I work in the TV industry and have access to test equipment. My Panasonic DMR-ES15 has great overall picture quality (even in 4 hr mode) but when I play back the disc on a Waveform Monitor, the Black Level is elevated. The ES15 has a menu selection for "darker" or "lighter" Black setting on both Record and Playback, but even with both set to "darker" the black levels are still close to 20 IRE. The NTSC standard black is 7.5 IRE. Does anybody know if there's a way to get the black down to 'normal' levels? This type of esoteric question would be nearly impossible to get a reply from Panasonic unless I had an actual engineers name and email, even then probably no reply.
(L)SD
Dallas, TX

Is this on a recording, or playing back a DVD? I've noticed that many broadcast TV shows have the wrong black level at the source.

A note of background history, the early Panasonic DVD recorders were noted to record at elevated black levels above 7.5 IRE. Though queried by savvy DVD recorder users in the 2002-2003 time frame, but Panasonic never officially acknowledged the design issue. This was corrected in 2003 (apparently Panny was listening even if they weren't acknowledging the problem) with the introduction of the DMR-E80 recorder and subsequent generations which had the record black level menu setting selection (darker and lighter) (they always had a playback black level setting selection, but obviously this would be useless if the improperly recorded discs were played back on a properly calibrated playback deck). Until now, I have not seen complaints of elevated black levels with Panny recorders since they implemented the "fix" with the record black level menu setting. So, four possibilities exist (in descending order of liklihood): (1) your Panny deck is miscalibrated (on either record, playback, or both black level settings) or malfunctioning (most likely), (2) your waveform monitor is miscalibrated - 20 IRE would be VERY OBVIOUS even without a waveform monitor, but the fact that you are actually using one would indicate that you would likely have checked calibration of your waveform monitor against a known good standard - true?, (3) the source is miscalibrated per amesdp post above, or (4) Panny screwed up the design again and the menu settings are off. Bottom line is that something is amiss because you should not have to be fooling around with the black level menu settings because the default settings should result in proper playback and record black level settings.

Just curious. Does changing the black level changes the result from the Waveform Monitor?

I have an ES20 and an EZ17 and both appear normal using the default black level settings.

I did notice some strange behavior when I was playing around with the EZ17 when I first got it. I was comparing 480i component and 480p component. Sometime the picture looked dark when I toggled back & forth between these two settings, and I never changed the BL settings. And changing the BL did not correct the problem. But turning off the recorder did, but I needed to have the Instant On feature disabled. I tried this several times. After I decided on 480i component for its PQ, I completely turned off the unit, which somehow "reset" the BL to normal.

Is the Panasonic default input setting "darker" 7.5 IRE? When I set my recorder to "lighter", the images were too bright. Also, I couldn't figure out why the output for composite/S Video have "lighter" and "darker" (default) while the composite has the same two options plus a "normal".

Side Note: For those who don't know what IRE is:

From the website:

http://www.dps.com/custserv/dpsfaqlib.nsf/90de91bbfcedda0b8525691c004ef6f3/f75b270cfddfa7d685256936006723e5?OpenDocument&Highlight=0,dpsReality

video levels are measured in units called IRE, which stands for Institute of Radio
Engineers (go figure). Higher IRE numbers mean more brightness. White is defined
as 100 IRE, so you would think that black is defined as 0 IRE. Not quite. Black is 7.5
IRE. 0 IRE is the called the "blanking" level.