It's official. I see a rainbow-like effect on every plasma. - Page 3

If the Philips had a crummy picture quality it was a bad feed. I own one and the picture quality is stunning to boot. We did discuss signal feeds recently didnt we Yoda1?

I recently got a Panasonic TH-50PX500U and see these yellow flashes on high contrast scenes, too. It's really apparent but I'm learing to live with it. I DO wear glasses and will check to see if it is any less apparent without them (if I can even SEE the screen without them!). But, if it's ineven phosphor decay, taking off glasses won't do a thing.

This may sound even more crazy, but, I have also seen instances where I can see that every other scan line is off, when my eyes pan from one side of the screen to the other quickly. I THINK it onlyhappens on cable 1080i sources (via CableCard), but I haven't done enough experimenting to know for sure. Maybe it's really a program source/compression artifact of some sort (?). I think I'm sensitive to this effect for some reason - the new LED car taillights really annoy me at night. I see ROWS of them when a car is far ahead of me.

That's quite possible. This drives me nuts too, LEDs can't really vary their brightness, so they basically flash on/off really fast to dim, so when people aren't stepping on their brakes they are usually just flashing really fast, and if you move your eyes you can see it kind of streak dots as it flashes because it's not a steay source. Very odd effect, and it is pretty distracting sometimes because you can mistake them for flashing lights, etc.

I feel ya, kmarsh.

I've had my Panny TH-50PHD8UK for a few months now and still see flashes on high contrast material and yellow trailings after moving white objects. Sucks to be me - I believe the vast majority of folks who have plasmas don't see that.

Oh well - it's too much trouble to try and sell the set now. I hope that in a few years there will be a digital display technology which I will be able to enjoy without annoying artifacts.

I've always noticed a rainbow effect on plasmas, especially scanning quickly with my eyes side to side. For me, it is way less apparent and distracting than DLP displays, and I'd rather live with them than the non existant black levels of LCD monitors. Now image retention is something that I cannot live with, but that's for another thread.

i actually do wear glasses so i'll try to see if taking them off will take care of the rainbows but it seems odd that it would

I tried this and it didn't make a difference for me.

I see also yellow flashes with a slight green light on my Pany, really obvious in Sin City. I wonder if there's something to do or if it's better to take it easy and try to get used ? I imagine if I change my plasma, I'll see the same thing again. According to what I see, on the Pany it seems that the 3 phosphors don't switch off at the same speed : blue>red>green. When we start from a white pixel, the blue first decrease, giving a yellow remaining light (red + green still deliver their color), then the red decrease giving the final greenish light. As I saw in another post, maybe it's the Pana subpixel management that make worse the native difference of phosphor's decay / remanence.

In the service menu 1 of the PX50, there's a test patern, and the ultimate test is a white bar crossing the screen at low speed. It should be sharp, but on the pana one side lack of sharpness and on the other there's a yellow border that can be seen clearly. During action in a picture, if a clear object cross the screen rapidly with a dark background, there's also this yellow border behind the moving object, and it the speed is high enough, it appears as a yellow "flash". It's really anoying and the people who see it don't dream or have eye problem !

On the europeen model to acces the menu service and test patern :

Bass should be at max
treble should be min
Then select channel 99 (TV mode)
Then press "index" on the remote and -/v on the TV at the same time
The service menu 1 appear
Then press green on the remote to see the different pages untill "test patern" page
Then on the test patern page press Blue on the remote to see the diferent tests, the last one is the white bar.
To exit press "exit" on the remote

After you need to adjust again brightness and contrast that have came back to factory default (channels are still there).

Don't know if it's the same for US model, but this test patern shows clearly where does the problem comes from.
It seems that the blue sub-pixel switch on and off more rapidly than the two others

Yes, that's exactly what I've found with my TH-50PHD8UK. I suspected these "rainbows" were really a pixel response time issue, since what I was seeing was very similar to LCD pixel response issues.

Using the GUN setting in my 8UK's service menu I too can demonstrate this clearly given any appropriate scene, in my case a 3D video game with a free-look camera. Blue responds very quickly, Red is somewhat slower, and on my set Green is surprisingly slow compared with the other 2.

The effect is typically a blurry, yellow smear and not a rainbow at all. It doesn't have anything to do with wearing glasses or having particularly acute vision - the TV is physically displaying yellow-hued pixels for visible lengths of time.

When a pixel is White (R=255, G=255 B=255) and is instructed to turn Black (R=0 G=0 B=0), B reacts near instantly, whereas R and G have visible decay times. During this time, while R and G are still being output on the screen in the absense of B, and slightly dominated by the slower G, a yellowish hue is produced somewhere in the neighborhood of this forum's post text (but a tad more greenish-sikly yellow, like THIS)

I totaly agree with the 3 sub pixels different decay time, it explain very well the effect noticed in Pany panel. I also noticed it on new Pio panels and JVC ones but not on Hitachi's panels. Don't know if it's a choice from Panasonic in order to produce something like a 3D effect or if it's an issue of plasma technology, but it's clear that It should be tecnicaly possible to introduce a delay on the Blue sub pixel in order to make it react like the two others (Green and Red are not so different). Maybe there's something appropriate in the service menu?
It's a general issue on all Pana plasmas it has been noticed on all panels, 37, 42 and 50 inches

The effect can bee see very clearly in Sin City, 30 min 26 sec (the scene after Marv speaking alone under the rain), around the shape of the girls: In this scene the traveling is from right to left so the yellow-greenish (red an green sub pixels remanence) appears on the side of the bright border where the pixels have to shut down to black.

Ooohhh...so that's what is happening!

I thought I was starting to go nuts. I've started noticing the trails too. Especially here in Toronto I noticed the buses have a new-looking rear lights that, when my eyes scan past them, they break up into "trails" in my vision. I had no idea they might be LED lights.

As far as the Panny, it's just so weird: I am super sensitive to rainbows on all DLPs (I swear I've even seen some problems on the 3 Chip projectors, which we discussed in the projector forum and it looks like there is some technical basis for seeing them) , trails on LCD and even flicker on CRTs (drives me nuts).

So why don't I ever see the flashes on the new Panny plasmas? I've looked and looked. Given how familiar I am with seeing rainbows on high-contrast scenes on DLPs, I know exactly when to look for them on and how to "induce" them with my eye movements. But I just can't see the flashes on the Panny.

Very weird.

I'd wonder if it has to do with calibration: too much R / G drive on the sets of people seeing it? Do we prefer our sets in such a way with brightness/blacklevel combined that exaggerates this effect? My wife can see the effect when I'm purposefully making it happen with the various GUN settings, and she can see the effect with video games, but then claims to not see the effect all during the past 2 movies we've watched (the first 2 LoTR movies, wide/extend ed.). However the amount of yellow & sometimes red flashing I've seen in those 2 movies thus far has been fairly distracting and is definately noticeable.

I'm hoping I can play with all the settings, perhaps RGB gain/cutoff as well, to somehow lessen it's effect, but I'm not too optimistic that'll work while still maintaining an acceptably colored / brightened / contrasted picture.

I noticed this years ago on my first plasma a 37pw5 . It annoyed me too but over the next few weeks it seemed to calm down as phosphor bedded in to the extent that it was unobjectionable a month later . I could still see it very slightly if I rapidly moved my eyes around the screen but in normal viewing it wasn't visible.

I just took delivery of a 42PHD8 and see the same phenomenon again , I fully expect it to calm down after a months use or so.

I also see similar artifacts on CRTs and CRT projectors and I refuse point blank to watch any single chip dlp device.

Wow this is quite interesting...so...well...is there any fix for this? Has this been getting better with each generation of plasmas? Is this something that some brands suffer from more than others?

Could you post a picture of your "rainbow effect" so we can see exactly what you're talking about?

It's a temporal artifact, so it would be difficult to capture on camera unless you shook the camera around, and even then it would be difficult to capture.

Sorry, that was my lame attempt at a joke. Heck, I didn't even realize this thread had 2 pages!

Make that THREE pages!

I really don't understand your joke then.

damn damn damn DAMN, why do I learn these things AFTER I buy the damn product

so I bought the latest Panasonic PX60U & the yellow afterimage is awful
it is especially noticeable in videogame.

I have been playing Oblivion & Call Of Duty & whenever I move the camera the picture goes to hell, this is very sad considering this ghosting like effect is one of the number one reasons people recommend Plasma over LCD panels

anyone know if there has been any new Plasma panels that fixed this problem?

this suck donkey balls. I notice the same thing. I first noticed it at BB when they were playing a basketball game and whenever the camera panned I could see yellow trails on the bodies of the black dudes. White dudes didn't have any trails I think this has to due with light or dark against an opposite background. So trails whould show up on the white dudes if the court was darker coloured.

Now, how bad is this for gaming. I'm a big gamer, so how often whould I notice this probelm? Do you see trails on most games all the time, or is just occasionly. Also, I have noticed green trails on my CRT RPTV on certain games. COD2 it is very noticable.

Not true. There's nothing inherent with LEDs that prevents them from varying their brightness. There may or may not be a limitation in their usage/implementation in automobile brakelights, but it's not a limitation of LEDs themselves.

I don't know much about LEDs, but my understanding was that they couldn't do that. In any case, PDM/PWM is how they are dimmed in most all applications I've seen.

Well....I hooked up my laptop to my 500u plasma and since making some adjustments with dot crawl and such (didn't have much effect) I was ok with the image I was getting.
I disconnected the laptop and went back to SD and right away, I noticed a PQ problem. After hyperventilating a little , I tweaked the settings to see if I just had changed some setting to cause it. Nope, all inputs are showing this problem. I almost can see a dithering problem along with what I would call halos around some forground objects.

OK, Are you viewing an LCD Computer Monitor as you communicate with us?

Do you see rainbows even on an LCD Flat Panel connected to a PC?

If not then why not use an LCD FP - it's transmissive light - I don't see how it would display rainbows.

Sounds like an X-Files issue - have you been abducted lately by one of those things with flashing lights up yonder?