Joined
·
25 Posts
For any of you that remember any of my previous posts - I've been having a bit of an unfortunate saga trying to get a good set.
I started off with the Samsung LN46A630.
The first set I got had horrible flashlighting/clouding and overall very bad contrast.
I swapped it out for another set which had even worse flashlighting/clouding - but which actually had really good contrast/'pop' to it. Still, it had to go, the backlighting was too bad.
At this point I was, overall, feeling a bit dissatisfied with the 630 line and decided to step up to the 650 line.
I returned the second 630 and got an LN46A650. It was one of the new run with the new design on the remote, the new 1008 firmware that isn't available for download yet, had the 'S' panel, all that good stuff.
It had some flashlighting but otherwise looked just beautiful. It had great, deep blacks, excellent vibrancy to the picture... I was really happy with it... and then I noticed that it unfortunately had two bright green dead pixels.
One of them was near the edge, and I could have lived with it, but the other was right near the center of the screen. No choice but to swap it out, which I didn't feel good about.
So I did the trade. Once again I got one of the new run - new style remote, new firmware, 's' panel. Good stuff. I did the trade in on Monday night so i didn't have much time to check it out when I got it home but I did some quick viewing - no dead pixels, back lighting extremely even, best out of all of the sets I'd seen. It was looking good.
But I noticed one thing - right out of the box, even in a brightly lit room the black levels didn't seem anywhere close to what the previous 650 had.
No matter, went to bed.
Today when I got home from work i decided to pop in a bluray, watch a movie and do some calibration.
Well, this is where the trouble starts.
Basically - the black levels are horrendous.
For instance - I'm using a PS3 for BRD - with the same settings i had running for the other 650, blacks are absolutely gray. I don't mean a little grayish looking, I mean GRAY.
If I set HDMI mode to 'limited' on the PS3 I get the worst most washed out gray looking picture you can imagine.
If I set it to 'full' I can get 'blacks' - but I should definitely not be having this grayed out picture on limited.
And the problem is on all sources, the ps3 is just the most obvious example.
Doing some playing around with settings I was able to get blacks by turning down the brightness - way down.
To get a decent black I have to turn brightness down to at least 40, if not down to 35 or so.
I've not yet had the time to detail out how much this is impacting my overall picture - but this seems to be an extreme amount to have to crank down the brightness for this set. The other one looked so good right out of the box that i hardly felt the need to mess around with the settings at all. And from what I've read most people only seem to do minor tweaking with this set.
So - for all you experts out there - what's going on here? Bad set?
There is also another issue with the picture - along the right and primarily the left edge of the screen there is a small line of distortion in the picture running vertically from top to bottom. On the left side it has a greenish tinge. I didn't notice it until I was scrutinizing the black level issue, watching a movie etc - but now that I've seem it I can't miss it.
So - do I try to calibrate this set out - or is this too out whack?
When the guys at Fry's loaded the set into the car they temporarily laid it over onto it's back - which goes completely against what I've always thought you were supposed to do if you had to lay a large LCD over - I thought you were supposed to lay them screen side down. They insisted though that they were instructed to lay them screen up. I can't help but wonder of those knuckleheads didn't damage the set.
I started off with the Samsung LN46A630.
The first set I got had horrible flashlighting/clouding and overall very bad contrast.
I swapped it out for another set which had even worse flashlighting/clouding - but which actually had really good contrast/'pop' to it. Still, it had to go, the backlighting was too bad.
At this point I was, overall, feeling a bit dissatisfied with the 630 line and decided to step up to the 650 line.
I returned the second 630 and got an LN46A650. It was one of the new run with the new design on the remote, the new 1008 firmware that isn't available for download yet, had the 'S' panel, all that good stuff.
It had some flashlighting but otherwise looked just beautiful. It had great, deep blacks, excellent vibrancy to the picture... I was really happy with it... and then I noticed that it unfortunately had two bright green dead pixels.
One of them was near the edge, and I could have lived with it, but the other was right near the center of the screen. No choice but to swap it out, which I didn't feel good about.
So I did the trade. Once again I got one of the new run - new style remote, new firmware, 's' panel. Good stuff. I did the trade in on Monday night so i didn't have much time to check it out when I got it home but I did some quick viewing - no dead pixels, back lighting extremely even, best out of all of the sets I'd seen. It was looking good.
But I noticed one thing - right out of the box, even in a brightly lit room the black levels didn't seem anywhere close to what the previous 650 had.
No matter, went to bed.
Today when I got home from work i decided to pop in a bluray, watch a movie and do some calibration.
Well, this is where the trouble starts.
Basically - the black levels are horrendous.
For instance - I'm using a PS3 for BRD - with the same settings i had running for the other 650, blacks are absolutely gray. I don't mean a little grayish looking, I mean GRAY.
If I set HDMI mode to 'limited' on the PS3 I get the worst most washed out gray looking picture you can imagine.
If I set it to 'full' I can get 'blacks' - but I should definitely not be having this grayed out picture on limited.
And the problem is on all sources, the ps3 is just the most obvious example.
Doing some playing around with settings I was able to get blacks by turning down the brightness - way down.
To get a decent black I have to turn brightness down to at least 40, if not down to 35 or so.
I've not yet had the time to detail out how much this is impacting my overall picture - but this seems to be an extreme amount to have to crank down the brightness for this set. The other one looked so good right out of the box that i hardly felt the need to mess around with the settings at all. And from what I've read most people only seem to do minor tweaking with this set.
So - for all you experts out there - what's going on here? Bad set?
There is also another issue with the picture - along the right and primarily the left edge of the screen there is a small line of distortion in the picture running vertically from top to bottom. On the left side it has a greenish tinge. I didn't notice it until I was scrutinizing the black level issue, watching a movie etc - but now that I've seem it I can't miss it.
So - do I try to calibrate this set out - or is this too out whack?
When the guys at Fry's loaded the set into the car they temporarily laid it over onto it's back - which goes completely against what I've always thought you were supposed to do if you had to lay a large LCD over - I thought you were supposed to lay them screen side down. They insisted though that they were instructed to lay them screen up. I can't help but wonder of those knuckleheads didn't damage the set.
