Official Panasonic VT50 owners thread - Page 309

Comparison not compassion ...dam auto correct.

Gents

I am scheduled to take delivery of a 65VT50 tomorrow, and plan to run the D-nice slides...

I'm curious if some of you more seasoned veterans that have utilized posted settings might post links to those that have worked best for you? I've seen several different ones mentioned, but was hoping to see if I might gather a consensus on those that are the most highly regarded.

Thanks for all the help

B

Can some of you guys please look at the black strip on the bottom of the TV where it says THX, Real 3d etc and see if it has some slight waves in it? I only notice it sometimes but depending on how the light hits that strip I can see some tiny waves. I am curious if this is common or if mine is defective. I'm not sure I would even take the set back if this was only an issue on my TV since it isn't having to do with the actual display but it is still a little annoying when the light hits it and I notice it. Like I said you will have to have a light on and may have to look at it at a couple different angles to see it. Thanks!

robnix's settings look superb on my set, he has his settings and result charts in post #800 of this page.

http://www.avsforum.com/t/1410156/the-official-panasonic-vt50-settings-thread/780

David Abrams (dave@avical.com) makes frequent trips from LA. He has an outstanding reputation here at AVS. You can use the link in the signature area at the bottom of my post to find customer reports on his work.

Anyone have any input, please?

I've collected some calibration reports for Geek Squad work. They are at the top of the second post (flat panel displays) in the "reports" thread that's linked in the signature area at the bottom of my post.

There are many fewer folks here at AVS that think they can get something for nothing from BB than in the general population. I know of only one person who got what he wanted in a calibration from BB. He was experienced enough to have done the work himself, and he interviewed the BB calibrator before he let him work on his display.

There are very few BB stores with the very high end Magnolia departments. Most Magnolia departments are not equipped to provide anything other than Geek calibrations. I always vote for calibrators that are known and reviewed here at AVS. See below.

Oh you are talking about ISF settings. I don't think all of us have ISF modes unlocked. Any Custom settings that you recommend?

You can definitely do better, as you can see by looking at some of the other calibration reports. I think every one that is done by a non-Geek Squad professional has every color dead center in the boxes.

And, other than fixing the yellow shifted towards red (that were settings grabbed from these boards), the final calibration doesn't really jump out as "way better".

You can use any of the posted settings in Custom, all the adjustments are there. However, I can't image not having ControlCal now. With it you can:

1. Unlock the ISF modes
2. Change settings without the remote
3. Save and import settings files

It's a small price for a lot of convenience.

The blind leading the blind.

Yes Dave will have a walk in the park besting those pre and post settings you posted.

What you guys should have is a little knowledge of what the raw numbers mean. Its not that hard all you have to do is look at each column and read down, with the grayscale report the yCIE31 value should read (ideal) .3127, the x CIE31 value should read (ideal) .328, for the Yfl value there should be a target number so you can compare the actual readings.
The Gamma should read whatever the gamma target is set at (in my example and settings I use a gamma target of 2.2)


The CMS chart is easy to read, just look at the target numbers and compare to the actual reading for the calibration.


These charts are taken form my ISF calibration, see the first link in my sig for the full report.


ss
Edited by sillysally - 1/14/13 at 10:42pm

Emclean07: Check that you are running the HDMI cable between HDMI #2 (ARC or Audio Return Channel) on the VT50 and your Receiver with a high-speed or HDMI 1.4 cable. Also, if your Receiver is 1.4 HDMI capable then you most likely have to turn "HDMI Control ON" on the Receiver and make sure your Receiver is tuned to the "TV" input.

Got mine in early December from Best Buy. October build date. No problems except for buzzing on bright scenes.

Been running white screen.mp4 file to clean up my IR from gaming last weekend. Now this video goes in a loop, but when the run is over it pops up with the box showing what movie it is and time of movie, its up for just 30 seconds or so. I am noticing the time IR up in that corner. How can i fix this?

I want to set a loop then goto bed. the panny image reduction in the settings is 15min long only.


thanks all

Got my new 65VT50 and playing around with the 3D. Picked up a pair of Samsung glasses and a Sony Playstation glasses that are supposed to be compatible with Panasonic. The Samsung works great, but the Sony's don't work at all. Does anyone know if these Playstation 3D Glasses will work with the Panasonic TV?

The 2012's use bluetooth tech in the glasses. The PS3 uses infrared compatible with 2011 and 2010 tv's.

Hi everyone,

New the the forum, but hope to stick around. I just bought the VT50 during a sale at Best Buy this weekend and it was delivered about an hour ago. I had the guys attach it to the stand while I was here and I guess they were in a hurry or something because they didn't attach all the screws in the base of the stand to begin with and the TV sort of fell about two inches to land on the floor.

The TV did power up after they finished attaching it to the stand and I hope there are no lingering issues because of this. I guess I have 30 days.

So I downloaded the images from Evangelo's site and dropped them onto a 2GB flash drive which I inserted into the USB port. However, after powering up the TV and clicking "Viera Tools" and moving to "Media Player", I can't select Photos because it doesn't recognize the USB drive. Using Windows 7, I have since tried reformatting the drive from FAT to FAT32, exFAT, and NTFS, each time moving the jpegs back onto the drive after the format. I've repeatedly tried booting up the TV and getting it to recognize the flash drive, but to no avail. At the moment, I'm trying formatting in FAT32 under different allocation unit sizes.

Is there something I'm missing here? Any help would be appreciated! Thanks in advance!

Hey all - I posted this on the LCD boards but I wanted to get some plasma owner's feedback...I'll just copy and paste..

---

I purchased a 55in Sony HX850 around the last week of December. I was coming from a 4yr old 52in Samsung 650 LCD (great TV). I must say I set it up, tried practically every custom calibration found on the "official owners thread" but I still didn't find the picture to be THAT impressive. I will even go as far as saying Direct TV HD actually looked WORSE on this Sony than my old Samsung, but that could be because of Direct TV's crappy compression. Of course service providers aren't the way to judge a TV so I even put in some Blu Rays and again just unimpressed. The colors appear to be washed out and not as vivid as I expected. Some of the dark scenes have a blue hue to them (i know that is a sony thing) but I've messed with the white balance to try and fix it but still ehhh just lack luster. I even thought I might have a defective set but I dont see any DSE or Banding, slight flashlighting but I assume that’s normal on any LED.

The reason I went with the Sony over a Panasonic Plasma was because of plamas IR issues and performance in ambient light. I don't have direct sunlight in my room but we have two large 80in windows that are behind you during tv watching so any ambient light is reflected. I must say the Sony's light filter does do a great job at minimizing reflections...

So anyway the reason I'm posting is because I was contemplating on returning the TV for the Panasonic GT50 or VT50. Am I just crazy and was hoping for too much of a PQ improvement coming from the old Samsung LCD? I was hoping to get some peoples inputs on this or maybe recommend even more calibration settings (if that is even possible haha). I plan on putting in star trek and transformers blu ray to see if I've just been watching terrible blu ray movies to test PQ...haha

Thanks!

---

I've never owned a plasma so I have always been bias toward LCD/LED. Can anyone confirm that the colors are THAT much more vivid than LCD/LED or is the main benefit of plasma really in the black levels?

Thanks. Hopefully this will help others like me who didn't know that the 2012s use bluetooth!

I've got the elite sc-61 hooked up to Hdmi 2 on the TV. I'm pretty sure I had the receiver tuned to whatever input I had it on previously, which was Cab/sat for the directv box (I had the directv box turned off). Ill change the receiver to a different input and check to see if I have hdmi control on. My hdmi cables are pretty old and probably pre 1.4. I bought a bunch off of monoprice last week but I'm still waiting on them to arrive. Thank you the tips I'm going to mess with it when I get home from work today.

I purchased my 65VT50 before Christmas and I am now waiting for Chad to calibrate it. I have read this entire thread, as well as the settings thread, but I still have a question regarding the settings for my particular equipment. I have all of my equipment, including a Genie Directv satellite box and an Oppo 93 Blue Ray player, running through my Marantz AV7005 processor via HDMI cables to the TV. I have my Genie set to native and my AV7005 upconverting to 1080p the signal being fed to the TV. My question is should I also upconvert the Oppo 93 signal to 1080p or just pass the native signal on to the AV7005. This means double processing but would it result in a better picture because of the superior video chip in the Oppo? Any advice would be welcome. Thank you

I wouldn't want the output from the Oppo touched, I would want it passed thru to the display.. I'm not even sure I would want the Marantz doing any processing but I'm not familiar with that model.

You are in great hands with Chad, he can also go over all this during his appointment and help with this.

W Will the 2013's use the same glasses, or are these being phased out?

Just wanted to follow-up on my earlier post from today. I found another flash drive (1gb) and for whatever reason, the TV decided to read the slides on that drive. I have since replaced the Evangelo slides with those posted by D-Nice at:

http://www.controlcal.com/forum/showthread.php?t=891

Following his setting criteria for those slides for North American VT50 displays, I take it I'll let these run for 100 hours and then try some custom calibration settings until I can have a professional out to the house to calibrate it. In the link I posted, I only saw custom settings for the ST50 and not the VT50 though so I suppose I'll try some user-settings and see what looks good.

Admittedly, I'm a bit of a newb and unfortunately with my job, I simply do not have the free time to read through 100's of posts looking for answers. So if there what I'm doing is not the correct thing to do when you first buy a VT50, let me know.

Also, if a calibration specialist is not able to come through Virginia within the next few months, is that okay? I just want to make sure that if after the 100 hours of prep is over, if I watch TV and movies for a couple of months, I haven't defeated the purpose of the pixel aging process. =)

Thanks!

Emclean,

Don't know if you thumbed through this review,

http://www.hdtvtest.co.uk/news/panasonic-tx-p50vt50b-p50vt50-201204101757.htm?page=Performance

but they did mention something that caught my attention. To paraphrase, they stated that after spending lots of time calibrating their test VT50, they felt that their results weren't a whole lot better than the THX cinema display preset available right out of the box!!! So as far as budget goes, I'd submit that you are fine. I plan to run test slides (I just started them today) and then go to the THX preset and let'er rip. I have a Spears and Munsil BD that I can then check out the THX against and if I feel the need, tweak things from there.

my $.02

B

BTW, that link I posted was talking about the euro model. This is important to differentiate because they aren't able to tweak the set to get the best from it due to power consumption constraints. I hope someone corrects me if I am misstating this. Although I have never had a pro calibrator, I have used controlcal to input Robnix's settings and I can say with certainty that the change was significant enough to get praise from even my wife, who tends not to bother with noticing such things.

Same with my wife lol, robnix is good with women.

I've even been tempted to try his settings in 3D aswell but robnix mentioned that he'll dabble in 3D settings later on... I'll patiently wait.

Yes he is

I can't wait for some good 3d settings either!

So this is a tough one to answer and you'll probably get lots of different viewpoints, but I'll share my answer. In the last two months I've owned both my first LCD/LED (samsung ES8000) and my first plasma (vt50 obviously). I returned the LCD for banding defects and ended up with the vt50. When I was in the showroom its funny how all I could appreciate was the brightness of my LCD. When I had to return it, I was quite disappointed to realize that getting a banding free one was impossible too. But having had both tvs in my living room for periods of time I've gotten to appreciate how much better the plasma picture really is and how not so subtle good PQ is once you've had to stare at it for a couple of hours with varied content. But I will say, my initial choice of LCD over plasma was based more on fear of IR than just the perceived PQ quality of the LCD. Thankfully I've overcome that fear, but recognize for different people and different viewing habits it could be a deal breaker.

The LCD had some serious pop on some scenes and I was a bit worried that I would never get that back with the new plasma vt. Now that I have my VT setup right I've got that 'pop' back. Although the LCD is able to produce much nicer brightness, the vt50 when calibrated seems to have the same brightness as my LCD when I had it dialed in. Where the LCD starts to fall down, imo, is in many scenes where its processors can't tweak the picture well (dynamic contrast etc) you end up with that washed out look because you are forced to see the tv picture closer to its raw form and you end up with very bad contrast since the tv is not allowed to cheat with its tweaks and is forced to use closer to its native contrast. One of the things I appreciate most about my plasma and its pq is that from scene to scene the colors and black/gray are consistent; the LCD was constantly trying to dim parts of the screen in some scenes via both software and hardware to the point where you would have quite a few cases where a scene is set in one room and when they switched camera angles the processors would make an object that looked light in one scene, dark in the other, and vice versa and the colors would be washed out sometimes, but then pop very well at other times (I really don't miss this).

Also, say you are looking at a field of red beutiful flowers on a scene, I've noticed on the plasma's picture I'm actually seeing all different types/shades of red that I never really noticed on my LCD/LED - could be that they were there before, but the improved contrast of the plasma is just 'highliting' it more for me, I don't really know except to say I see it and appreciate it. So if vivid means more color, then I give it to the plasma again.

So take this for what it is, I'm now biased by my LCD/plasma side by side experience and feel fortunate that I ended up with the plasma.

Hope that helps,