Panasonic TC-P42U1 / TC-P46U1 / TC-P50U1 Owners Thread - Page 7

Amkus,

**For 2009 Panasonic service menu calibration information, click here**


Larry

scroll up to the beginning of the thread and look for larryinri i think his name is. He has a link in his info to the calibration settings. I personally would use the professional calibration for the cinema mode. I tried droid's and the white's look reddish the professional calibration settings are right on with the avs disc too if you have a calibration disc I'd use those and run it. Also i've noticed a nice balance of color and whites look normal. That's coming from someone that's worked professionally in broadcast and am picky about color.

Thank you, Larry.

Alright, finished my break-in and got 'er hooked up.

Hold vol- while pressing "info" 3 times and... nothing happens. Tried various pressing speeds on info, and still nothing.

Both buttons work on their own.

TV looks pretty dang good already (of course it's my first plasma, so I'm probably easily impressed), just want to see how it changes with some recommended offsets.

Press vol down on the TV. Press info on the remote. Make sure the remote is pointing toward the infrared detector on the TV -- near the red power on LED.


Larry

You are a man of much wisdom, Larry.

Using Droid's settings and it's looking great. So far I've only been able to watch in 480i, and I can't see how HD is gonna look even better.

Watching normal digital cable really sucks though. Just about every time I change the channel I have to change the format. Even commercials on the same channel are running in different formats.

Does anyone know If running a plasma with 100 percent contras will stress the power circuits as long as it's calibrated? I have in mind to use my calibrated cinema settings for lower light and set up the custom settings set for brighter viewing. so i was thinking of calibrating with 85 to 100 contrast and the other settings matched to it. I will only set it to 100 though, if it won't shorten the life of the TV or cause things to overheat etc from producing too much heat. Right now watching it at about 85%.

Thanks

No, it won't hurt a thing. Panasonic would not make the 100 contrast level an option if it wasn't able to handle it. Most of the modes start at 100 contrast. The ABL limiter will limit any bright scenes you may be watching, so having contrast at 85 vs 100 will only make a difference in darker scenes, if that makes sense.

Thanks, so much I was double checking because I was running the TV at 100 contrast when the power board failed (the stock powerboard) and I was just double checking to see if maybe over heating was connected to the stock part failing. I think for day viewing, 100 contrast would be good

Either way, I've read that panasonic has had quite a bit of stock boards fail, but not with the U1 series. Anyway I'm going on 4 months since the repair and things have been fine, in fact i put the TV through a line conditioner and updated the firmware. So, everything seems fine now.

There were two boards replaced in my TV.

The display drive board, when the geeksquad agent touched the connector for the ribbon it feel off in his hand, and there was a mid sized board next to it with about 4 or 5 heat sinks on it that also had went bad.

Hey guys Just tossing around some thoughts here. I've decided to go with 100 contrast 57 brightness for bright time viewing. Everything is set the way it looks the best for calibrating in that setting. What I'm unsure of is to set the color at 40 42 or 45. The calibration Droid lists with the settings I'm using in user menu has color set to 56, but it seems to be a bit washed out. for the contrast i'm using. 45, seems to be a bit too saturated. 42, or 40 seem to be the best choices and 38 might be workable too. Which would people here recommend the amount of color compared to brightness and Contrast. I have my cinema mode calibrated. but that's dimmer and works best in dark viewing I'm tweaking the custom settings for the bright day viewing so i switch between the two. Any thoughts and feedback would be appreciated

I'm just having a bit of trouble determining over saturation when looking at color bars and skin tones. The color bars are fine, but skin tones seem to vary movie to movie. I am using hd video to calibrate though.

Just had a strange occurrence.

While watching TV, my set randomly turned itself off. I was able to turn it right back on.

How old is the set? The reason i ask is on the model(s) of tv known for bad power boards, that was one of the symptoms before the board(s) failed. I haven't seen a lot of U1 complaints o even anything past models ending in just U. My set had to have a board replaced under warranty because it Just Popped and I got 10 blinks from the power light. But since then it's been fine. Hopefully that was just a fluke and it won't repeat, but thought I'd just mention this.

One other note, shortly after my repair and I had put the blu-ray player back on this tv (used it with my bedroom tv until this was fixed) I turned on the unit and it caused the TV to restart itself due to some error (probably hdmI) but the tv displayed it had encountered and error and had recovered. My solution was to reset the player back to factory defaults, and it has been fine since. Do you know if when yours shuts of and you turn it back on, it displays any sort of error message?

It happened a second time about a half hour later, though I also noticed that the DVD player/surround sound unit also went into standby at the same time. When I turned the TV back on, the input changed from the one I was running cable off of to the one used for the sound system.

I had the cable box sitting on-top of the sound system (which has no top vents), the top of the sound system box felt pretty warm. I unplugged power to the sound system, leaving only the cable box on for an hour and experienced no further problems. I then moved the cable box off of the sound box and plugged it back in for another hour or so with no issues.

I figured that since the surround sound box automatically changes your input to it, that maybe it has the power to turn off the TV also. Does this sound logical to anyone?

My set is only a little over a week old. Ran 100 hour break-in, and currently probably around 10-15 hours of TV/ movie watching. It was made in 2009, if that's what you were asking.

Amkus,

What brand/model of DVD player and receiver/amplifier are you using?

Larry

Philips HTS3371D 1000-Watt Home Theater System

http://www.usa.philips.com/c/home-th...s3371d_f7/prd/

And thanks for even more help, Larry. You're awesome.

Amkus,

First I would turn "System Audio Control" off. (page 38 of the Phillips owner's manual.) See if this helps.

Maybe someone with the same audio system will pitch in with some more suggestions. Also check the audio forum here on AVS.

Larry

Against my better judgment, I'm gonna throw a couple pics up I took. They didn't turn out as well as I'd hoped, and the picture definitely looks better in person. I'll just feel better about myself if I pretend the time I spent taking them wasn't a complete waste of time.

From my P42U1

DVD in 480i:
Backdraft

Collateral


DVD "up-converted" to 1080p:
Gladiator (watching this movie on the big screen sure is a treat, Last Samurai and LotR series, here I come!)

Dark Knight