Quote:
Originally Posted by
steve1971 
Hey cal,
I tried dunans settings yes but I have now switched back to Tom's and heres why. My fiance came home from work and and I am sitting here watching ESPN First Take and she says "What did you do to the tv? Why does the colors look flat? Change them back to where you had them!" She also said that the faces of Skip Bayliss and the other commentator looked to red. Then we watched Planet Green and she said the colors looked too flat. I had to agree so it was back to the settings Tom Norton gave me and from now on thats where they will stay. Dunans settings looked good but didnt have that pop that my fiance and I enjoy so I tried his settings but went back to Toms. As for dunans r bias setting? Its +7. But again cal I am staying with Toms settings. You may like giving dunans setting a try and who knows you may like them. As I say tvs do vary from set to set. Let me know what you do buddy.
This is interesting because I thought toms settings looked acceptable, but not great on this tv. I used them for some time, but always thought they could be better. Also, thats an indication that our tvs aren't that different when it comes to settings and PQ if even a few people think the same settings are acceptable on different sets of the same model.
When you calibrate, you're calibrating to match DVD/blu ray content, not cable tv, as the content fluctuates too much from channel to channel. One station will look great and the next station will look horrible. Cable TV is not a good way to gauge a calibration by, and unfortunately the ESPN channel blows out their reds unlike any other, so the reds look incredibly over saturated on that station. This is why you say it looks too red and planet green looks too flat. So, the last thing you want to do is gauge how your whole TV looks as a whole by cable tv. For example, ESPN looks good with toms settings, but with other channels, people look pale and the colors look under saturated and too flat.
When you put toms settings into calMAN, the grey balance is way off center and far into the green, so the grays have a green tint to them. That's why people look pale. The G5 hue that tom has does even out the greens a little but the fact of the matter is that the greens on this set are over the top and he tried getting the green luminance down by setting a G5 hue which deadens the reds but does help the blues. The goal is to get the white balance dead center so there is as little color as possible in the grayscale. You want the RGB balance in the grays to be as flat as possible. This is why you think the colors look 'flat' because you are removing the color content from the grays, but technically, this is how the picture is supposed to look. This also gets the colors as even as possible so one color isn't standing out over the others.
The technical aspects of the settings are this:
The cinema and warm settings gave this tv a 64xx hundred white point. If you change it to any other setting (standard, vivid, etc.) it will be too blue. You don't want that.
The picture setting of 82 gave a 35 luminance setting, right in the middle, where you want it for movie watching. To get a brighter picture (luminance), bump up the backlight, not the contrast.
Brightness of 47 gave a black reference cutoff of 16, right where it should be for blu ray reference after setting the white balance.
Contrast is more of a user setting but 82 on this set gave the best white to dark ratio.
Color at 50/hue R1 gave the most even color balance on the calMAN scale. If you do a blue filter test with this set, the color/hue settings would be color 48/hue R8. This threw the secondary colors into disarray, making the yellow and magenta too red, cyan too blue and the picture looks far too unnatural with the secondary colors (CMY) having far too much luminance over the primarys (RGB).
Gamma at low gave the best average gamma point at between 2.1 and 2.4. The goal is 2.2 and setting the gamma to 'off 'put the gamma point between 1.8 and 2.3, too low of an average.
The trick to the white balance is to get the colors in the grayscale to 100 on the RGB chart. These settings do not go over 100 or under 99 so they are as close as they are going to get, giving a virtually even white balance, almost dead center. Anything that is supposed to look grey will look grey, and color tint within the grayscale is as little as it gets on this set because there's no way to get it perfect.
Unfortunately there is no way to adjust luminance of colors on this set (boldness of the colors) as this set uses a 2 point white balance instead of a 10, so as I've said earlier, cable tv will not look as good as a DVD or blu ray with calibrated settings. ESPN does look over saturated on my set (reds) but that is not a fault of the set, it's how ESPN has the color balance set on their channel. This is verified because the series 'frozen planet' in HD looks absolutely wonderful with this set, with people and landscape looking as they should, not under or over saturated - the complete opposite of ESPN. Skin tones look natural and everything has an even color balance. Better yet, throw in a DVD/blu ray and look at skin tones or something you know to be gray or silver (skin tones/streets/roads/meat slicer). They will look as they are supposed to with a proper calibration.
As stated in previous posts, the colors are supposed to look flat because the grayscale would now be correct and it's being see the way the producer intended it to be seen. This is the whole point of calibration - to see it the way it's meant to be seen, not how we want it to look, since everyone perceives color differently. You also have to give your eyes time to adjust to the difference, especially if you're used to watching tv with certain settings. Hoped this helped or cleared some things up regarding calibration and settings.
