It's official. I see a rainbow-like effect on every plasma. - Page 15

every one ive ever seen at BB, from SXRD's to DLPs to ILAs to plasmas to lcds. they all have it to some extent, its a casualty of mpeg compression.

so maybe you can enlighten me on the "rainbow effect"...how can a FLASh of any kind of light be considered a rainbow?? when i think of a rainbow i think of curved bands of color...can you enlighten me further?

Read the thread?

yes i read it and other things...all it says is a flash of red blue and green light...or a flash of yellow light....again, how can this posssibly be called a rainbow?

seems that good old RH doesnt see it on plasmas either...

For anyone who doesn't see this effect, walk right up to your plasma while some pure white credits are scrolling on a black background. It will look like the white letters are leaving yellow and green streaks as they move. I love my plasma and think it's the best technology out there, but i also am well aware of these rainbows. No one's ever mentioned them to me, though, while watching my TV, and i've had plenty of critical viewers. I did however get lots of comments on the LCD i had before my plasma as far as crushed and greyish blacks. I think this issue is very minor, and even being well aware of it i don't see it often while watching a regular movie or TV show, but it's still there.

Is this effect more annoying than watching a crappy cable sd signal on a crt?

That actually sounds a little different than what I notice as I do not actually see trails, I just see each color seperated, that is if I move my eyes side to side. It is occasionally noticeable on black & white material because, of course. there is more contrast and a lot more white material. Might this be some sort of phosphor lag?

Does the pioneer have banding, dithering, actual looking rainbows in the picture sometimes?

yes it does...and most of the time it is due to the mpeg encoding at the source, because the pios decoder is one of the best. i have yet to see any digital signals without some banding to some level, the only time i dont is on some of the highest bandwidth discovery HD shows, etc. i did have the vizio p50 before, and i can tell you flat out the banding was worse on it than on the 5070.

No, I'm talking about yellow flashes in any high contrast moving material material. I've never viewed a dlp in a home environment and never bothered looking at them much in the stores, so I don't know how much this resembles the rbe on those. I find it to be similar to the glowing green/yellow trails on crts, only instead of trails they are very bright flashes. In some scenes the yellow/green flashes can be quite jarring, but luckily I don't notice them most of the time. Usually just 1-3 times a movie.

Anyone: "Is this effect more annoying than watching a crappy cable SD signal on a CRT?"

Good lord; maybe only < 0.1% of all plasma owners can actually see this if at all.

i just watched the white credits scrolling on the black background on HBO HD after watching mr and mrssmith...with the pure cinema set to ADV which is 3:3 pulldown, the letters stayed very clear as they scrolled up the screen, and i saw no colors other than white or black...no yellow, blue, green, or any other colors splitting up. maybe you just need to buy a quality set.

So this is much ado about nothing, then. Thanks for the input.

For me, the hardpart is the yellow "flashing" Even if high contrast, fast movment is not on the screen.. just the act of switching my eyes from a bright object on the screen to a dark one will sometimes cause this "Flash"

Tonight, for example.. was watching BSG rerun.. the corridors on this ship are faily dark, with bright lights placed alongside.. whenever somebody passed by the lights, or even if i moved my eyes to focus on something else.. yellow flash again.

I've even seen it on the cuffs or collars of people in black suits.. if they move fast..

I went upstairs, turned to the same channel on a Sony Grand WEGA 32" CRT.. no such problem.. I tried moving close, far away.. shaking my eyes from side to side.. lights on, off. ect.


In the end, I'm returning my Plasma.. I'm getting an LCD instead.

I don't want to, the Plasma is so rich.. but this "flashing" is tiring, it ruins my enjoyment.. it actualy starts to "hurt" after a couple of hours..

So I'll have to settle for a"flatter picture".. "grey-blacks" ect... it's better than the visual discomfort I'm feeling now.

To the majority of you whom don't notice or are bothered by these effects.. you are so very, very lucky.

It's on my friend's pioneer 5060 with 3:3 pulldown enabled where it's needed. You should just consider yourself lucky that you can't see it . This is like someone coming into a dlp rainbow thread and claiming they don't exist just because they can't see them. If you look earlier in this thread you will see where I noted seeing this. I never said I saw it in credits since I've never really seen credits on his tv. Just movies on dvd and numerous tv shows, and the dvd is stopped before the credits roll. It's not bad, just 1-4 times per movie or show if it's showing the high contrast content that brings it out for me.

Well i disagree there because the same problematic scenes with dithering and banding dont show up on lcd, crt. I agree though the pioneer is probably less annoying with dithering compared to vizo, but i come to the conclusion it's straight up a flaw with plasma technology. The picture the vizo gives is unreal at times and can hang or surpass pioneer anyday of the week, black levels, color accuracy, brightness, clarity. HD is superb. It just cant get better. But yet shows plasma true colors imo with noise,dithering-actual looking rainbows, and the dlp rainbow effect with bright scenes, or dark scenes with white in them.

For anyone that says their sensitive to dlp rainbows and dont see the plasma rainbow effect, not the dithering rainbows, i dont know what to say their but it is extremely similar. The difference is dlp has rainbows with dark scenes, plasma has it with bright scenes, and dark with white in them. B&W movies like sin city are a killer..

I think the effect also is more noticeable with the amount of white your plasma produces. I know watching credits with the vizo it can produce extremely bright white credits compared to other plasmas i've seen.

If plasma was perfect it would have no.
Dithering-banding-actual looking rainbows in the picture
DLP like rainbow effect
Tendancy for whites to look a little pinkish at times.
Less noise which plasma is very revealing and seems to enhance noise.

for my pioneer 5070:

1. again, i dont see any of this "banding" other than what comes from the mpeg encoding
2. i dont see these rainbows and i have pretty good eyes, my vision is 20-15
3. my whites look a little bluish, not pinkish, and i like bluish whites and couldnt care less about 6500K whites
4. with my noise reduction set to medium, i see almost no noise while retaining sharpness.

Probably a placebo effect. I never read anything good about noise reduction and it's almost always preffered to leave it off. Interesting.

have you seen it in action on a pioneer? they implement it very well.

Not on the pioneer, but on my sony lcd noise reduction adds motion trails, on the vizio it dont do nothing.

All of the flaws i mention are not on lcd. But yet plasma still produces the best image. lcd can range from grey black, to straight up looking blueish black it's famous for. Plasma black levels win by long shot. GL

This could have been written by me as i suffer from the exact same problem !
Scrollings with bright lights in BSG corridors do produce some REAL green rainbow for my eyes, very annoying.
I hate LCDs and Plasma hate me, i guess i'm screwed...

I haven't read this entire thread, but I find the subject interesting. I am extremely sensitive to RBE on DLP and cannot watch one for more than a few minutes without a headache and eye strain. Even 3-ship DLP is impossible for me to watch. I'm sure I would be in the major minority on this issue.

I have had a 42" Panny ED plasma for a few years and have never seen anything like RBE, but I just finished auditioning a bunch of plasmas at home and I noticed something that looked like RBE or an occasional flashing of sort that matches some of the descriptions in this thread.

For those who see this I wonder if there will be a plasma that works for you. I auditioned a number of plasmas and I only recall noticing this on the Pioneer models...5070 and Elite 1140 I had in-house. I didn't notice it on the Samsung, Panny, or Fujitsu.

^^^turn on the ADV 3:3 pulldown and you wont see it.

Do the flashs i see when moving my eyes from white to black part are due to the different green-decay time or is it a different thing ?

This issue is really weird about who can see it. I have only ever watched a 3-chip dlp projection set up in a real theatre when I saw sin city, and I noticed no rbe at all. I also am not very sensitive to flicker on a crt tv playing a movie (flicker kills me on crt monitors no matter how high the refresh rate though). But even when watching little miss sunshine on a Pioneer 5060 with 3:3/72hhz enabled it was pretty easy to see the green flashes. However, they are few and far between. But I decided to test how it would be if I quickly moved my eyes from one side of the screen to the other (since people have reported that this brings the effect out), and then the green after-images/flashes are constant. So I imagine that maybe you are noticing this now because the plasma is larger, and so maybe you are moving your eyes more as things happen on different areas of the screen.

No one else that I know that has seen this tv can see the green flashes. So you are probably just among the unlucky minority.

I should really test if I can see this the next time I go to gawk at the 65px600u. It's always playing 8-below which really isn't the best material to bring this effect out for me, especially since I have only ever seen the tv during the slow indoor sections on that tv and only for a few minutes at a time. But maybe if I try to bring out the effect by moving my eyes quickly from one side of the screen to the other I can bring the effect out on that movie. I highly doubt that the panasonic would be any better, since plenty of panny users have reported that they can see it in this thread.

I feel exactly the same way, and your description of the problem sounds exactly as I percieve it.
It is so annoying; I really like mye Panasonic 42 otherwise but these yellow flashes are too straining for my eyes.
I don`t want a LCD so I guess I`m stuck with my old and small Crt until some new tech. comes along...

I had to return my pany 60 for the exact same reason. I went to the shop with a DVD i made to check if the problem was the same on all the plasmas and the answer is yes. They all have green/yellow trailing issue, some can't see it but if you do, other brands is just the same. And of course moving from bright to dark spot could also bring yellow flashes.

I just brought back my old CRT from the celar. LCDs suffer too much from banding, clouding, and all other crap. Having a good set is just plain lotery. I won't considering them until they opt for backlight led, which won't happen before 2008.

Waiting is bliss...

This might very well be a stupid question, but: Can the same problem occur on LCD-screens with LED-backlights such as for example LG has started using? The reason why I am asking is because some of you mentioned that you see a similar effect on cars with LED brakelights. Or is this totally unrelated amd LCD screens are safe from this problem whatever technology it uses?

By the way: I`m norwegian so my english is not the best but I hope you can understand my questrion...