Official Sony HX850 Owner's Thread (46HX850, 55HX850) - Page 34

I just took that online color test you were talking about and I got a 4. That was pretty cool to be honest with you.

link for this online color test

Thanks, will give them a go.

One question, why motionflow not on using clear? I get why for films off but for tv it does boost motion resolution. Also smooth gradation on low is supposed to be good with mo negative side effects bar slightly noisier blacks.

Just curious.

I also usually aim for a gamma of 2.2 so have mine on -1.

Cheers.

Aaron

I watch cable tv (90% 1080i content, 10% SD content) most of the time. Would these setting work for cable TV? Or are they only for bluray?

Also 90% of the time I watch TV in a non-dark room. How do I tinker your settings to watch in a room with light? Increase backlight appropriately?

This is what I am using for Cable TV and I am liking it.

Picture Mode: Cinema 1
Backlight: 5
Picture: 90
Brightness: 50
Color: 50
Hue: 0
Color Temperature: Warm 1
Sharpness: 50
MPEG noise reduction: Auto
Dot noise reduction: Auto
Reality Creation: Manual
Video Area Detection: Off
Resolution: 40
Noise filtering: Min
Smooth Gradation: Low
MotionFlow: Clear
Cinemotion: Auto 2

Black Corrector: Off
Advanced Contrast: Medium
Gamma: 0
LED Dynamic Control: Standard
Auto Light Limiter: Off
Clear White: Off
Live Color: Off
White Balance:
R-Gain: -2
Rest default
Detail and Edge Enhancers: Off
Skin Naturalizer: Off
Edited by rajivr - 12/13/12 at 10:28am

http://www.xrite.com/custom_page.aspx?PageID=77

Sorry for this newb question but how do you use the TV to take this test? I don't have a pc connected to the TV but I can use the Xbox to get online. Would that work?

Picked up my new HX850 a couple of days ago and am using Kevins calibrations. My trouble is if I set the color any lower than 58 some HD Tv channels are fine but others become pale and washed out. The strength of the channels must vary and in order to boost the pale channels i have to keep my color at about 60. any suggestions?

@HaRd2BeAr
I turn motionflow off because I notice some soap opera effect with all the settings. Also clear lowers the backlight brightness, so a calibrated panel thats 100 nits becomes 80 nits peak brightness. Standard and smooth don't affect brightness. I haven't messed around with smooth gradation much so I can't comment. I turn off all the extra video processing as a habit. As far as liking a 2.2 gamma, thats fine. You can adjust the gamma from -2 to 0 to achieve what you want with my settings. Hope that helps

@rajivr
Cable tv and movies have very similar video standards, so my settings are interchangeable between the two. If you want the set to look brighter you can turn off the eco settings, which will increase brightness to 130 nits, which is really bright imo. Turning up the backlight has some bad side affects. The most obvious is flashlighting, but the gamma in brighter scenes will lower exponentially. The only way to get gamma back to normal is to lower contrast which pretty much brings you back to the same levels as my calibration. You have to sacrifice brightness in favor of accuracy if you want to get the desired results.

@STEVE
Color should be set at 50. Any higher than that makes the colors way brighter than they should be. You say you're watching on cable? Not all channels will look the same. Garbage in, garbage out.

Thank you


I don't notice any soap opera effect with clear and i am sensitive to it, smooth and standard look awful imo. As for the light output drop, this set has so much head room that i don't mind.

Cheers,

Aaron

I notice the same with my cable provider (COX). For example, their ESPN HD channel is significantly more color saturated that the other channels. The only option you have is to use two scene settings such as Cinema 1 and Cinema 2. Optimize one for the 'pale' channels as you call it and optimize the other for the more color saturated channels and switch as needed.

I am using the built in youtube app which could be the problem. Do the settings in the TV's setting menu apply to the youtube app or only the inputs? Are there separate settings for apps?

App settings are separate.

Aaron

If you go full screen on the youtube app you can change the video settings. For some reason they are universal for all the apps like netflix, which doesn't let you change the settings. Kind of a weird workaround.

I was referring to what I said earlier, "setting contrast to Max as you did blows out some of the detail in the WMC yuppie's white shirt, particularly around the buttons and pocket", and I was using all your settings at the time. To my eyes, the default 90 preserves all the detail in that video and is a very reasonable default. Going higher loses detail, and going lower doesn't really improve it. I guess it might still be a good trade-off to make up some for the very dim picture.

The Bluray player is a Sony BDP-BX1 and uses defaults for all the video settings; the TV input it is on uses the default "Auto" for its "HDMI Dynamic Range". It passes BTB and WTW, the TV considers 16 true black at its default brightness, while whites are visible up to 252 or so, which I understand is nominal. The PC is different. I have to set both the PC's Nvidia GT430 video dynamic range and the TV's "HDMI Dynamic Range" to "Limited (16-235)", which is necessary for the PC to agree completely with the Bluray player's output including BTB and WTW, without any other changes in the Nvidia control panel or TV settings. No other of the 4 possible combinations of dynamic range give the correct result. If the PC is set to "Full (0-255)", it expands and completely obliterates both BTB and WTW, and the TV blows out whites in both its modes, and the TV also crushes blacks in its "Limited" mode. If the PC is set to "Limited (16-235)" and the TV is "Auto" or "Full", the TV considers 0 true black, making 16 a light shade of gray, and the only way to fix this using settings is to dial down the brightness on the TV or card way below the default, which isn't a good solution.

While I don't know what the BD player is sending when set to its defaults, when I set it to "Limited (16-235)", it behaves the same as the PC if the TV is also set to "Limited". Unlike the PC, the TV's "Auto" mode equates to "Limited" in this situation, not "Full", so for the BD player, "Auto" on the TV would be fine when the BD player is set to "Limited". But that's all a wash as the defaults accomplish the same thing for the BD player.

The PC and Bluray player are on separate inputs, and I have direct input selection buttons on my remote, which I taught my main remote from the JP1 remote I programmed with these discrete codes, so switching between inputs is just one button press and as quick and non-disruptive as it can possibly be for A/B testing.

If your settings are "correct", then I prefer some degree of "incorrect" for the reasons already given several times now. And now you're overstating it as a "cure" for flashlighting. Your settings aren't much if any better than the ones I gave for the flashlighting I have. Both improve it, neither eliminates it completely, though I find it easy enough to ignore. I never would have guessed that was your primary goal in posting, but I guess it does help explain why you favor such a dim picture with poor shadow detail. Measurements are a great starting point, but you have to assess how they work out when applied to real material. Furthermore, it should be noted that people with meters (e.g. reviewers) end up with pretty widely varying results, even starting with the same presets like Cinema 1, so it's pretty bold for anyone to claim his is "correct".

I must have missed it. When I am watching a video full screen in the YouTube app how do I get to the video settings?

The test involves rearranging color squares to form a gradient, and I don't know how you'd do that without a mouse, so you need a PC AFAIK.

I'm not saying my calibration is verbatum, but it certainly is backed by scientific standards and measurements. Oh and sony blu ray players are notoriously inaccurate for calibrations. Check this out. 2012 model right there.

http://www.hometheaterhifi.com/blu-ray-players/blu-ray-players-reviews/sony-bdp-s790-blu-ray-player/page-4-on-the-bench.html


You aren't telling me anything I don't know about rgb levels. Since you're so critical of my calibration, let me explain to you why you are wrong. I don't favor a dim picture. 30 ftl or 100 nits is the industry standard for film mastering and tv production. My settings almost completely match the sony crts that film producers use. You say my settings have crushed black levels. I say that according to the bt. 1886 calculator the 2.4 gamma levels I have set match my black level reading of .003 nits. All of this helps with the flashlighting a lot. The black levels with eco on low are 3 times than when its off. It's not a "cure". I never said it was. I believe it to be the best way to minimize it though. Now if you're not seeing the full shadow detail down to 16 on avshd I don't know why that could be. Seems like something weird's going on. I have to lower my brightness to 41 to get only 24 to flash. And as for your last statement. I know for a fact that the meter I use is way more accurate than your eye. Period. You can go on and on about how its a dark picture and what not. That's all preference. But don't come on here and claim your eyeball as some reference. It's not.

That would be relevant if it was about my Sony BDP-BX1, AKA the BDP-S350, which was a 2008 model, or you could prove reviewers who came up with different calibrations were using buggy BD players. As someone who believes in accuracy, you should also have noted Sony fixed the issue in the 590 and 790 with firmware updates. I mean, the article you cited noted it. But I guess it's more dramatic to characterize the whole line as "notoriously inaccurate".

I wasn't trying to educate you on RGB levels. I explained how my equipment behaves in response to your question about the color space and RGB levels I'm using in order to accurately answer your question about these things, so that there would be no question about the terminology used.

You claimed "you were posting mainly because your settings fix flashlighting for the most part", like it's some good news you want to spread. I would assume everyone turns Eco off and uses Standard for the dimming. These things fix most of my flashlighting, and I configured them the moment I got my TV. The rest of what you're doing doesn't really help it much, but it does destroy shadow detail and give a very dim picture. Whether you like that is a matter of taste.

I specifically mentioned the APL Clipping Test, the one with both the black and white bars. I hope you're talking about that, and not the Black Clipping test, because the former is more relevant to real content, which is not just a black screen with gray bars on it. For APL Clipping, bar 24 goes away at brightness 48 for me. For Black Clipping, bar 24 goes away at brightness 44. If you're seeing 24 flash on APL Clipping at brightness 41, that does seem weird, because for me, even 28 is black at that level. Again, I can only say that my PC running WMC and XBMC display this the same, and they agree with my Bluray player in A/B testing. Refer to my previous message for a detailed description of what I see on these devices for RGB levels, including info on BTB and WTW.

There you go again claiming I've asserted my eyeball as some sort of reference. You should stop doing that, because it doesn't get any more true with repetition. The whole gist of my argument has been, I'll trust my lying eyes to tell me that (say) a suit coat is a featureless sea of black, and when that sort of thing crops up again and again, I'll question whatever methodology led to that result. I don't care if you assert that it's "correct"; other people with meters who have published reviews have very different calibrations than yours, and ultimately, I will go with whatever is most pleasing overall, and reject what looks overtly wrong after exhausting other causes for it.

Never mind I figured it out, you just hit the options button while in full screen. I did not have the settings correct in the youtube app and that is why I was still seeing the soap opera effect. Now that I have the settings right, I am really impressed with what this TV can do from a PQ perspective. I can vouch for the chronitis settings as a good starting point. I will still probably get it professional calibrated anyway. I sometimes get a little bit of light bleed through on the bottom corners, but it is not bad at all and I can live with it. The only thing I hate about this TV is navigating the built in menus and the controller is a bit awkward for me, other than that nice job Sony.

On a side note, when I turned on my TV this evening I seem to have lost all my internet apps (it had to refresh them) and some of my settings appeared to have been reset. Has this happened to anyone else? Maybe I hit something by in the menu at some point. I hope it is not a problem.

Do some research bro. I promise you i'm not just spouting b.s. Sony blu ray players have had an rbg problem for years. I guarantee your 2008 has the same problem. And yes, there are buggy bd players that have a bad dynamic range. Please read. http://www.hometheaterhifi.com/secrets-blu-ray-player-hdmi-benchmark/secrets-blu-ray-player-hdmi-benchmark/blu-ray-player-hdmi-benchmark-introduction/page-4-blu-ray-player-hdmi-benchmark-data-examples.html. There are more sony blu ray player reviews on the site if you doubt what i'm saying. Perhaps the rgb range on your blu ray player is being skewed.

The flashlighting is caused by the backlight. Any backlight setting above min will exacerbate it. So the best way, in my opinion, is to lower backlight as much as possible and turn the eco on low which further lowers the backlight to extend the black levels. And the picture being dim is your perception, not really based on film production. As far as the shadow detail. I don't think I can change your mind, but maybe it is your blu ray player.
,

Hmmm. On my blu ray player it displays the same thing for the black clipping and the apl clipping patterns. I don't know about anyone else, but that seems pretty odd. It appears to me that you have calibrated just your blu ray player and computer. That's fine if it's all you use. But if doesn't mean that ota, cable, xbox, ps3 etc will look right. I'm not trying to be a jerk, but what you prefer does not make my calibration any less accurate.

My tv has started rebooting randomly again! It rebooted twice over 30 minutes of watching this evening. It's getting quite annoying. How to fix this?

To quote from that article, which mentions the Sony 570, a 3D player from 2010, and doesn't mention my player, a 2D player from 2008:

I don't know which blocks they are talking about, because they don't say. However, I have the Spears and Munsil disc, as I mentioned in my first post, and I said everything checked out with it. When I look at it right now, the "Dynamic Range High" (white blocks) looks exactly as it should per the documentation that is available when one presses the up arrow key while viewing it. Same thing with the "Dynamic Range Low". In the "Contrast" pattern, which I guess contains their "gradients", the gradients are perfectly smooth, with no stairstepping, and everything looks exactly as S&M says it should in their detailed description of what should be seen. Ditto for the AVS709 tests I've talked about. In general, the article suffers from not clearly describing what they expect to see and actually saw, and they don't compare and contrast their expectations with the S&M documentation. I have no idea what they're saying with "it was possible to see all of the white blocks since they were adjusted down below where the contrast was calibrated, but on the OPPO, the WTW blocks correctly blended into the white background". S&M plainly says:

That is what I see. (And no, I didn't type all that in. It's from the S&M .pdf file in my Manuals/Video folder. I'm sure anyone can easily find a copy to download if interested.)

To the extent I can make sense of the hometheaterhifi.com article's prose, they are not describing the behavior of my system. It's not even close.

I think it's to be expected that the presence of the bright white bars in the APL test should cause a couple fewer black bars to be visible. If I obscure the white bars, say, by holding my arms in the right position to block them from sight, then I'm able to see those missing black bars. They were always there, of course.

It's happened to me once since I got the TV two weeks ago. Basically it froze like a crashed computer and rebooted itself. Annoying. Also annoying is the lag time from power on to UI availability. I haven't timed it, but it must take 30 sec to a minute or more for the UI (e.g. the Menu and Options screens) to become available. Once it starts to respond to button presses, it can be very laggy, with things like selection bars moving halfway between items and getting stuck there momentarily. This aspect of it is pretty damn awful.

FWIW, I have WIFI disabled and connect with a network cable. Automatic updates are disabled. I don't use any of the apps.

guys i am very happy with tv...

my problem is connecting this with my home theater system and other systems.

i have ps3, set top box and home theater system. all has hdmi. i want only sound to come in my home theater system. (i dont need video of home theater system.) My Previous setup was - two cable from tv to home theater system (red nd white) and configuring those port as out, then connecting set top box and ps3 bia hdmi and now all sound will be in home theater.. but in this tv i cant configure any in port as out port!

my home theater is sony dav dz290k. it doesnt have optical out.

When I first got my set I was confused why I couldn't see any white steps above 235. I thought that the wtw and btb were not passing through. But after talking to sony engineer, he explained that my set is doing exactly what it should. Every bar flashes from 16-235 as per tv reference levels. The wtw and btb levels are for color and they do pass through on the set. On the color clipping chapter of AVS709 I can see bars above 235 for all colors. If you see the white blocks above 235 on the white clipping then your blu ray players dynamic range could be below 235, i'm just guessing around 219. Thats what the article is saying when it says "it was possible to see all of the white blocks since they were adjusted down below where the contrast was calibrated, but on the OPPO, the WTW blocks correctly blended into the white background". Now regardless of what spear and munsil says you shouldn't see flashing above 235 as the set is automatically at tv levels. Some other t.v.s i've owned do pass 16-255 automatically, allowing you to see all the wtw bars on the white clipping test. This t.v. only does 16-235 by default, and allows just the wtw and btb colors (not whites or blacks) to pass.

I think they might be. Your blu ray player is older than the one in the article as you state. A lot of older sony blu ray players have this problem.

Thanks for the help. I have Comcast cable and my ESPN is also my most saturated channel. I have turned my color down to 57 so ESPN figures just look well tanned now and other channels I am happy with. Reading this forum has been a fascinating experience and it does prove the old adage that 'beauty is in the eye of the beholder"! I Turning color down to 50 on my Comcast channels produces a sickening washed out look.

I agree. 50 might be okay for Blu-Ray but on cable you def gotta bump up some settings that u wouldnt normally use.

http://www.spearsandmunsil.com/articles/technicalnotesonthepatterns.html
If luma is clipped, but R, G, and B aren’t clipped, your first assumption should be that contrast is set too high. Turn down contrast and see if the clipping goes away. If it doesn’t go away, then the player or display is clipping the high luma range. To figure out whether it’s the player or the display generally requires either test equipment or temporarily substituting a different player and/or display.

It is interesting that my PC behaves identically to my BD player; who'd have thought Nvidia and Sony would screw up in the same way? And again, the article says the bad dynamic range caused gradient problems. I stated the gradients they're likely talking about (a more meticulously written article wouldn't make me guess about this and other things!) are perfectly smooth, not "blocky" like theirs were, and they conform to everything Spears and Munsil have to say about them. If what the article said applied to my system, I would observe the problem it described with the gradient. But I don't, and I conclude the article does not apply.

Furthermore, on the AVS709 Grayscale Steps, I took a screen shot in XBMC. The 25 bars range from RGB(1,1,1) to RGB(253,253,253), and the 25 rectangles in the top strip have values 1, 5, 16, 26, 37, and then continue increasing in steps of 11 (with one 10 if I counted right) up to 245, and then they end with 253. All these rectangles are distinguishable, except of course for the two BTB ones, as they are full black at default brightness. The WTW ones are visible at default brightness and contrast. As I've stated several times, my BD player looks just the same. I don't see how this is consistent with your idea that my BD player has a reduced dynamic range or your latest claim about what some Sony "engineer" told you.

Well, no. I can take a screenshot of XBMC flashing AVS709 White Clipping and verify in a paint program the background is RGB(253,253,253). While the bars say 230, 231, ... 253, they actually contain values one less than that, and bar 253 (really 252) is just barely visible against the background 253, with all the bars progressively blending in up to that point just like they should. When I play the same test pattern in my BD player, I see the same thing. Ditto for the S&M patterns. As for BTB, if you don't see it when you turn up brightness, that's another indication that something's out of whack with your system.

Sigh. You are again asserting without evidence that my 2008 2D Bluray player has the same problem as a 2010 3D player, a problem that was fixed in firmware for the latter, and you're implying it wasn't fixed in a firmware update for my player, if it even had the problem to begin with. Furthermore, for what you say to be true, my Nvidia GT430 has to have the same problem, because it behaves the same way. Another big part of your thesis relies on information about WTW/BTB clipping you got from some unidentified Sony engineer; my experience contradicts what you were told, and the Spears and Munsil link I gave you lists alternate causes for what you're seeing. Still another part requires you to ignore the fact that the gradients look exactly how they should on my system, while the article you consider gospel talks about them looking blocky due to poor dynamic range. I could go on.

I'm loving my 55HX850 which I've had for about 3 weeks. It's in a very bright room that used to cause lots of glare and issues on our older set, but this one looks great.

So I'm not having any issues that I need to correct. And I'm not a videophile looking to get 'perfectly accurate' PQ settings. This LCD is in our family room, not a theater or media room.

Having said all that, I am curious about some tips or particular setting changes I should make anyway. Is there a Tips List or FAQ or something that lists handful of settings I should consider making (and why)? As I said - this is just our family room for various TV, blu-ray, and gaming usage and looks good to all of us. I don't think I need to get a calibration disc and go to that level.

Maybe you disagree. Let me know!

Our sony hx850's by default clip the wtw and btb range. They do pass the wtw colors, but only under ycbcr. If you are using rbg limited you shouldn't see anything flash above 235 anyway. It should only show tv values of 16-235 even with adjustments to brightness and picture. Every set i've owned, including the st30, st50, e7000, d8000, mitsubishi dlp, do act as spears and munsil describes. This set does not. If you don't believe me call tech support and ask to talk to an engineer

Don't be naive. Sony didn't just all the sudden start making bad blu ray players in 2010. You can find older sony blu ray players on that site that have the same problem. I don't really care about your pc. It has no baring to calibration as there's no way for me to determine if you have anything set correctly in the nvidia settings. My ati 5870 messes with all sorts of things. As far as your "experience" goes, after talking with you for a few days I'm pretty certain the sony engineer knows more about this set than you do. Your gradients are not correct.

You sir are talking b.s. here. I all ready said why, but I'll say it again. This set should only show 16-235 by default. Adjusting brightness should only raise the black level, not allow below 16 to be seen. The set does pass the wtw and btb colors though, which are all that really matter. Download and burn this disk. In the basic settings there's a pattern that shows color clipping for all primaries and secondary colors. White should end at 235, but the other colors should flash above that. This is how the sony engineer convinced me to not take my set back. http://www.avsforum.com/t/1406352/gcd-gamut-calibration-disk.

If in fact your blu ray player and pc are acting correctly as you state, the only conclussion I can come up with is that you had a bad ADC calibration at the factory. Here's some more info on that. http://www.avsforum.com/t/1424425/adc-result-variations. Please note the plasma's act differently then our sets.

My settings are pretty good. If it's too dark, or doesn't have enough shadow detail you can turn up the gamma from -2. I wouldn't set it gamma above 0 though.