Panasonic PX80 Owners Thread - Page 48

I have my ps3 upconvert to 1080p and feed the TV. The results are very good. If you read back there has been discussion on this.

fwiw, I'm not noticing anything. blur is tough to discuss on a message board because everyone sees things differently. I don't notice anything excessive and it's nothing like LCD blur. Some blur is inherent to the source, and no display will hold full resolution during fast motion. I watched a bit of Bourne Ultimatum on hd-dvd the other night, a movie that has lots of fast cuts and hand held camerawork and didn't have any issues with it. you're on the right track, give the set a look yourself and decide. if you go at a down time they may let you throw in a dvd that can put it to the test.

I found that sometimes my DVD's looked better letting my TV upscale them from 480p instead of my ps3 upscaling them to 720 or 1080p... not sure why. I think it speaks alot about the quality of the TV's scaling though. 480 content can look fantastic.

With panning, i don't notice any jitters. With certain movement, it's only in rare occasions where i notice any slight blurriness on fast moving subjects, and i mean it's minor. I think it's normal. There is no ghosting. I sure notice a difference on UltraHD. When the models walked down the runway on my lcd you could definitely see ghosting and now it is completely nonexistent, and it looks awesome.

I don't get it. Why are hd discs so inconsistent. I watched the transformers on hddvd and stargate on bluray. I know they might not be the top choices for no noise, but from highdefdigest.com, stargate is rated pretty well with low noise. Half the movie the picture looks amazing and then other parts are so noisy it's ridiculous. It was the same with the transformers. It must be the disc. It just doesn't make sense why the whole film shouldn't be completely noise free. I'm not sure if i notice it more with the 50" compared to the 42" or not at 9' away. I'll have to play spiderman 3 soon.

was it noise, or film grain?

I've got one of these, and it worked great:
http://www.monoprice.com/products/pr...seq=1&format=2

hmm, possibly film grain now that you mention. How do you tell between the two? I never heard it put that way before.

I do understand what noise is being involved with digital photography. I'm assuming grain is a lot more noticeable. I would say in stargate it looked like film grain. The bad parts really looked grainy. I'm thinking some noise was there too. I would say it was noise in the transformers. It just wasn't crystal clear through the whole transfer which i felt was odd. I am not sure what would cause this.

chad473,
my settings are:
Mode: Cinema
Picture: 70
Brightness: 60
Color: 46
Tint: 0
Sharpness: 50
Color Management: off
Black Level: light
and yes, I see a push in the orange colors but seem thats its "normal"

LarryInRI,

Even reducing color to 20 problem remains. Called Panasonic's customer support and Techinician will be here on saturday; will post results after that.

Other issue is that Im trying to connect my computer thru HDMI and can't get an watchable image: have lots of lines , impossible to read and all color mixed up. If I do the same using my projector everthing looks fine. I've tried all resolutions and nothing. Maybe you or someone else could have any ideas, I really apreciate them.
Thanks

No, just my eyes. Before this I had similar settings to most everyone else (Cinema, Warm, Picture: 86, Brightness:48, Color: 37, Tint: -2, Sharpness: 30). However, the settings I settled on work best for me at all times of day. There is no technology to support my settings

Go here to find info about which blu-ray movies look good, and which do not. Stargate is rated pretty low in the scheme of things. Get a good movie to watch, and then judge!

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=858316

Anybody have a definite answer on the best 50px80U picture settings for the break in process? I called Panisonic and all they said was "Standard"(50's across the board) or "Cinema" (PQ is at 100!). Ive also read that its best to just turn everything down to exactly 0? Can anybody post the settings they used for break in? Im comfortable with "standard" but have lowered picture and briteness to mid 30's and sharpness to 25. Im breaking in with discovery HD on zoom, not static images, no logos, just trying to do it the best way possible with the best settings. I know on the Panisonic web site it says "turn down picture to 0", but on the phone they said leave it at "standard" (50...or I guess it could be 0 because they're scale is different, however there is a "0" value far left of 50) Just confused, their website says one thing, and the lady I talked to on the phone says another...
Thanx-
Bob-

In response to someone who had problems with using the galleryplayer function earlier in this thread: You do not have to strictly use galleryplayer's own software and hardware (requiring CPRM capable devices). There's also a thread elsewhere on this forum which details this. You can just as easily use any standard jpeg image and copy it to your SD card or even just view images straight from a digital camera storing on an SD card. The tv will have no problem reading it. I have done this myself in the past two weeks of owning this tv and have even viewed odd aspect or odd resolution files. None of this requires CPRM capable hardware, just anything capable of reading and writing to SD cards.

Getting back on track, I just got this tv a couple weeks ago (the 42" px80) and as my first ever HD set (last tv was a 32" SD CRT of a couple years old) and I am highly pleased with it. I have even noticed that in comparison to a 50" Hitachi plasma that my cousin owns, it seems to win out in raw PQ.

In addition, I am very surprised by the internal scaler. Between of my 480i dvd player and my HD set top feeding the tv the channel resolutions directly (ie: 480i from SD channels), it still looks great. Not HD by any means, but it certainly doesn't look like crap. If I wasn't already in the market for a new dvd player, I would easily stick with the one I have now till blueray players came down in price.

Lastly, I'm curious for those who have hooked this set up to their computers and what my options are here. I have a couple of machines in the house. All have standard VGA out, two have DVI. One of those DVI machines has a radeon 9200 and the other has a geforce 6200. The latter has referenced to HDTV support in the control panel, but I haven't determined which output. Is this tv capable of taking RGB in via component converted from VGA? Or would I be stuck doing DVI>HDMI? I would prefer to use the geforce 6200 machine if at all possible. I'm just not sure what my options are at this point.

EDIT: Also as a general reference that I found out: Anyone who reads this that has a PC hooked up via S-Video or Composite, I recommend turning down the chroma and luma flicker reduction completely if available in your video card config (this case was an older ATI Rage Mobility card with the older control panel configuration). It increases readability tenfold. I'm able to easily read standard font size text at 1024x768 so far on this set. I haven't really noticed any major degradation in quality from this so far just in standard desktop situations.

I set my break in settings to 20 on brightness and picture, 0 on sharpness. Then I read on the forum that setting it too low defeats break in period and extends it, so raised the levels a bit. All worked out, great picture
Adam

Yes, if you have your settings too low, it won't break-in. Scale now goes from 0-100 (not -30 to +30), so "50" is the new "0." Everything at 50 should be safe.

50 is the new 0 for the 2008 Panasonics. The old mid-point was 0 and the numbers went negative. 50 or below is what you want on the PX80U's

As an aside I put in a couple of hours of XBOX 360 playing Rainbow 6 Vegas 2 last night and I tried the "gaming" mode.

I didn't see any IR after the gaming session on a blank input black screen from 4' away in almost complete darkness... I'm sure closer inspection would have revealed some IR, but I'm trying to be less of a "worry wart" and just enjoy the TV. The IR would have been gone after a movie anyway.

My girlfriend and I watched a movie later with ALL the lights on (2 ceiling lights and track lighting) which is the brightest environment I've watched the TV in since I purchased it, even brighter than CC's showroom floor, and it looked very good... not as good as my normal "very dark" environment, but very good.

So right now I'm using Larry's settings for movies and the default gaming mode for gaming, and I'm VERY happy with this TV. I'll be purchasing the 50" for the living room soon.

I am glad your replacement set is working out for you. I will also pick up a 50 inch and move my 42 into my bedroom. Love this set...

I found cinema a little bit to dark for my eyes. Anyone have a good custom setting for standard?

"Larry's settings" are very good to my eyes. If you look through the thread somebody may have posted settings using the standard settings.
You can also get brave and play with standard and find settings you like

Loving mine more every day... we have similar eyes apparently.

Are you close to Larry's settings as well?

I kind of noticed that too, but sometimes standard is too hard on my eyes. The highlights in it are much better than cinema imo. I have picture at 60, brightness at 35, color at 43, tint at 0, sharpness at 15. With sharpness i cannot tell what difference it makes at 0 or 100. Color temp is warm. Try those. I thought it looked really nice.

I just looked at cinema vs standard. With larry's settings in cinema, they are almost identical to the settings i posted in standard. However, the color depth looked much better to me in standard. If you raise larry's color from 34 to 43, it looks identical to my standard setting imo.

My cinema settings aren't as good as larry's cinema setting or my standard setting, but i tamed them down just for break in. I use my standard setting for optimum viewing at any time of day and my cinema settings when i need to rest my eyes for not so critical viewing. Hope this helps.

Picture:60
Brightness:40
Color:42
tint:-3
Sharpness:30
Color temp: warm

hey nice settings! Did you come up with this youself? Or did you use some sort of dvd program?

Someone on here had postings for standard setting. I'm not sure who at the moment, but i tweaked them based on their settings. My cinema setting are tweaked off of larry's. Check page 37 for everyones settings on here so far.

FYI, imo, i used everone's settings and the settings i just posted are my personal favorites. Everyone has a different way of seeing things, so it's always different. That's why i tweaked to get the settings looking the way i like them. I also did not even use the avia disc i have. I don't really feel the need to at the moment. That's saying something for a tv, not have to even use a calibration disc. I haven't messed with many hdtv's but as far as reading about different models and based on my experience i would say this set is very easy to setup, and that's what i love about it. I never mess with my settings anymore. I only switch back and forth between my standard and cinema settings i posted depending on my mood.

After about 250 hours of use as the TV settles into its electronic comfort zone, I have modified my initial Cinema settings listed in post #932.

The Brightness in Cinema mode needed to be increased. The black level (Brightness) seemed to drop as the set aged and some detail in the near black was lost -- similar to what Tom Huffman found happening in his PZ85U.

Also, I reduced the Picture value slightly. It appears that, in the Cinema mode, the Picture control has little affect over in luminance when set over about 70 -- again somewhat like the PZ85U where it also seems to hit a plateau at 60.

My 42PX80U settings now for Cinema/Warm are:

Picture: 78 (down from 84)
Brighness: 52 (up from 50)
Color: 34
Tint: -3
Sharpness: 50
Color Management: off
All NRs: off

N.B. Each PX80U will have slightly different baselines and small variations in settings will exist.

EDIT: As of 12/15/08, I have about 2,000 hours on the set and I have moved my Picture and Brightness back to the original 84 and 50 settings.

Larry

I'm nearing 250 hours on mine Larry. I am going to try your "revised" settings, although I haven't noticed a dramatic change in picture quality since 100 hours or so.

Maybe mine isn't settled yet?

In all honesty cinema isn't that far off what I like just as it comes, and I've discovered that the gaming mode seems just fine for gaming... imagine that!

Larry's settings just got me that little extra icing on the cake