Among the Z2 posts, did you notice this one ?
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showt...42#post3171742
It shows that the settings that are right for one unit are comlpletely wrong for another. First example : the dark boxes on the THX optimizer test.
On a calibrated device, there must be 7. If there are 6 or 8, the device needs calibration.
With exactly the same user and service settings, when 9 are visible on Vlad_Dracule's Z2, only 3 are visible on mine.
Second example : flicker. When Buns' Z2 doesn't flicker, mine, with the same user and service settings, flickers so much that I don't need any test pattern to see it : any normal picture blinks !
Thus I would NEVER use the "perfect settings" of Vlad or Buns, since my unit looks broken with them.
Anyway, my Z2 is quite perfect.
VB is inferior to the background FPN
The greyscale has the best tradeoff between accuracy and punch
Panels are aligned better than 1/3 of a pixel at the center of the picture...
I just had a dust blob, that I removed.
BUT...
The background FPN can look bad in itself. There is no calibration involved here, this is how the panel looks by themselves, after all VB is removed.
The lamp is blue, like any other lamp, and digitally correcting the greyscale leads to losses in color saturation, and makes the FPN more visible.
The green panel is not aligned with the others at the extreme left of the picture only.
The only problem that I could correct is the non linearity of the gamma curve, setting contrast at -31 and gamma at +7.
None of these problems come from a bad calibration, my unit was perfectly calibrated out of the box. All the service menu settings are as good as they can be. You can get them in the left column of this post :
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showt...58#post3198858
Changing them in order to get better "greyscale tracking" for example, introduces more problems than it solves (loss of light, apparent loss of color saturation, most of the IRE output falls into the zone where FPN is most visible). Moving the green panel to the right would fix the problem at the extreme left of the picture, but would reintroduce it at the center...