Samsung PN50A450 Offical Owners Thread. - Page 22

if I turn all the lights off, watch a very dark scene and get within 5' I can see kinda what he is seeing, just not as bad. at about 6' it just looks a little grainy at 8+ ft it looks fine. However, I would love to find a solution, because I suspicous this is a panel setting we can tweak.

Cool... after reading the thread I think I am in the same position you were a little while ago regarding IR - I have the PN50A450 on order and it's due to arrive next week, so any talk of problems is freaking me out way more than it probably should.

I dunno what you guys use for settings

I sit about 5' away at all time and dont' see any posterization

What's posterization? Is it different from dithering?

Give us your settings viper.

movie
cell light - 8
contrast - 96
brightness - 48
sharpness - 20
color - 48
tint 48/52
dynamic contrast - low
black adjust - off
gamma + 1
white balance - red gain 27, blue gain 23
16:9(not just scan which is probably what you should use)

I use 16:9 also cause I like the overscan. just scan is too 1:1 for some of the cable channels.

i dont friggen believe this. the plasma now wont turn on. I unplugged it, plugged it back in the light lights, the screen gets brighter, i here a click, then it shuts off, then it wont do anything. Idk man, i got the tech comming over saturday. 8 friggen days in and it dies, i cant believe this! what the hell. Oh well might as well look back into LCDS

so because you got 1 lemon you're going to completely kill your tv viewing experience by getting an LCD?

ok, new "best" setting based on some intelligent persons comments, namely doug.
Did a very quick and dirty "calibration" after using new settings, again using DVE.

CellLight 10 (according to Doug, otherwise gamma is screwed!)
Gamma -1 (saw this mentioned just too many times, so i set this to -1)
Brightness 49 (again, using DVE until "super-black" disappears, 49 also makes green noise on black disappear)
(Make sure to adjust from DARK ---> Bright....ie. using PLUGE on Avia/DVE...increase brightness and watch until "super black" appears...then turn one notch down til its gone.....not the other way around since this "blacker than black" bar otherwise pops up and disappears in random fashion..)
Contrast 83 (matter of taste, really)
Sharpness 0
Color 42 (used DVE blue mode)
Tint 50 (default here seems to be ok)

All "Enhancements" OFF again, Black Enh. OFF, Movie mode, Warm1. (Warm2 is too warm


Changes to settings i had before: Sharpness to 0 (from 20 before), Gamma to -1 (from 0) - resulting in need for brightness to set from 47 to 49.

Those new settings might result in a better gamma-curve...thus better dithering and overall better look. Also..this is head on to the +/- 50 Brightness Doug is mentioning...so my "calibration by eye" seems to be all right.

Add: To the "posterizing issue"-person....does this appear with any kind of content? As far as i remember you posted settings and you had various "enhancing"modi on...please turn them off, especially entertainment modus...DNIe....dynamic contrast etc..etc.... and use HQ material or some reference to make sure its not the source material, cable, bitrate..... Also...normal viewing distance 5ft for an evaluation whats going on there.

i just dont get how it can work perfectly for 8 days no problem, and just die on me

As a rule of thumb if something is going to go wrong with an electronic device it is usually going to happen early in its life.

Normal viewing distance 5ft? That's WAY too close for me, grain is horribly evident at that distance. Would your settings work for Warm2?

Can you please tell me exactly where hours logged is? I was told it was under "option byte" on main menu. I hit select on option byte and could not find. Is it called something else?

Also, by factory reset, do you mean "reset factory default/settings" at the top of the "option byte" sub menu?

Are they different settings/locations on the 42PNA450 vs. 50?

thx.

Yea your right. Idk what happend though. it worked fine. Do ya think it dident have enough air? But then again, if thats the case, it would have ran hot, no? Also, if thats the case, then u cant wall mount these things eather. Wtf?


I dont wana break in another plasma, maby this is a sign to go back to Lcds, atleast i can game on them without worrying about burn in

plasmas on the whole are very reliable. You could have had the exact same issue with an lcd. So unforunately it is luck of the draw. Do make sure your plugs are all seated firmly though and that you are using some sort of surge protector.

Anybody play a lot of video games on the 50" 450? Any problems?

As it turns out, it appears I had a calibration problem. For some reason, I couldn't correct the issue with the settings I was using, so I just reset everything to the defaults. Then again, I used LondonVikings settings, and set the cell light to 10 as suggested. I don't know exactly which setting was the culprit, but during my testing, the posterization became clear as day when the blacks weren't black enough.

So you no longer have the significant posterization?

yea luck of the draw. oh well, im safer off with an LCD anyway, cant burn those in, and i do a ton of gaming

When you run the burn-in DVD on a plasma should you crank the brightness UP during the burn in, then turn it down once it's burnt in? to reduce burn in, in the long run?

is posterization effected by source? I was sitting pretty close to my tv 5' or so and flipping through my comcast HD channels. Some the picture was awesome.. others it was good, but definitely had a grainer look.

but on an LCD you get worse things than burn in like clouding
and of course there's the fact most LCDs just suck due to the nature of teh technology..... Samsung's new 6 series is the only decent LCD ever

Wow, you guys must either be well past your 100 hours, or you're fearless on the IR... Contrasts up at 83-90?

I'm sure it looks great, but with about 5 hours on my set after a week of owning it I'm too timid to crank it up... I feel like I'll never approach my 100 hours, and I'm not going to turn on the display and let it run uselessly just to get to the 100 hours, I'll just labor through the break-in period.

I've heard of LCD "panel fade". Is this the same thing?

keith,

FWIW, I did play around with a DIRECTV HD source on this TV last night, and I was seeing a lot of the same posterization that you captured in your photos. But before anyone writes this off as a source issue, the same HDMI cable plugged into a Panasonic PX80U does not have the same issues. This seems to affect low APL (average picture level) scenes much more severely, and renders all shadow detail into a blotchy mess. In the shadows where the APL is higher, it's very detailed despite looking a little greenish. (The Samsung's grayscale is a bit of a mess below 30% gray even after calibration.) And the Panasonic also uses dithering much more subtly, but I have to say the dithering on the Samsung, while obvious at 6', is completely unnoticeable at normal viewing distances (greater than 8').

Now let me qualify the above comparison by saying that both sets were calibrated with a colorimeter so that a white 100% window is putting out ~30 ft-L, about the general consensus for the right light output for a plasma. Black level (brightness) was set using GetGray and DVE DVDs.

The Samsung's brightness setting seems very non-linear and unpredictable. Somewhere on here I also read one other person's experience with this - I'm going to try and find this post. For every click, the black bars seem to alternately disappear and reappear, in a weird step function that changes the way the TV processes low light levels, instead of gradually dimming like on every other TV I've tried calibrating. There are also combinations of contrast/brightness that create unstability in the TV's rendering of low level grays that could cause flickering. Kicking up/turning down one of the two controls a notch is usually able to make it stable again.

However, given the full controls in the Samsung user menu, I was able to calibrate the colors to be as close to the HDTV Rec. 709 standard as one could expect to get, with very even color decoding (i.e. no red or green push). The Samsung also has much better gamma that the Panasonic.

In a brightly lit scene, or any kind of normal TV programming (i.e. not dark cinematic scenes that taxes the ability to reveal dark details), the Samsung clearly shines due to the accurate colors and superior gamma. But in a dark movie scene, the posterization makes the Sammy very unwatchable. However, with the Panasonic's low gamma, this set is known for making dark shadows overly bright, but of course the nice thing about this is you get to see all the detail in there.

I'm going to contact Samsung CS to see what they say about the weird brightness control and the poor low light processing.

Here are the settings on my Samsung so far:
Mode: Movie
Cell: 10
Contrast: 55
Brightness: 53
Sharpness: 0
Color: 50
Tint: G50/R50

Detailed:
Black Adjust: Off
Dynamic Contrast: Off
Gamma: 0
Color Space: Custom
Red: R50 G6 B2
Green: R0 G49 B9
Blue: R4 G0 B36
Yellow: R47 G51 B14
Cyan: R3 G51 B48
Magenta: R48 G5 B40
W/B (from Warm2 color temp):
R-Offset: 26
G-Offset: 25
B-Offset: 26
R-Gain: 29
G-Gain: 25
B-Gain: 18

I take this back. The A450 and PX80U have very similar black levels measured with my colorimeter. Probably within the noise of the level of accuracy of the colorimeter - so essentially the same.

wow. that is really disappointing to hear. I called frys to see if I could send mine back, but they said no. I feel a little like I got taken being that this tv has severe posterization issues at low light situations.

Just got my a450 in exchange of my old 5033 that was buzzing like a fridge. And guess what? the FREAKING thing is buzzing like a fridge as well. I haven't play with the setting but the PQ doesnt look better than my old crappy 5033.