Official Panasonic GT50 Series Discussion Thread [No Street Price Talk] - Page 189

The ST60 is the ST50 replacement for 2013

IDK ,,the game looks pretty decent to me ,some slight blur,but i'm not noticing any of the stuff you are talking about ,,but i sit about 17 feet away and wear glasses ...Only thing i can't adjust to is trying to watch it on warm settings

[quote name="HD-Master" url="/t/1403635/official-panasonic-gt50-series-discussion-thread-no-street-price-talk/5580#post_22849860
Try the settings I just posted and see if you notice any improvement.[/quote]

I will try your setting tonight. But I am not sure if this is an issue or not because I only see this issue sometimes. The thing that I am seeing is that when during a scene when the carmera pans from left to right or right to left the scene seems to stutter along its not smooth. Is this an issue that can b fix or is it normal for some cable shows and movies?

Those will work perfectly fine.

Very few people post to say "I love my tv and haven't had any problems". This would be my case though. I will say that it would be wise to monitor what the children watch for the first 200 hrs or so though for purposes of ir.

I use 6 of these. They're great.

First time watching live hockey on my 60"GT50. Looks awesome to me. All the other sports were superb since I got this t.v . Thought there might be a problem with hockey with all the things you read about how hockey looks on plasma's, but like with everything else with this t.v I have no complaints. I have a Samsung Led t.v in my living room and always thought this t.v was incredible. Now I practically never watch it. I have an Onkyo reciever that upconverts all my cable sources to 1080p. This probably helps with my 720p sources that they say this set has problems with.

Thanks everyone for the advice...that will save me about $350 !!

Also, would you recommend me purchasing a Panasonic 3D Blu-Ray player or is my PS3 good enough?

PS3 is a fine 3d BDP. No need for another player.

So I posted on some other threads to get more feedback. I was told to consider trading the GT50 for the VT50 so I can gain ISF calibration because the GT does not have the same capability. Can anyone confirm this?I bought the GT vs the VT because from watching the forums, doing the research, and speaking with top calibrators who own them for the price it didn't seem worth it. I was told the VT only got 5-7% better of a picture.

"Put 200 solid hours on the TV of careful non-static images, then call a high end professional local calibrator. ONCE calibrated, the VT50 will actually have a broader bandwidth (for lack of a better word).... it will be brighter cause the bandwidth gets "opened". It also will show darker areas darker = bandwidth opened.

This in turn will make the set look like the best picture possible on the market today IMO. It will portray a much more consistent picture and simply be doing what it was built to do. The GT50 does not have this ISF capabilities, so it can be calibrated, but the "bandwidth" will not get opened like it does with ISF software."

I have no idea what they are talking about when they mention bandwidth. The VT50 gets you ISF Day/Night modes and 10 point adjustment versus the 2 point with the GT50...which allows for more fine tuning.

So with 2 point is there really much a calibrator can do with these sets? I'm curious what the secret to getting the best picture is. My wife and I find ourselves really trying to push this thing to get brighter with more pop. The brighter we make the panel the more grainier the picture gets. I calm it down or go into THX and it's too dark and we lose detail-yet the blacks look nice and inky as billed. Is this to be expected? what are the specific settings that I should really be toggling the most to try and balance this out?

Also is it common for the foreground to always look very good and very details but have grainy backgrounds?

TX

They're out already. Several of us in here have one. Go get ya one!

At least with my calibration by chad b it was startling how much he was able to extract. What I found is that even though the calibration controls are limited, there is a lot of fine tuning and balancing between different variables that a pro calibrator simply knows how to do much better than us normal folk, especially with their custom patterns and equipment. Custom mode definitely has more pop than thx but it needs a pro to really lock it in. This is on top of whatever service menu things that need to be adjusted, but even setting contrast isn't as simple as it seems, I thought I did a decent job myself with spears and munsil but chad really embarrassed those efforts lol.

That's exciting. Chad really does seem to know his stuff. Out of curiosity is there a way to use Custom mode but have multiple setting profiles saved under Custom so I could have one for day, one for night, one for movies, another for football, etc...I just really have not found anything I like at all in any other mode. I noticed someone mentioned an HDMI switcher but these TV's seem pretty sophisticated. Is there another way?

Not to my knowledge you can only have one set of custom settings per input i cant see needing more than a day and night setting tho

Correct. Each input can have its own specific custom mode, so you can use a splitter and use one input for a day custom mode and another for a night custom mode. With my calibration and room and lighting my custom mode ends up working for both really well.

Thx cinema is nice deep and rich but the colors are muted and its not very exciting, a calibrated custom mode has so much more pop but still retains the deep blacks and no grain, just as smooth and rich as the thx cinema.

Can you recommend a worthy switch box? Also do they come with remotes?

Saying it has a 5 - 7 % better picture is meaningless. It's like saying linguine is 5-7% better than fettuccine. The VT has a darker filter and therefore will give a deeper black. Every post I have seen indicates that extra black comes at the expense of producing a dimmer white. So nothing is "opened up" its just slided down. Both of these sets use essentially the same panel and can only produce so much light. The dark filter on the VT absorbs more of it. Darks are darker but whites are darker also. If you view in a dark room, the extra black from the VT will give more contrast but if you view in an average living room with any lighting at all you will not see it. What you may notice is a dimmer picture.

The GT can be calibrated to produce an excellent picture. The VT has more accurate "tools" for calibration that may appeal to studio engineers but unless you have reference calibrated eyes you won't know the difference. If isf sliders were this vital to PQ every TV produced would need these capabilities.

The PQ on these sets is very similar overall. What you need to decide is if you want to pay more for a set of adjustments that will allow you to display very accurate test images. Tv, cable, and satellite are not calibrated and neither are most disk players. So you also need to think about what you plan on watching.

Plasma can only achieve a certain level of brightness. It can't compare to LCD. On the flip side, plasma can achieve a far better black level and therefore a much better absolute contrast ratio. If you want an image that is bright and colorful and stays that way in a bright room then you may want to look at LCD sets with LED lighting. If you want an image that is contrasty, has deep blacks, and looks better in a dimmer room then hold onto the plasma and let your eyes/brain adjust to the lower light output.

The blacks on my set are pretty darn black not sure i need blacker. I have been watching Tv now for about 12 hrs. I must be crazy. The picture is looks significantly better than it did this afternoon. Less light in the room perhaps.We shall see tomorrow.

This is classic DSE (dirty screen effect). It can only bee seen with a moving image. The camera panning back and forth on a hockey game is the perfect example of a "moving" white field. This will show all the non-uniformities in the panel. You will also see it on a green soccer field and panned sky shots.

White slides are not a moving image. They will not show DSE. They will show glaring irregularities but nothing compared to that seen on a moving video image. DSE is present on nearly all flat panel TV's. some show it more than others. My GT50 is probably the "cleanest" screen I have owned. I had tried and returned an LG LED/LCD a while back. The DSE was crazy bad on that set. It was present on nearly every panned image.

Yep, plasma in a "dim" room produces an excellent PQ. Daytime in a room with windows can be pretty washed out. Since 90% of my viewing is in the evening, I went with plasma but if most of my viewing were in the daytime I would have kept the LCD. Beautiful image in the day but horrid at night.

I went back and looked at my slides but in custom mod, obviously no motion or panning and could see these vertical lines all the way across the mid 2/3s of the panel. It was most noticeable on the white slides.

Well that great. We are about 50/50. Weekdays in the evenings (in the summer its still light). Weekends all day both days...my wife loves football as much as me. So the LED's look bad at night? why is that?

I am incredibly happy with this TV. Only 70hrs into break in slides and watched my first hockey game tonight . No IR from score bar or clock. No brightness issues like i had on my Sammy either. Ice looks great, motion is great, everything is great.

Couldn't be more thrilled with this bad boy.

I'm not sure why folks say this tv or plasma don't get bright. In terms of my LCD which is currently running together with my gt50 the ft is actually brighter when I use thx cinema than what I dialed in to my LCD. It gets super bright. I'll try some of the others posted settings maybe those are dimmer.

What I do have trouble spotting Are the 'inky blacks' everyone speaks of with this set. As it is today, It still looks like it has a little light haze like my LCD does. Less haze but certainly not deep black as I can tell. This is when it's night time with all lights off. Am I missing something? I am using the various ootb modes. The only test content is the standby screen of my fios box where it's a black background with Verizon moving around like a screen saver. What's good to see the blacks on this thing?

Yup.... Try some of the various settings in this thread also in 2nd post and also 1-2 pages back. Custom mode. Hd master, cnet, blackops, dnice are a few

2 point in the consumer menu doesn't mean much to a professional calibrator. They do a lot of work in the Service menu.