Official Panasonic ST50 Series Discussion Thread [No Street Price Talk] - Page 282

I think the setting at the store the tv was on on ECO mode off..

That makes the tv alot dimmer...

On daytime the tv must be on eco mode on...That makes the tv far more brighter..

In de evening i turn the eco mode to off because i like bright images in the dark to..

I only wish there was a way not to have to cange this settings each time.

And keep the tv always in the brightest possible way...

Never trust store settings. Never walk into the light (aka brightest picture) - it's a trap.

Hard telling. We could speculate on that all day. Suffice it to say the STs get a great picture.

It is absolutely too bright in a showroom setting to compare a plasma to an LED. An LED in torch mode will be MUCH brighter than a plasma and look better in a bright store, but if you took both sets home and tried to use those same settings for normal viewing, the LED would be uncomfortably bright. You'd never want to actually watch it that way. And besides, what do you expect from comparing two TVs that are both in 'vivid, blown out contrast, inaccurate color' mode? To see which one looks best with settings you would NEVER want to use in your own home?

Take it from professional reviewers and calibrators. Among LEDs, there's just no comparison to the ST50.

Anyone play around with the YouTube app? It buffers/skips for me most of the time. I have the 25Mbps connection from Comcast. The 55ST50 is set wirelessly to my network. VUDU app works fine and streams HDX (1080p) no problem. Why is YouTube app acting up?

Oddly enough I just bought an iPad (4th gen) and found out that throught the iPad YouTube app I can "mirror" the video on my ST through the TV's YouTube app - as long as you are signed in to your YouTube account on both the iPad and the TV. When I do this the video streams just fine, but this requires me to use two electronics (iPad + TV) at once. When all I should really need is the TV YouTube app to work

I tried searching the thread for YouTube video issues but no findings. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Ya never trust Store settings - they either use default (eco energy saving mode) which are super dim or Vivid (extremely bright, oversaturated) to catch your eye and sell inventory.

Buy from a brick and mortar for their return/refund/pricematching and look at reviews and general consensus from the community

ST50 has a great picture - just little annoyances (DSE, IR, etc) but if you feed it a quality source the PQ is amazing

Just got the 7 blinking red lights of death on my brand new ST50. Spent all week breaking it in, calibrating, re-calibrating, getting everything absolutely perfect, and now this. Depressing. So now I either get a 1 week old TV gutted with individual components replaced, or they give me a new one that I have to go through all the same crap with and with my luck will probably be a lemon in terms of IQ, or worst case scenario they'll give me a refurb which I will outright refuse.

Sorry to hear that. It may be quicker to return it than wait for Panny service to come to your house. That's generally a quick simple fix for service though.

What's the fix they usually do? Also, the box is long gone (small NYC apartment, we kept it for 5 days taking up half the kitchen, the tv seemed perfect so we recycled the box...), so how would a return even work?

I'm not a tv tech but from what I understand they replace the power module. Contact the place that you bought it and ask about the box. You really don't need it. You could wrap it in a blanket or something.

Amazon, off a truck.

If the fix is as simple as a new power supply, I'd much rather have that done than get a new unit. I was worried it'd be a PCB, which upon replacing would make the unit much more failure-prone for the future.

As mentioned, I've spent god knows how many hours in the past week getting this thing perfect, and I'd dread starting it over again. There is also always the matter of inconsistency between displays, which would drive me crazy if the new one is even slightly worse than the old one, knowing what could have been. I actually had my Galaxy Nexus phone die pretty early on too (touchscreen stopped working), but I was able to compare displays from the new and old units, and the old display was noticeably better—brighter, more accurate white point—which drove me absolutely nuts. At least that's just my phone.

Sigh. I really hope they can get this thing fixed by the weekend so I can watch football as my other football buddies are out of town... and if its not fixed by Monday, when Ni no Kuni comes out, I'm going to lose it.

fyi Amazon has an excellent return policy. They would probably take the old one away in the new ones box.

Seems very random that some TVs suffer worse IR than others. I've watched a a pretty even mix of stuff since I've gotten the TV (Logo'd TV, black barred movies, video games with static HUDs, etc.) and have absolutely no IR. Granted none of this stuff is usually never on for more than 2 or so hours of a time. I am a bit nervous about baseball season when I sometimes watch 9 hours of baseball a day on the weekends, and at least 3 1/2 hours EVERY day, all those games have static "stuff" on them.

Can someone tell me if there's anything wrong with my set. The pictures are 20% grey full field on my TV, notice the uniformity in the middle of the screen, it's little bit redish. It isn't something that you can spot easily nor shows anything weird during real content and less visible at upper grayscales.

So do I have a faulty pannel or something ?(uneven phosphor aged/IR/etc) I ain't that picky because it isn't as bad as you see in the pictures and I can't tell any different by watching real content but I ain't sure with the screen non-uniformity in the middle like this can be properly calibrated

http://i.imgur.com/dXV1U.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/tJCOr.jpg

fallengt, while your uniformity does not look great I dont think its possible to get one of these sets with perfect uniformity.

I have gone through 2 60ST50 sets and both of them have a huge slightly greenish tinted circle in the middle of the screen when displaying white/grey slides. It has improved very slightly with use to where it really is not all that noticeable on white but on a grey slide it still shows up pretty decently.

My set does not have the redish tint like yours.

My opinion is if the only time you notice it is on slides (solid color screen) and never notice it when watching regular content, then just live with it.

Well, the IR bug hit me, though to be fair it was my fault. I was running the movie "Up" in an effort to age my panel faster (currently at ~250 hrs) and got lost in making a pair of speaker cables. After the movie ended (I didn't set it to loop) the menu screen popped up and remained there for I don't know how long...10 min, 20 min, 30 min? When I went back to my room and saw the menu screen I quickly started the movie again and to my dismay saw IR from the menu. I ran D-nice's slides for ~30 min and then the scroll bar for 15 min before going to bed, but still see it slightly. I will continue to run a few blu-rays and I hope to see it disappear sooner rather than later. Fingers crossed.

*Interestingly, I can play FIFA 13 for 1 1/2 hrs at a time with no IR, yet I get IR from the "Up" menu screen as well as the Smart Viera logo that pops up when powering on the TV.

All you need is some normal viewing time. "Sooner rather than later" is just lack of experience on your part.

Why are you aging your display faster after 250 hours?

I've had my 60ST50 for a couple months now. I was a HUGE fan until about a week ago - I started to see some very stubborn IR. I've put in some pretty long NHL13 sessions on my xbox, with tv in game mode. Sessions can run several hours at a time. I was using the default game mode, which may have been a mistake because contrast is set pretty high. I've now backed off some of the game mode settings in hoping it won't torch my tv. Anyway - Ya I've got EA logos and NHL13 logos in the corners of the tv, which I cant see during normal viewing until that corner is sold white. I've run the sliding bar for a few hours, and watched lots of tv, movies ect for about a week now but the IR is still their. You have to look for it against a white screen but now that I know it is there it's super annoying! Kinda pissed and wondering if it will eventually fade or not. After going from LED to plasma and being pumped now I am second guessing it.

Not lack of experience, but rather an oversight. I am well experienced with plasmas. This is my third Panasonic plasma.

I am running a blu-ray as I write this.

I am aging my panel faster in an effort to reduce IR more quickly and to flesh out any problems/infant mortality while still within the return period, which ends January 31.

I play FIFA 13. To minimize the risk of IR I turn off the scoreboard (I do leave the name/power meters on in the bottom corners) and use game mode with contrast at 68 and brightness at 60. So far no IR while gaming. When I play online friendlies I can live without the scoreboard, but when I play competitive online matches I will turn the scoreboard back on.

1) I just got a P55ST50 and would love to extract the important info on this thread. But 282 pages? That's a lot of reading knowing that so much of it will be irrelevant to me. Is there a ST50 FAQ or something? I just want to know about breaking it in and setting the PQ settings. Any advice would be great!

2) I'm noticing something I didn't notice in the store: slight flicker not unlike the old days of computer CRT monitors when the refresh rate was set below 72hz. Is this normal? It's not as bad as a CRT from the old days, but I did notice it right off the bat. The picture is beautiful and the flicker seems unnoticeable sometimes but not other times. Is this normal?

That sounds like a power supply board. It is a straight-forward swap, but it does require removal of the back panel.

IIRC, if you swap sets, the delivery folks will take the old set away in the 'new' box.

Here you go:

http://www.avsforum.com/t/1397245/official-panasonic-st50-series-discussion-thread-no-street-price-talk/8250#post_22803172
http://www.avsforum.com/t/1397245/official-panasonic-st50-series-discussion-thread-no-street-price-talk/8280#post_22804903

The info you're looking for, FAQ, settings, etc, is linked to in my posts, #8272 and #8292

The slides provide no benefit to getting rid of IR, you should just play normal TV content.

I primarily ran them to see how much I could see the IR on each color. After running them briefly I left the two brightest white slides on to help get rid of the IR since the text that caused the IR is white.

Infant mortality is a very good reason. I did 500 hours (24/7) on our Kuro for that reason.

Once the IR is not visible under normal viewing conditions, I would let nature take it's course.

I ran the panel prep slides for 100 hours before inputting D-nice's reference settings and then watched full screen content, played a little FIFA, and ran "Up" several times over the first month. Since the beginning of January I have been running "Toy Story 3" and "Up" for ~10 hours a day along with some limited normal viewing. I'm trying to crank up the hours now so that I have ~400 hours by January 31.

So far the biggest issues have been feint vertical streaks when the camera pans during soccer, minor line bleed, minor picture uniformity issues, buzzing, and some IR. I've pretty much committed to keeping the TV, but will continue to put it through its paces, checking for the issues I've mentioned, to see if there's improvement. The issues so far haven't been deal breakers and I've gotten over the initial bummer feeling, lol

Hello Everyone.

I'm a brand new owner of the 50ST50. This is my first HDTV purchase and I'm loving the picture on this set. So far so good!

Does anyone use the Panasonic Skype camera (or one from another brand)? Is the built in Skype app good?

Also, I'm looking to get a Panasonic Blue Ray Player. Any model recommendations for this set?

Thanks everyone.

George

The point is I used i1 pro to calibrate my plasma and took reading from 10% windows size patterns at centre of the screen. It gave me weird result at some grayscale levels so I suspect that my plasma can't be calibrated properly because of non-uniformity like this and that's the only thing bug me the most.
Watch regular content is totally fine.

How many hours are on your set? Also, were those pics taken after you calibrated? If you have at least 100hrs on your panel and you already calibrated, I would exchange it. Uniformity issues like that could be caused by too much red in the white balance. And I think I've heard others have this issue during the first 100hrs, but went away after the phosphors aged.