Plasma Owners - How do you calibrate saturation?

Originally Posted by buzzard767

Use windows APL patterns, 100% saturation, and 75% luminance to start. If the results are not satisfactory try moving to 75% saturation and see if that helps make the overall gamut more accurate.

Originally Posted by zoyd

75% works well for me too. Tracking chart using the GCD disk can be found int the 2nd post in the Samsung D7000 & D8000 Settings/Calibration Thread

Originally Posted by Monitorman

Hi ndaa75,

The best way to set Color/Saturation on any display with a Blue Only feature like the Samsungs is to use SMPTE Color Bars (75%), separate Blue and adjust according to the panel. Typically I set Samsungs at either 46 or 47 for Color and it looks correct. Try that.

Originally Posted by Doug Blackburn

The blue filter method is a waste of time if you are using a meter on a video display with full CMS controls. Set the color and tint to their middle/default settings and leave them there.

Use window patterns that cover 10%-18% of the screen area for a plasma panel. If the window patterns are too large or too small you will have a bad calibration result.

Use 75% color patterns which are close to 50% stimulus when your Gamma is 2.2-2.3... that means if 100% red measures 7 fL for luminance, the 75% red window pattern will measure about 3.5 fL. The luminance measurement for 75% windows will vary somewhat depending on what Gamma you have set the video display to. I would recommend a gamma of 2.25-2.3 for your plasma model.

Your calibration software should have some means of showing you hue, saturation, and luminance for each color when you are doing color calibration. Many programs show you a triangle that represents HDTV color space (Rec. 709). If a color measures INSIDE the triangle, it is under-saturated. If a color measures outside the triangle, it is over-saturated. One of the CMS controls in the Samsung displays will move the measured color between over- and under-saturation. The calibration software has to tell you when you have selected the correct saturation, sometimes this is done by minimizing the dE error, some software shows you a "box" that represents where the color should measure and your are correct when the measurement "dot" is in the center of the small box. If you don't know how this works in your calibration software, you need to find out more information about your calibration software.

Some CMS controls will interact... sometimes a lot, sometimes a little. So it's not unusual for one adjustment to require a tweak on one of the other 2 adjustments (3 adjustments total for each primary and complimentary color, 18 controls total).

Originally Posted by zoyd

I explained this already in post #11, the red slider for the red primary controls luminance not saturation of red. If you have blue and green set to 0 for that primary, that is the maximum saturation you can get. Trying to increase luminance to increase saturation will not work, as you have already noted.

Originally Posted by TomHuffman

Are you measuring window test patterns in a dark room? Ambient light will reduce measured saturation. Full field test patterns will ruin luminance readings on a plasma.

I have not found Samsung plasmas to have undersaturated reds and greens in the Custom color space, Movie mode. So long as green and blue are at zero (for red) and red and blue are at zero (green), these primaries should be pretty close to the ideal.

If you measure something significantly different, then you have a non-standard display, your meter is not measuring accurately, or you are measuring under non-optimal conditions.

Originally Posted by Doug Blackburn

As I said in the original post, sometimes moving one control causes some other parameter to change. So you have to adjust another control (or all 3) every time you make one adjustment. You have 3 primary colors, red, green, and blue and 3 complimentary colors... magenta, cyan, and yellow. Each color has 3 controls (at least I've never seen a Samsung display with CMS and less than 3 controls per color). Those controls control hue (the color), the saturation (what you are trying to change), and luminance (how bright the color is). Sort of... as mentioned, those 3 controls may interact. So if you adjust saturation and luminance goes up, you have to adjust the luminance control lower to keep the color from getting too bright. When adjusting red, the hue control will likely move the measured red point closer to green when you move it in one direction or towards blue when you move the control in the other direction. The saturation control... sounds like you know what that does. The Luminance control will move the brightness of the color in question up or down.

So... let's say you adjust the saturation control to get red closer to the Rec709/HDTV coordinates for red, but red gets brighter while the saturation improves. You then lower the luminance control to get red brightness correct again. But that causes red to de-saturate again. So you make another move with the saturation control and again, you improve saturation, but red is too bright again. So you use the luminance control to make it dimmer, but that, again, de-saturates red. You are stuck in this cycle and can't get the saturation and luminance correct at the same time. This is where the "art" of calibration comes into play. Your TV is simply not capable of making the red point accurate. So you have to decide whether the saturation error or the luminance error is more obvious and live with one or the other. Another option is to leave half the error in saturation and half the error in luminance and live with that... I'd probably do the latter.

The other thing about errors, luminance errors in particular, tend to be more problematic if there are large swings in luminance errors... say red, green, and magenta are too bright while cyan, blue, and yellow are too dim... that's a bad scenario for image quality. You want them all within 10%-15% of each other (less if possible). So if you end up with red being too bright and there's nothing you can do about it, you should make all the other colors too bright also... not by a crazy amount, but you definitely don't want a situation where red is 30% too bright and some other color is 30% too dim. If I had a problem where red was going to have to be 30% too bright, I'd probably try to get the other colors to be about 15% too bright.

Using the Color control in the user menu MIGHT help with red saturation---or not. You won't know until you adjust it and re-measure and see if increasing Color allows you to get closer to the ideal red point while maintaining a more accurate luminance level. Color controls do different things in different displays so you'll want to measure ALL the colors after an adjustment of the Color control because the Color control might help you fix one problem, but it could create a problem with some other color. Our vision is most sensitive to Green so you want green to be as accurate as you can make it. Cyan and Yellow should be the next most accurate colors. Red and magenta should be next in line for accuracy, and blue errors would be the least-obvious errors. But large errors in any color will be visible so you have to keep things in balance (again, part of the "art" of calibration that you can't learn in descriptions of how to calibrate).