I've deleted my initial settings, because they have all been rendered invalid.
Last night, umr (Jeff) came in to calibrate my set. I can only say, I highly recommend getting the set calibrated, and in particular, if you can, getting Jeff to do it. His equipment is very good, and his eye (and ear) is very experienced. Plus, he clearly knows Sony's backwards and forwards.
The first thing we found, is that I'd been using the test patterns from my VP-50 to try and calibrate, and it turns out that signal is way too high. That then made me have my Brightness (black level) too high, which then messed with the color balance in bad ways. To show how bad it was, I thought I had color balance at about 6500K +/- 50 by my measurements, but it was closer to 5700k according to Jeff's equipment.
He checked overscan on the set, it was in the 2% range, so he didn't adjust it.
We checked convergence, and he tweaked green one pixel, but that was it. There is some minor misconvergence out at the edges of the screen, but Jeff said that was normal, and actually better then some of the other Sony's he has seen.
Jeff was able to get the primaries pulled out where they belong. At that point, the colors were tracking very well, but he further tweaked them in the SM to further balance them at the IRE 10/20 levels.
Now my set is truly 6500K +/- 50K. Colors from 100 IRE down to 10 IRE are +/- 3% - pretty much dead flat.
My actual settings are pretty meaningless for everyone now, since Jeff made changes in the SM. Some broad brush stroke comments:
Jeff has concerns about the dynamic iris settings since they actually change both the iris and the picture/contrast setting dynamically according to the scene, which can twist the colors. He would advocate just changing the setting depending on lighting conditions. (Anyone know any discrete remote control codes for directly changing the iris setting without going through the menu?
)
He did end up going with Gamma set to Low on my set, felt it looked a little better then off. With gamma off, some of the darker flesh tones had a tint of green to them.
I had had sharpness at 12, Jeff moved it even further down, to around 6.
Everything else is pretty much set to off, since I'm feeding my set 1080p from an external scaler. DRC settings aren't even enabled for a 1080p input.
End result - the picture is truly lifelike. Shadow detail is very good, and the colors stay accurate in shadows. This then leads to a much better 3D look. In bright scenes, I'm not seeing any "blooming" of green anymore.
Jeff actually tore through my video pretty quickly, since its not a very complicated setup. Since we still had time, he offered to check out the audio. I confidently told him I was pretty sure that I had it configured properly, but to go ahead.
You know where this is leading...
On the plus side, a couple speakers were off by just a dB each, and the sub was cranked up a bit (which I knew - like my explosions!)
But Jeff also quickly identified that there was something wrong with my center. I had pulled a bone-head move and configured it as full w/sub, even though my center doesn't have a serious woofer to speak of. (It's a chopped down version of my main L/R speakers.) So it was distorting trying to cover bass lower then it could go. Setting it to Xover to the sub cleaned up the distortion.
To his great credit, Jeff didn't even point out that I had made a bone-head mistake...
I really can't recommend strongly enough that all of you go ahead and get an ISF calibration done, generally by someone knowledgeable with Sonys, and certainly with Jeff in particular if you can. No amount of playing with the white balance is going to fix some of the issues, such as getting the green and red primary colors properly set. The before/after improvement from the overall configuration is not subtle.
And, like someone else mentioned, my wife feels the money is well spent just to get me to stop jumping into the advanced settings menu in the middle of a show or movie to try tweaking it yet again.
eric
Last night, umr (Jeff) came in to calibrate my set. I can only say, I highly recommend getting the set calibrated, and in particular, if you can, getting Jeff to do it. His equipment is very good, and his eye (and ear) is very experienced. Plus, he clearly knows Sony's backwards and forwards.
The first thing we found, is that I'd been using the test patterns from my VP-50 to try and calibrate, and it turns out that signal is way too high. That then made me have my Brightness (black level) too high, which then messed with the color balance in bad ways. To show how bad it was, I thought I had color balance at about 6500K +/- 50 by my measurements, but it was closer to 5700k according to Jeff's equipment.
He checked overscan on the set, it was in the 2% range, so he didn't adjust it.
We checked convergence, and he tweaked green one pixel, but that was it. There is some minor misconvergence out at the edges of the screen, but Jeff said that was normal, and actually better then some of the other Sony's he has seen.
Jeff was able to get the primaries pulled out where they belong. At that point, the colors were tracking very well, but he further tweaked them in the SM to further balance them at the IRE 10/20 levels.
Now my set is truly 6500K +/- 50K. Colors from 100 IRE down to 10 IRE are +/- 3% - pretty much dead flat.
My actual settings are pretty meaningless for everyone now, since Jeff made changes in the SM. Some broad brush stroke comments:
Jeff has concerns about the dynamic iris settings since they actually change both the iris and the picture/contrast setting dynamically according to the scene, which can twist the colors. He would advocate just changing the setting depending on lighting conditions. (Anyone know any discrete remote control codes for directly changing the iris setting without going through the menu?
)He did end up going with Gamma set to Low on my set, felt it looked a little better then off. With gamma off, some of the darker flesh tones had a tint of green to them.
I had had sharpness at 12, Jeff moved it even further down, to around 6.
Everything else is pretty much set to off, since I'm feeding my set 1080p from an external scaler. DRC settings aren't even enabled for a 1080p input.
End result - the picture is truly lifelike. Shadow detail is very good, and the colors stay accurate in shadows. This then leads to a much better 3D look. In bright scenes, I'm not seeing any "blooming" of green anymore.
Jeff actually tore through my video pretty quickly, since its not a very complicated setup. Since we still had time, he offered to check out the audio. I confidently told him I was pretty sure that I had it configured properly, but to go ahead.
You know where this is leading...
On the plus side, a couple speakers were off by just a dB each, and the sub was cranked up a bit (which I knew - like my explosions!)
But Jeff also quickly identified that there was something wrong with my center. I had pulled a bone-head move and configured it as full w/sub, even though my center doesn't have a serious woofer to speak of. (It's a chopped down version of my main L/R speakers.) So it was distorting trying to cover bass lower then it could go. Setting it to Xover to the sub cleaned up the distortion.
To his great credit, Jeff didn't even point out that I had made a bone-head mistake...
I really can't recommend strongly enough that all of you go ahead and get an ISF calibration done, generally by someone knowledgeable with Sonys, and certainly with Jeff in particular if you can. No amount of playing with the white balance is going to fix some of the issues, such as getting the green and red primary colors properly set. The before/after improvement from the overall configuration is not subtle.
And, like someone else mentioned, my wife feels the money is well spent just to get me to stop jumping into the advanced settings menu in the middle of a show or movie to try tweaking it yet again.
eric
