder colorimeter from the SpyderTV package to measure grayscale, but I don't know all the details.

Every set is so different, you can't just use the numbers one person comes up with and expect them to be much of an improvement for your particular display.

When I did the calibration, I turned the backlight down to zero. I adjusted Red & Blue Gains/Drives up and down to get a good 80% white field. Then I adjusted the Red & Blue Cuts (Orion/Sharp calls them Cutoffs in the service menu) to get a good 30% white field. Then you have to check the Gains/Drives again, and if there were any adjustments, you have to check the Cuts/Cutoffs again, and keep going back and forth until you have a good 30% white and a good 80% white. The rest of the gray scale falls into place remarkably well. I started with the Neutral color temp selection before making the service menu changes. So blue gains/drive and blue cuts/cutoff needs to come down a fair bit to start getting closer to d6500.

Before calibratio, Neutral produced very blue images with a very high color temp... mostly 9000 or more and Warm produced very yellow-green images with a color temp below 5400 degrees.

The tricky thing on this set was that when you adjusted the Green Gains and Cuts, the green channel did not move... if you increased Green gain, the measured green response was the same, but the red and blue gains decreased. This will confuse some people not familiar with calibrating video displays.

The calibration improved the image quality so much, I'd almost say it was worth an ISF calibration, especially if you could get it done for less than the average of $300 for a simple calibration. That won't happen unless you happen to have a calibrator who lives next door or something:) unfortunately. I think for a TV like these... something with a very rudimentary service menu, that can be calibrated in 30 minutes or maybe less (after it is warmed up), there ought to be some way to get a calibration that you can live with the cost.

Here are the factory and post cal numbers I got - but be warned, your factory numbers may be different so write everything down. And your starting temp for may be different for Neutral so the adjustments you need could be quite different than mine:

Parameter number is the first thing, then name of parameter, then factory number, then post calibration number:

3 R Drive N 135 137 adjusts amount of red in bright whites (80% white screen)
4 R Cutoff N 128 127 adjusts amount of red in 30% white field but interacts with Drive adjustments a bit
5 G Drive N 128 128
6 G Cutoff N 128 121
7 B Drive N 104 87
8 B Cutoff N 128 118

To make the value of the parameter change, use Volume + or Volume - on the remote control.
The Up and Down selector (arced) keys on the remote above and below the Enter key move through the parameters. You don't have to go forward very far to get to the adjustments you want. The first 2 adjustments have vertical bars to the sides of the adjustment name to allow you to set the horizontal and vertical image position. When you get to the first red adjustment, the vertical bars disappear. When you change the parameters, you just turn the TV off, then on again and it remembers the new settings. Then you can see how close your new settings look. You might want to take blue Drive and Cuttoff down 1 or 2 or 3 more steps if the pic still looks a little too blue to you after trying the numbers I posted.

You can also experiment with adding blue to the "W" Drives and Cutoffs - that will affect the Warm color temp setting to make it less warm.

Too bad you're not in Colorado Springs...:(