Originally Posted by
kaiserk 
I have a settings story that I'm a little surprised by, but wanted to put it out there with the back story. Sorry if this is a little long.
I did the D-Nice panel prep of 100 hours and then used his settings for my Panasonic 50ST30 with great anticipation. I found that for our viewing, which is usually with a light on in the room in the evening, the settings resulted in a picture that was good, but too dim. And, it certainly was too dim for any daytime viewing, even though our TV has its back to the window.
I then experimented with mid panel brightness and every set of settings I found here using the Custom picture mode, as well as a number of pretty decent results with my own variations, mostly with D-Nice as the basis. No matter what I did, however, I could never get the flesh tones right; typically, they were on the ruddy side.
Two side notes on those experiments: First, although I also reacted to the wild looking CNET settings published for custom mode, on my set they turned out very similar to D-Nice, albeit with an offset of some 50 clicks for some of the settings. I didn't like their dim look either, nor did I like being at or close to the limits of several of the settings. Also, as CNET claimed, I thought the default Cinema settings were quite good, and again similar to D-Nice both in overall picture and in dimness.
Finally, in fit of desperation, and thinking that I remembered the default Custom mode settings (duh, I didn't write them down), I simply set six RGB white balance parameters of the pro settings to 0 (which is what I think the defaults were). The rest is D-Nice with the exception of MID panel brightness, and toning the color down to 28. To my shock and delight, suddenly I had realistic flesh tones and a picture that was not too dim. The picture with blu-ray discs is excellent to my eyes, although I obviously have no way of telling how close to or far off from a calibrated result I am.
First, lest this give the wrong impression, I'm deeply indebted to D-Nice and thank the others with the courage to put their settings here for folks to try. My theory is that there is indeed panel to panel variation, and while Panasonic may not be spot on, they do a good job with custom and cinema modes. I still haven't figured out what they were thinking with the other modes, but right now I don't care too much because I have a night/dim mode with cinema and a general mode with my custom settings.
Now if my set didn't have a case of very annoying brightness fluctuation, I would be all set. But that's another post in another thread.
