Panasonic ST30 DIY Calibration and Settings Thread - Page 2

D-Nice doesn't want his settings posted anywhere. Might be best if you just referred to them, linked to them (if AVS will let you) but removed them completely from your post.

i know CNET mentioned that Custom had a stronger dither effect than Cinema, but i found it to be the exact opposite on my 55ST30.

i get dither in the letterbox on my movies in Cinema, but ZERO dither on the letterbox in Custom.

it's almost impossible to see the dither on the black scenes in Cinema, although i could've sworn i could see it on the first day.

anyone else notice the difference in dither between the two settings?

is it better to keep the color settings in the 40's??
right now iam testing harry potter half moon prince with
contrats 78
brigthness 55
color 45

and it looks good no fluxing brigthness

Hey guys! Good day to all of you! Anyways, question here, I've got a beautiful p50st30 over here and was wondering if anybody has the calibration setting for game mode. I have a PS3. Oh and any tips for the 3d setting on this tv as well for I do play in 3D quite a lot. Thanks in advance guys! Hope someone can help. I've been looking for game mode calibration for this tv set but can't find any.

Ps- thanks mfrey0118 for the link to this thread! :]

i was watching Kung Fu Panda on the weekend during the day, and while the picture was nice, I felt as if the colours were a bit muted. i tried playing around with the settings, and couldn't get the picture to look right.

that is, until i changed the panel brightness. WOW!!!!

if you leave everything else the same (D-Nice custom settings), and just change the panel brightness from low to mid, the colours just jump off the screen.

i didn't see what the effect would be at night in an almost all-black room, but i'll try that tonight. might be a bit too bright i'm guessing, but we'll see.

while Cinema and D-Nice settings are great for a "natural" and more realistic look for film, i think changing the panel brightness to Mid looks amazing for animated films. and in fact, i believe James Cameron's settings for the 2010 plasmas had panel brightness set to High in fact.

just FYI. enjoy guys!

OK. I was committed to mid panel brightness and enjoying the pop, but it seemed a little too much for nighttime viewing. Also, even though I'm a proud non-videophile, the colors just didn't look right.

I reverted back to the D-Nice settings for nighttime viewing and the colors were simply unbelievable. My TV is so beautiful!

So D-Nice for night and, if I care enough, mid panel brightness for daytime.

ok i tried Mid panel brightness (everything else was D-Nice Custom), and it looks fantastic with animated movies even at night. a bit on the bright side, but everything really pops. Avatar and Monsters Inc look incredible, although Avatar looked far more realistic, while Monsters Inc looked like the colours were on steroids.

for non-animated movies, Mid panel brightness screws up the colour a bit too much, with skin tones looking sun-burnt, and other colours a bit too exaggerated. you get more pop with Mid, and your eyes naturally prefer that level of brightness when you switch back and forth between Mid and Low, but i think overall Low is a bit more realistic.

Mid looks better if you make some modifications to it. The color, brightness and contrast need to come down a bit after changing to mid.

do people find their black levels to be worse with Mid panel brightness? I want to make sure my black levels are at optimum levels, since this is why i bought the set!

although i think the picture looks quite natural with Low, it seems a bit washed out imo (found that to be true with THX on the G20 I had too), and no pop.

Mid is nice, but then the colours get screwed up.

at the same time, if we go Mid, what was the point in doing the 100 hr panel prep?

I think I agree with just about everything said here, especially the distinction between MID panel brightness for animated vs non-animated material. I settled on MID with Toy Story on iTunes HD as my main demo movie. MID had nice pop but the reds were a little saturated.

I realized how awesome the D-Nice settings were with LOW panel brightness while watching TDK on Blu in the middle of the night.

yeah i was tinkering with Mid for an hour or so last night, and i can't get myself to like Mid for regular non-animated movies. the picture doesn't look as natural, and something seems "off" or "artificial" about it, whether it's the colours, or the brightness.

i watched TDK mostly for these tests, and yeah, i just can't go with Mid. ended up preferring Low much more.

i thought since Cinema was the most accurate according to CNET, and the fact that D-Nice Custom was virtually indistinguishable to me compared to Cinema, that these two must be the most accurate or "reference" settings for the TV.

i say virtually b/c i do find whites tinged on the red side with Custom, so i actually went as far as -4 on the W/B Low R, and left W/B High R on 0. then i did a blind test between Cinema and my new Custom setting (had the wife change the modes while I closed my eyes) and i couldn't tell one from the other, which was interesting.

however, I will stick with Mid on the animated movies, cuz the images just seem to jump off the screen. everything looks sharper too, with more detail for some reason as well.

quick question though. has anyone noticed while on Cinema, the black bars on letterbox movies have quite a bit of dithering (viewed 2 inches from the set), but on Custom, there's zero dithering on the black bars? i found it odd that CNET reported the opposite. was wondering what other people were experiencing.

Did Panasonic change the Cinema setting for recent builds? My 65ST30 is a May build, and right off the bat, the Cinema setting was at a perfect brightness, and I only hand to lower the Brightness setting down two notches to achieve 0 blacks with no sparklies on my letterbox bars. (Which was also where 0 black became uhh.... 0.)

In fact I had to lower my Contrast value down to about 40, as 50 and up were brighter than I normally like. Contrast was default at 100 in Cinema, though 50 through 100 was barely any different, but 0-50 was where all the change occured.

I think Panny may have fixed the low light output of Cinema. Standard at default was incredibly dim compared to Cinema, not to mention horrible in PQ.

I'll try and mess with Custom, but I'm very happy with Cinema, even with lots of lighting. I've come from LCDs, which I tended to put at Blacklight 3 out of 10, so jumping to Plasma wasn't a big change in brightness for me.

I think the Cinema setting may be using a mid level lighting now.

I'd also like to know if anything carries over from one input to another. I know Cinema does. Looks like Custom doesn't.

I ask, because I dunno what it is, but it seems at random times, the Motion Smoother isn't OFF when I know that's where I had it... That and Noise Reduction being set to Weak when I know I put it as OFF. Is this not saving when I turn off the TV?

i had NO idea changing the brightness setting would get rid of the sparklies!? i tried that last night on Cinema mode (from default), and dialed down brightness by either 1 or 2 clicks, and all the sparklies in the letterboxes went away?! it lowered the dithering in the entire picture dramatically as well.

i always preferred Cinema, and felt it had plenty of light output, but i didn't like the dithering, and now it's gone.

so a big thank you to you sir!

mine is an April build, and i'm happy to use Cinema for day and night, and Custom Mid for animated movies.

i'm loving this TV more and more each day

FWIH, Dithering is how Plasma deals with shadow detail in the darkest grays. It'd make sense that the 0 black wouldn't have dither, since there shouldn't be any detail in 0 black. In any case, with test pattern even value of 1 out of the 255 has very minor dither, so you know that you're not crushing blacks at the brightness setting you have.

I've always done well getting the brightness setting correctly on all my TVs. Its easier with LCD because all you have to do is set the TV to 4:3 mode and match the 0 black with the 4:3 bars (which are 0 blacks, always). Lots of people don't seem to notice that, lol.

^ yeah i read somewhere about why plasmas "dither", but didn't realize it was related to detail in shadow areas. this is my first plasma, so i'm still learning

i'm not familiar with the test patterns you speak of and the corresponding measurements. is this from a test pattern image you downloaded off the web, or from a calibration disc?

i'm considering picking up the Spears and Munsil (sp?) disc, but can't remember if amazon.ca had it in stock. almost impossible to find in B&M stores in Canada.

can't wait to watch some movies this weekend! planning on picking up How to Train Your Dragon, heard it was good!

Try this:
color temp: Warm1,
color at 35-36
Contrast/Bright to your own taste
tint at +4/5
Gamma 2.2
Panel Medium
Black Extender +3/4
W/B you can boost the high and low Red a bit but again it's personal taste

Custom can get flakey on skin tones and Warm1 with the other settings moderate that quite a bit. I pretty much use Custom with these for day and night. I hate the low panel setting. It's like watching through a dark haze to me and Cinema mode's brightness is a bit too limited for me unless the room is pitch black and even then it rubs me the wrong way.

i think i've gone back and settled with Cinema. now that i've learned i can get rid of the dithering by lowering the brightness 1 or 2 clicks, i think the pic looks pretty good. not as much pop obviously compared to Custom Mid, and yeah, it kinda looks like you're viewing things through this light grey haze, but overall, i think the picture and the colours looks most realistic with Cinema.

i'll stick with Custom Mid for animated movies though.

Thanks Cal for putting in the effort to find the best looking mid panel brightness settings. I feel like it's a long journey with no immediate end in sight (reminds me of the end of fellowship) I don't even have the tv yet but I've been eyeing it for awhile. I'm trying to figure out if my family would prefer the mid panel settings or just the accurate colors the experts go for. I feel like to deliver the wow factor, your settings may just do the trick. And if you can't wow your family, then what's the point? If it was just for me (based on my G10 settings), I prefer the more accurate picture where your eyes can relax and enjoy the show. That being said, I've never experienced mid panel brightness settings, so maybe I would prefer them as well.

To get to the point, you said the settings you came up with (modifications of D-Nice setting's) did a good job removing the badly colored skin tones. Now let me ask you a question that may be hard to answer at this point: Do you think an average person that doesn't care about this stuff would notice anything was off with your settings? And secondly, do you think the average person would prefer your settings at night watching a non animated film, or would they think it was too colorful?

Hmm... That's a good question but I suspect that an "average" (non-discriminating?) viewer might not notice how dark Cinema's picture is at night. Frankly I've wondered about what Panasonic is thinking about with this built-in brightness limiter in the ST30's Cinema mode and the GT and VT's THX mode. If the sets natively could do at least 40ftl in those modes, Custom mode might not stand a chance.

so far i only tryed dnices final st30 settings they look good.
this week the tv is going in my room so now i will have time to fool with it
mr frey your settings look good

I was thinking about that point. The only thing I can come up with there has to be some kind of reference standard for color that requires the brightness to be set at that limit. Maybe the answer to why custom mode can't get the colors just right with a higher setting brightness isn't due to panasonic's limited features. Maybe the requirement to reach a the rec. 709 standard of color is to limit the brightness. I know absolutely nothing about the internal working of these sets, but that's the only logic I can gather. Doesn't THX mode require a certain brightness minimum of 35 ftl(I may be off?) There has to be a reason for it.

I did a search and looked at the THX home site but can't find a specific minumum brightness level for an HDTV. I know of one case of a GT25, after an ISF calibration, having THX come in with an ftl level in the mid-40s. That's astonishing and would make that set's THX mode the only one to use in any situation. The most that I've seen for the ST30's Cinema mode, after calibration, is around 37, which still is a siginficant improvement over its default of 30 or lower.

Good to know. So basically, if you just change the settings on cinema mode based on a tv review site to their recommendations, are you going to get a ftl of 30 or lower? You need to have it calibrated to get more out of your tv in cinema mode, brightness wise?

I think I'll end up setting up the custom settings as you laid out and change from there if something looks off. As long as the skin tones look natural then it should work out great. I'll also set up the cinema mode based on some expert reviews for non animated films if I end up thinking the custom settings are too bright. Either way, it's nice to have the brighter option. Again, thanks for taking the time to find something that works.

I went about 100 pages but no where to find where is D-nice setup in service menu? Could someone give a hint.
Thanks

Sent you a PM.

Could you send that to me as well? Much appreciated.

Ditto...