Photo update:
And the results are good.
From the words of my friend who was over with me at the time
"Its so true to life it feels like the lasers are hitting my eyes bro" *(More on that phenomenon in part 3)
Here are some side by side comparisons of the factory presets. Camera was locked in manual mode to prevent auto WB correction and adjustments to brightness. Over/Under exposed photos show relative brightness based on base reading from Standard settings. (Vivid was about +1 EV, Calibrated/Dark roughly -1 EV)
Avatar:
Standard (slightly blue, shows edge enhancement halos from Sharpening at +60)
Calibrated (darker image bringing warmer color tone and more accurate flesh tones)
Calibrated Dark (more of the same, with darker back light. Blur reduction appears on as flicker is more pronounced)
Vivid (Very Blue, you can see the over done high-light clipping as well)
Computer: (Reduces sharpness, uses cooler color tones)
Game Mode: (cuts to 1/2 brightness due to back light dimming scheme (3 segment horizontal, causes slight flicker which may be bothersome to people, but can you can grow accustomed to it.
Will do blur-buster test in part 3 to see the benefits to this scheme)
Standard vs Vivid vs Calibrated
These 3 should speak for themselves. Vivid way overblown, where as calibrated's darker picture recovers more details in highlights.
Can a 5 segmented backlight really give amazing blacks? With very dynamic content with mixed brightnesses there simply is no way to dim a corner of a screen perfectly.
As such with content like this, normally a star field would be slightly grea'd out. However using the "Black Detail" settings you can 'cheat' the blacks if you really wanted them. Obviously you clip shadow details in the process but the results were striking as blacks melted into the bezel. Perhaps with a more through calibration setting those pixel level improvements may be achieved w/o compromising overall shadow details.
T2:Skynet Edition
Good to say however in real world practice, you will likely not notice these slightly greyed out areas. Even in high contrast content, blacks are controlled quite well.
The horizontal bar orientation helps with 2.35:1 content, black/bezel border is mostly un-noticed.
With some minor tweaking to contrast and brightness settings, I was able to achieve a picture quality much greater then my previous 2013 32''M Razor ever could. I've noticed much more true to life flesh tones w/o the overly red shifted blacks I became unfortunately used to with my 2013M.
I will continue with more with Part3 where I'll go into how the back light blur reduction works in practice showing the blink scheme w/ video + blur buster examples. Also night time viewing and extreme dark/black testing + 4x3 content as well