Quote:
Originally Posted by mike_pro 
I think it is fairly easy to this with a good test disc. The AVCHD disc has some nice patterns that show black and white bars, and have the reference 16 and 235 bars marked. So, as long as you properly set your video level and contrast and brightness using something like this you should be ok. At least for that device. It becomes complicated when you have all of your devices going through a receiver and are only using one input, or a device like the PS3 that can send PC RGB levels for games, and video YPb levels for movies. I'm pretty sure the settings I have posted in the FAQ are correct for the TV and PS3. At least, they seemed to work for me, and I'm not crushing blacks or whites, (although I do have my contrast maxed at 100).
I think it is fairly easy to this with a good test disc. The AVCHD disc has some nice patterns that show black and white bars, and have the reference 16 and 235 bars marked. So, as long as you properly set your video level and contrast and brightness using something like this you should be ok. At least for that device. It becomes complicated when you have all of your devices going through a receiver and are only using one input, or a device like the PS3 that can send PC RGB levels for games, and video YPb levels for movies. I'm pretty sure the settings I have posted in the FAQ are correct for the TV and PS3. At least, they seemed to work for me, and I'm not crushing blacks or whites, (although I do have my contrast maxed at 100).
If I understand what you did with the AVCHD disc you set your brightness so that you could discern the flashing gray bars up to the point of reference black (16). You see 16 as black and everything lower than it as black. For white, you did the same thing - tried to get it so that 235 and everything above it was white. To do this you had to max the contrast at 100 and even then you may still see some extremely light gray lines flash, maybe up to 238 or so. At least that's what I see on my TV.
If that is what you did I'm not sure I understand your use of the word crushing for the whites. I was under the impression that crushing meant you were losing detail. I don't see how you lose detail by having reference white less than the maximum whiteness your TV can display (the background of that test pattern). It'd would be the equivalent of turning the brightness up on the TV and having your black level very dark gray. At that point you wouldn't be losing detail, just contrast and darker blacks. On the other hand, if you have your brightness too low you start losing detail and clipping very dark grays as they would appear black.
I hope that made some sense. Maybe I'm just misunderstanding something. To sum it up I don't see how having your brightness at 80 would be crushing whites. I don't think it's possible to crush whites on this TV because even with contrast set to 100 the reference white is still lower than the brightest white the TV can display.
I happen to be using the opposite settings from you for HDMI Black Level on the TV and Full RGB on the PS3 (Dashboard and games only). I came to use Full RGB after visiting this page and using their test image to verify the TV supported Full RGB. I felt the combination of Full RGB and HDMI Black level set to Normal looked better and my contrast and brightness settings were still accurate when viewing test patterns on AVCHD and DVE (Blu-ray and DVD playback).
I'd like to try your settings for the display/PS3 combination, but I don't see any listed with 100 for contrast, just your settings for Cable TV (95) and Movies (85).
