Now that things have settled down, I wanted to discuss contrast again, and the limits of it's effectiveness. What I noticed is that it's not that nothing is happening, it's that it was so subtle it would have been impossible to see by eye from a normal distance. Of course the fact it can't be seen by eye normally is a testament to how truly negligible the effects are. I only tested Custom/Game/THX:BR up close, so I don't know how the other modes fared. Inches from the TV, shortly after 90 contrast I could see white areas start to get bright white snow introduced into the picture, like a black background if you turned up the brightness setting too high. I only saw any change to white areas though, other pixels/colors seemed to remain the same.
The major difference here is that settings before 80 act much, much differently. It only takes a few clicks to see that the entire image is getting brighter, if you look closely you can see a large surface of pixels just light up. On these modes you will not notice this effect occur at all after 80 (your TV may vary slightly on that number). HD-Master tested small white windows, and while I believe his results were correct, they just don't apply the same way to full screen content. Watching full screen content, 4:3 content, widescreen with black bars, etc. your contrast is effectively "capped". I think it's unfortunate the TV can't get much brighter than 80 in it's most accurate mode, but I believe any increase in brightness would be offset by the ABL anyway.
Feel free to ignore this, test it yourself, whatever you like.
