Official Panasonic VT50 owners thread - Page 257

The darker the environment the better higher contrast looks.



Look at a Sharp Elite in the mostly light Magnolia areas at BB. It stands out like a sore thumb for one reason - black level.

I have two Darblets. They're fun but neither is in use right now.

I can deal with GIGO, except I don't watch garbage. I think it's the VT that is adding noise to the picture. I watch the same programs on my 46" Sony LCD and it looks much cleaner there. And no, it's not the size because I can get right up to 2feet in front of the set and it looks clean. With the VT I need to get about 15 feet away, except I don't want to sit that far away. I don't think it's the video processing because I doubt the $700 set I got for the guest bedroom has a better video processor than the $3000 VT. Or maybe it does in which case it's a crying shame. (I've turned off all noise reduction settings on both sets, as they don't seem to do much of anything on either)

PS: is it normal to see a lot of pixel noise and slight but definite flicker with the VT when viewing a gray slide?

I'd rather some natural 24fps judder (which you see in movie theaters, digital or film, too) than all of the weird processing errors AMP stuff makes, for the most part. Although obviously not everyone agrees.

Agreed, cause your right, this natural flickering is in the theater that we are all so used to. But what I am talking about is definitely not natural, and does not look natural and is not natural steady "flicker". Cause that I could deal with. As you pointed out, the theater has that.

What I am talking about is completely herky jerky panned motion shots. Almost looks like when a movie is streaming, but hasn't the bandwidth to stay smooth... ALMOST. So no one attack me for that, its just my description for this issue that happens to ALL HDTV's if some sort of motion smoothening is not enabled. What you would really call it or describe it better, IDK ?

But believe me dude, its not natural or bearable to any person that likes things right. And especially embarrassing when trying to show off your TV to someone that still has SD and they need incentive to move to HD... they look at that and are like, WTF was that ? lol

1. you won't catch me watching streaming junk that barely matches my old DVDs
2. even for that stuff and for cable channels I still find that processing makes it all look even worse, now you have badly compressed signal plus DNR waxing something already low on detail mixed in with sharpening nasties on what bits it does pick up, obviously you like that, not everyone does

Yes and many of use complain about DNR and overdone and poorly done sharpening all the time. Usually a very tiny bit of sharpening needs to be done to overcome losses during scanning procedure or re-scaling to 1920x1080, but that is just a little bit of very careful sharpening and not nasty ringing, haloed junk using huge amounts using ancient out of date algorithms. I was always shocked how these huge studios would use sharpening algorithms that average joe wouldn't even think to still be using on their home snapshots. Although the DNR has generally proven to be the much worse culprit for blu-rays discs.

I never said that all of the processing was the same, I said that it doesn't matter. I have no doubt that some of them use more advanced sharpening and edge enhancing algorithms.There is no need to use sharpening and edge enhancement on material that has already had that done to perfection at best and way overdone already at worst. And it DOES NOT bring back detail lost by compression. It just adds false aliasing and grit! Maybe if you hook up by component or s-video or VGA instead of HDMI a very trace might help but who connects that way anyway if they care what things look like?

And who wants to add more DNR? SOme material has already been turned into wax works disaster. Extreme compression robs away even more details. Using DNR to try to mask blocking and stuff is pretty poor business!

Instead of focusing on all that, how about Samsung makes a set that doesn't use crappy edge lighting?? They do, but then those are only the low end models now so they use crummy tech and have poor black levels and they cut out the calibration controls! So the sets they make using backlighting that could produce a nice quality set they don't give you the options you need and use cheap tech and then the sets they give you the ability to calibrate and that use better tech they saddle with nasty edge lighting that makes them a waste.

I broke my current LCD and unfortunately need a new set now (had been hoping it would last until OLED was working reasonably and not quite THAT expensive) and it's hard to find something to get.

I'd like something with lots of calibration controls, that handles stills well and at 4:4:4 (i'm a bit worried about plasma IR and moving dither) along with 4:2:2 motion video, at least has a chance to look good in a dark room (no edge lighting), can have all the automatically chaning the backlight lower for dark scenes and smoothing AMP and so on all 100% defeatable. And it's hard going. The only LCD that do anything right these days seem to be the super premium models from a couple companies and even they have issues and then plasma might be the way to go but I wonder about IR and dither just to name two. LG puts in good calibration controls across the entire line of their plasmas but some say the black level is no good and the IR really bad (is the black level/true contrast ratio worse than say a Samsung A750/C650 LCD? or merely just poor for a plasma?) Panasonic plasmas sound good, although you need the expensive VT to get full calibration control and OLED is coming soon.... (and I do wonder about IR even with these and especially about the pulsed dither and the persistence causing 24Hz input at 2:2 or 3:3 causing flicker).

A NEC PA series monitor (although the blacks would be rather weak) or a non-IPS Eizo in HDTV size would be nice hah.




I find using that stuff makes over-compressed material even worse. No amount of sharpening brngs back detail on a nasty cable channel and using DNR to smear bad compression isn't much of a solution. I mostly watch relatively decent OTA HDTV or blu-ray or stuff sent from my PC stills or high quality video I've taken myself and such.
And since I use my PC to drive things I can have the PC apply processing, I can have it do super quality upscaling for SD and DVD etc.

And a garbage input is always going to look garbage, I'd rather focus be put on making sets deliver a great signal fanstastically then focusing on voice activation and built-in web and processing to fix up garbage input (and sometimes they leave some stuff undefeatable and then it just messes with your ideal signals which is really, really annoying so I'd just as soon none of it was in there so they can't end up being tempted to leaving on parts of it hidden under the scenes.)
Edited by skibum5000 - 11/19/12 at 5:11pm

Reports like this do make me wary of the GT/VT50 and perhaps even plasma in general.

I wonder how that looks when you are showing slide shows? It sounds bad enough during video.

I need to go take a look at BB, although they settings and material they use make it hard to known what is really going on.

Hello all! Just got the 65" VT50 and I have a question. I previously had a sharp lcd and ran my pc to it from dvi to hdmi. Trying to do the same with the VT50 and the pc sees it, but the VT50 says no signal is being received. Any ideas? I really what this set up and this is a little frustrating.

Thanks!

I purchased my VT50 yday at Best Buy (finally getting them to price match) and I as well saw noise on one of their displays, which showed a rock concert... It did not look good, I could see the noise from 12 feet away, now question is what the source was, and even with a HD source, that material was probably not mastered well... still I was kinda shocked to see that noise... So far I haven't read much about the TV introducing noise, until reading your post and seeing that made me wonder...


yeah, their sources suck... on another VT50 display at the Magnolia in BB, they had a Blu-ray of Avatar running (despite what you think about the movie is a well mastered source), but these fools split up the signal for 12 TV displays and it looked so pixely bad, that i though I was watching a 360p super low bitrate rip... it was impossible to determine which TV displayed that movie better...

Good thing with purchasing from BB, you can currently return / exchange the TV until 01/24, so plenty enough time for extensive testing and making up your opinion... ;-)
Edited by Iron Mike - 11/19/12 at 6:01pm

Todays new plasma t.v.'s will not have burn in problems compared to plasmas from 5 years ago or so. Check the forums on AVS, there are many great customers of the Panasonic Plasma VT50 that have done their own calibration and incredible results. I personally have the TC-P65VT50 and have used the calibration setups that many people on AVS have used for the same t.v. with excellent results. This is the place for truthful information.

I hope I've helpd you out here.

Have a great holiday.

If you pan too fast at 24fps it will do the herky jerky thing, home or movie theater though. 3:2 pulldown can add another tiny layer if you don't do 24 directly.

Sometimes blu-ray may get a bit herky-jerky if your graphics card doesn't have full h.264 decoding in HW or you use a CPU-only player or something but that is it's own matter.

Maybe I'm not sure what you are talking about.

Tell me if you see the noise too once you get it going (TONIGHT ).

mine will be delivered on Friday (11/23), but yeah, I'm excited to see what's going on...

will break in the initial 200h asap and then to do a first quick cal with Controlcal (I guess) and then do a full 125 point cal with the Mini 3D...

How long are people running the slides? I thought D-Nice had posted to do 100hrs.

Congrats.

You don't need to use Controlcal for your VT50, all you need is Calman to assess and control your ISF modes via LAN (socket in calman, same as you would use to connect with controlcal)) using the DCC controls of Calman. Use the DCC controls to input brightness (55), contrast (81), sharpness (0), Color temp (Warm1), screen brightness (mid), gamma (2.2), turn off all enchantments for both night and day ISF modes. Then when you run the 3D LUT cube and your Mini 3D all you have to do is use your remote to set your VT50 to one of your ISF modes and then calibrate using the 3D LUT cube workflow.
These settings are a good starting point to use with the 3D LUT cube 125 point CMS and a 21 point gray scale calibration workflow, of-course using your Mini 3D.

Using your computer, I would minimize all running programs before starting the 3D LUT cube workflow.
Also if you are using Calman, do not use 504 RC1 (as of this post), use the posted CM5E 503.

Good luck,

ss

What D-Nice said was if you are going to use his settings, but not to use if you are simply burning/breaking in to VT50.
Of-course there are no D-Nice settings for the VT50.

ss

sillysally,

thanks as always for your detailed response !

So the direct control issues C5 had in the past with the VT50 are gone ? I remember (pre 125 color cube era) that people said C5 had issues and ControlCal was the way to go...

I also wonder if I should do a rudimentary calibration on the VT50 via Calman / ControlCal just to bring the VT50 closer to it's target and then do the 125 point Mini calibration afterwards... ? Some users have been saying that is the way to go (so that the Mini - at the end of the day - has less processing to do), others have stated to disregard that initial calibration and work straight with the Mini... what do you think regarding the VT50 ?

--- As a side note: I have calibrated my Sony KDS-R60 XBR1 RPTV using the Mini 3D and C5 and w/o a (very) good initial calibration the Mini with 125 point Autocal could have not done much... the colors of the TV were so far off out of the box, that the C5 Autocal did a HORRIBLE job... extremely disappointing... on top of that the values adjustable in the C5 Mini DDC interface are simply not enough to compensate the color offsets... I'm assuming that is much less of an issue with the VT50 out of the box ---

Also, how long did you break yours in before you did your first 125 point cal ?

Do you see noise in inferior sources as I mentioned in one of my above posts ? It really surprised me when looking at the screen in BB (with one particular source), but it's obviously impossible to tell whether that was the source or the display...

Also, I saw your post in the other thread regarding the MLL fix for 504 RC1, I guess I'll be using that since I'll be using a D3 (profiled to an i1Pro) and I hope the new sync mode improves performance...

Thanks !!!

- M
Edited by Iron Mike - 11/19/12 at 10:35pm

ss

I was agreeing with you.

I watch those things, satellite TV mostly, lights on mostly.
When I stream movies from Vudu and iTunes, the quality is really, really good. I don't know what junk you are streaming, though.

My VT50 looks great with these sources.

thanks for the detailed explanation, follow up questions:

by "setting the RGB controls" - w/o a 6 point standard calibration - I assume you mean the 30 / 100% IRE adjustment in pre cal ?

so, what you're saying is that it might not be possible - being in the 3D LUT workflow - to access the Calman VT50 DDC controls in pre cal in the 3D LUT workflow, because the DDC is already connected to the Mini ? If that's not possible, I could still run a second Calman instance in a Virtual Machine and do that... or just set the 30 / 100% in another workflow (Quick Analysis) right before you enter the 3D LUT workflow... btw, why are you not using Controlcal anymore to access the VT50 directly, I remember you were a fan of it ?

From my understanding (and I might be misunderstanding something here), it would be the opposite, as the 125 point cube cal has less to alter in the signal to get to the specified target... The only question is which video processor does a better job ? The Mini or your TV ? If your TV video processor does a horrible job, it's better to leave as is and let the Mini handle as much as it can (as I said with my Sony, I had to utilize both and now it's a very, very good picture)... at the end of the day the 125 point cube only alters what needs to be altered, reading with the meter what the TV currently outputs and then making decisions based on that, so if the TV is already decently calibrated, it has less adjustments to do in some of the areas... please correct me if I'm wrong here !!!

Thanks !!!

- M

btw, the new beta software (504) really is bad if you try to use it with meter sync mode turn on, so until Calman gets a grip on the 504 version I think it wise to use the 503 version.

I guess you already know how to tweak the 3D LUT cube with Calmans settings.

ss

Finally got my replacement set yesterday and I'm glad to report that there is once again no buzzing, no dead pixels, no issues at all, except one. When using the color slides, I can see very faint vertical lines running through the top middle of the screen about a quarter of the way down. These are very faint and I can only see them being right up to the screen. However, it doesn't matter what color is showing I see them. What can these be? They aren't noticeable from any normal viewing distance or a foot away. Could this affect picture quality? This VT50 also doesn't seem as sharp as my last one, at times, unless that has to do with the aging of the panel and the old one having more hours on it and the picture getting better with time.

well, I know how to use the 3D LUT workflow, not sure if there are any "special tweaks" to it...

I did about ten 125 point Autocals on my Sony KDS-R60XBR1 RPTV, as I mentioned above this is whole different beast, as the technology is 7 years old, it's missing some crucial controls and out-of-the-box the TV is completely off...

Like I said, just using C5 and the Mini with a 125 point cal was a joke - absolutely unusable results... After doing a standard 6 point calibration - which took forever, due to limited service menu controls and all manual work with the remote - I got a decent cal in and then ran the 125 point cal with the Mini. This did it, the 125 point Autocal adjusted everything that I couldn't due to the missing controls and everything else it does... The results are very, very good (except one issue at 10%), picture is fantastic - very film like when watching Blu-Ray... Wanted to tweak more and try more approaches, but then the Mini stopped working and I had to replace the unit twice (Lumagen great customer service)...

I'm very excited to compare this picture to the new plasma technology in the VT50...

will keep you updated, my expectations are very high seeing your results

- M

Hey guys I have a 55VT30 that I bought right when it came out. Sometimes I'm happy with it, sometimes I'm not, I think the PQ could be better...what really sucks is I have burn-in on the left upper corner where the DISH logo is. Why? I have no idea, I just do regular viewing. Will I notice an improvement going from VT30 to VT50 that significantly? I'm just not sure if plasma is my thing anymore because of this burnin issue, but I don't like lEDS/LCDS because off angle sucks

Folks, I apologize for posting this here since I already posted it on a separate thread, but I'll try to remove it from the separate thread as this might be the best place for it (lots of VT expertise here!):

======
A week ago I bought a 65" VT50 and really love it. I've been doing very careful break in (no letterbox, full screen, no logos, etc.) and am 50 or so hours into it but when watching a show recently, I noticed what I think on LCDs would be considered a small section of clouding in the upper right corner. It's not noticeable when the scene is dark but when it's lighter it is noticeable. It's also definitely noticeable when a gray screen appears briefly when I turn on cable.

There is nothing on the panel (no smudging or anything), I checked...it's definitely on the inside. The rest of the panel is beautiful, no apparent differences in brightness whatsoever. BTW, I am NOT referring to variations in brightness that one can see during the anti-IR "erasing" thing...those don't bother me and they're faint. But anything that's noticeable when watching is to me unacceptable.

I bought it from BB and they price matched the internet so I got a nice deal on it. It wasn't a return, it was a new unopened unit and they assured me of that. When I bought it they were also very reassuring that if I had any problems they'd make it right and exchange it, etc.

So, I'm definitely going to be taking it back but I was curious if anyone else had run into the same situation. Any ideas what this might be? Are there occasionally defects in VT panels? Any constructive responses are greatly appreciated.

Thanks, and take care!

I just received my second 65VT50 - the first was returned due to a dead green pixel. Really! The replacement looks good so far. Doing the slide burn-in thing (I have read all the comments on this and decided it couldn't hurt. The video I watched on the first one (delivered Sunday) looked pretty darned good. I will get it calibrated later.

What did you use to find the dead pixel? Some RGB slides on the set itself or something on a Blu-ray test/calibration disc?

The RGB slides. It was also visible, but less obvious, on the initial menu screens which are (mostly) blue, but it was blindingly obvious on the green slide. I bought from the local Paul's TV and they gave me no grief about it at all. I checked the replacement with all three colors before the delivery guys left.

I did the same with mine. Got mine replaced because of a flashing green pixel. Checked the new tv with the slides before the delivery guys left, no dead pixels. Two days later, there is one dead pixel, so they do develop with time, But one dead pixel that can't be seen from any normal viewing distance is better then a green flashing one that can be seen.

Can anyone comment about the faint vertical lines I can see on the slides from up close? From normal viewing distance, I have no chance of seeing these.

I don't see any faint (or otherwise) vertical lines on the slides on my set. I do note that the images are JPG and there is some "shimmer" to the image, so it could be one of the TV's NR circuits at work.