Official Panasonic ST50 Series Discussion Thread [No Street Price Talk] - Page 307

You should set your brightness with a pattern and leave it alone. I'm pretty sure that's just dithering you're seeing, nothing out of the ordinary really. Using low brightness is going to crush lighter shades into black, that's why it's reducing the effect when you do that.

But, interesting thing is it's not just sub-1080. It probably happens more on Blu-ray than anything, and my PS3 should be outputting 1080p correctly (short of being defective). Set to limited RGB range, made sure corresponding 16-235 setting on the TV is correct. HD SIze 2 and all that.

At least that makes sense though. Something to explore. It's more than anything else I have to go on. I would leave it alone, but it's intolerable. It's not something that's just "kind of" noticeable, it looks like the source of the image being played back on the screen is something like a bad VHS tape that was put through a washing machine. My Game of Thrones season 2 blu-ray will go from a day scene in the desert that looks amazing to something that looks like it was produced 40 years ago and it kills the experience.

Watch from further away or get. Smaller set

Kidding aside, I noticed this too when I first got my gt. however at normal viewing distance of 14 ft for my room, it isn't visible. I recall someone saying a pro calibration will reduce it greatly.

Have you made all the other appropriate setting changes: motion smoother off, nr off, pixel orbiter off etc?

Does the pixel orbiter really effect PQ? I've never noticed. I typically keep mine on at all times.

No.

My calibration isn't pro by any means sadly, but I did it with a C6 rental and CalMAN with a lot of feedback from Spectracal and them looking over my reports every step of the way. There's not much difference in terms of the severity of the problem between my calibration and uncalibrated.

I was going to get it pro calibrated at one point but the guy I was talking to never made it up my way. Yep.

That shouldn't be. Can you try your PS3 on another tv to see if the problem still occurs? Another suggestion is to hook up a bluray player to see what that looks like.
Edited by sheshechic - 3/15/13 at 7:53am

I just noticed this set does not have a TV guide for the OTA stations. Is that true for most TVs nowadays?

Shame on Panasonic then. They could have easily added the TV Guide software since they went through the trouble of installing an ATSC OTA Tuner.

Have to mention that the picture is as good as my Sony 34XBR960

hey guise,
I'm noticing some pixelation during HD broadcasts of some movement and also in non-HD broadcasts. I guess plasmas produce a bit of pixellation. Can I reduce it by changing the settings for video nr, block nr or mosquito nr? I have fios as my source of HD and non-HD broadcasts. I'm playing around with the settings for video nr, block nr, and mosquito nr to auto/on and I don't really notice anything different. Are there certain combinations of the aforementioned to turn on/off to improve picture quality of non-HD broadcasts without sacrificing too much for HD broadcasts?

Make sure u put dnice settings in or cnet.. Or some kind of custom settings. Because before I put custom settings in I had the same problem

That's your cable/content, not the TV. All the NR options should be off.

Well, like I mentioned, it happens on multiple sources... Tivo Premiere, Toshiba HD-A35 HD-DVD player, and my PS3. It did not occur (if it did it wasn't noticeable) with those same devices on my older LCD.
Edited by Shocked - 3/16/13 at 11:47am

I still think that photo looks normal for something taken right on top of the TV. Maybe you could give a close up and far away shot of the same scene for comparison? Maybe another close up, then something from 5, and 10 feet? Still, dithering isn't something that should be distracting from regular viewing distance, so it's possible your TV may be defective.

"The blue blobs/dots appear to move around when the picture is in motion. It also does so when it's paused but only when set to high panel brightness. Mid panel brightness seems to be ideal, and the only setting that seems to make it better (I've tried changing every single setting the display has) is when I murder the brightness setting about 10 notches below where it should be."

So, was the problem from high brightness or were you just adding that the problem is even worse on high brightness? You don't want to use high panel brightness, period. It creates much stronger dithering on high, not to mention washes out bright scenes.
Edited by JSpectre88 - 3/16/13 at 1:02pm

Sadly, I tried taking a few dozen pictures of it. They just don't come out that well. My cell phone camera downplays the severity of it, so you wouldn't be able to see it from 10 feet (whereas watching it, I can see it from at least 15 feet). And my DSLR can't get a clean picture at all.

Nevertheless, this was taken at the same time from much farther back. You can still see the blue, but it's more blurry so it's harder to notice the severe pixelation:



I spent a lot of time on the phone with Panasonic thinking the TV might be defective, but they don't care since it doesn't happen at their "recommended" brightness setting of 45.

For a long time I thought it was just something plasma-inherent because I saw the same exact thing on a GT30 I had for a while using D-nice settings. If it's just regular dithering, I must be really sensitive to the effect or I got unlucky and got two bad panels - I've tried so many different sources and even replaced my HDMI cables that I just don't know what else it could be.

But, it's really a shame because ever since I got the TV I've found myself avoiding watching stuff that heavily favors darker scenes (i.e. Battlestar Galactica, one of my favorite series ever...) much like I did with my old LCD because of clouding.
I would never use high panel brightness, but I was obliged to compare what it looked like while rigorously going through the settings and thought it might be useful knowledge knowing it made it worse.

Yeah I didn't think you used high brightness, just making sure. That image looks particularly bad, but even blu-ray's don't look flawless all the time. Does your TV look like that all the time or only during certain scenes/content? I still think you're just seeing a combination of dithering in dark scenes, and the graininess and pixelation in poor source content. We can try to find something to compare if you want? I have Amazon instant and Netflix.

@Shocked, are you using D-Nice's settings? I'm guessing that you might have too much blue at the low-end of the white balance, which will give a blue tint at low stimuli (ie darker areas). If you are using D-Nice's settings, try setting all of the White Balance settings to 0 in the pro settings menu, or try lowering the W/B Low B a notch or two. If you still see blue, try Cinema mode set to Warm2 instead. D-Nice's settings will work ok-good on most sets, but not all. A proper calibration might fix it.

Depending on your panel size and gamma setting, 56-58 should be the correct brightness setting in Custom mode with mid panel brightness. I don't recommend lowering it.
Edited by rahzel - 3/16/13 at 2:48pm

It looks flawless much of the time, it's almost always darker scenes it happens in... but even some of those will look perfect. Or one shot of a darker scene will look fine, the next one will look terrible, the next one will look pretty bad, and back to being fine. All in the same scene.

While it goes back and forth in terms of severity, there are some movies/shows it shows up more frequently on (The Hunger Games for example has a lot of scenes in the second half of the film that look terrible, which was why I had my choice of shots to try and get a picture from - oddly there were many shots that looked worse than the one in the pictures I managed to snap but they didn't photograph as well).

I haven't watched Netflix in a while, and I just got my wisdom teeth out yesterday and am doped up on pain meds or I would probably feel up to go digging up some content. But the funny thing is it happens more on Blu-ray than it does Netflix. I know Blu-rays aren't flawless, but it happens way too consistently on some of my best discs (just going by the video quality scores over at High Def Digest). I'm not using D-nice settings, I actually used a C6 and CalMAN5 to calibrate it.

However:

1) In my TV-only calibration, my blue is actually pretty close to where it should be except for shooting up at 60%. If anything, have more red in my lows than I'd like.

2) I have a DVDO iScan Duo I do a second calibration on using Autocal. It gets the values a lot closer than I probably could. (And before anyone yells at me, yes, I've verified the problem exists when I remove the DVDO completely out of the chain and hook the devices straight up to the TV). There's virtually no difference between the Duo calibration and TV-only calibration in terms of this effect. Nor does removing the Duo and resetting the 2-point white balance to default help.

3) The strangest part is it's almost always grey, not blue. But I think the fact that it's blue here is one of the reasons I was finally able to actually get a photo of it.

aren't dnice settings or cnet settings for blu-ray sources? Anyone have settings for OTA or Cable broadcast tv for both HD and non-HD sources? I think NR at auto setting does help with some of the artifacts from non-hd sources.

Good settings are not source related. They should give you the best picture for whatever you watch. You may have to tweak them to suit you. The auto setting for NR with non HD would be a good example. But you dont need a whole different set of settings for OTA or cable.

Displays are generally calibrated to industry standards from generated images using calibrated equipment. Practically, that's the best you can do. Trying to calibrate to every public source would be very expensive and would require constant recalibration. Neither our OPPO Blu-ray player or our Comcast STB were involved in the calibration until it was time to check the results. Calibrators like UMR and D-NIce will play DVD or Blu-ray sources that they are very familiar with to check the work that they have done with their tools. Checking with either HDTV or SDTV is hard to do because the material and it's quality is always changing.

The TV Guide feature is no longer supported by "TV Guide" aka Rovi.

http://www.engadget.com/2012/11/27/rovi-gemstar-tv-quide-ota-shutdown/

Ok I've had my tv for about a year now and no issues.................until now. I noticed a small circle-ish image burned in at the top right corner. It's been about three days now and it's still there. I was wondering what I could do to get rid of it before contacting best buy for a warranty replacement. This really sucks cuz I had the ST30 and a bad pixel showed up and now I got a burn in issue with the replacement panasonic. (sigh)

I read on here somewhere that if it is not gone in 48 hours of watching full screen content ,it is considered burned. If best buy warranties against burn. Why would anyone buy their tv any place else. Jmo

They gave you a newer model because of 1 bad pixel? And now you have burn in right as the new models come out again? Let me know if you get a 2013 because of that burn in because I am going to have burn in every time the new models come out.

Not a newer model, but a similar one according to their stat sheet. My P50ST30 had a bad pixel right in the middle of the screen and it would flash on and off, very annoying. Best Buy came here and said it needs to be replaced but the ST30 was no longer being produced so they gave me the next best model, a Samsung E550, which did not compare to the ST30. I dealt with it for some time and eventually got rid of it for a ST50 (paid for it myself). Here's a vid of the bad pixel.

http://s693.photobucket.com/user/Chriseatsmud/media/SDV_0194.mp4.html

(dunno what happened to this forum but i used to be able to post videos via photbucket but now I cannot so click on link to see the video)

Look right in the middle, that flashing dot on the old ST30, so annoying LOL. Definitely worth replacing IMO (and BB's). Imagine watching Batman with that crazy flashing pixel. Drove me nuts!

I tried to capture the burn in on my smart phone but it cannot handle the image and shows nothing but flashing screen. I tried......
Edited by Muddeprived - 3/18/13 at 10:01am

Are you seeing the "small circle-ish image" when you watch normal source material? If not, what does it take to see the image?

In order to get burn-in you would need to watch the exact same source with the exact tame fixed image for a long time. It seems logical that under those circumstances you would know where your "small circle-ish image" came from. So far it sounds like you have image retention, and it would help if you could figure out what source caused it.

Click here for suggestions.

The only Best Buy near that has a 55st50 is a display model. Their offering it to me for $899, which would be $962 after tax. Should i Jump on it? Only comes with power cord and remote. No Box

I do play xbox games on it but I cannot seem to figure out where the image came from. I'm thinking maybe NBA2k11 game but unsure. It looks like a shape of a mushroom. It appears when the screen is bright, like during commercials and things like that. You can't see it during dark scenes.

I ran the slides again all night and now running the image retention slider for a couple hours. I hoping it will disappear.