[kweezr]

I've had this contraption now for 2wks, over all I'm enjoying it. Purchased a S&V hometheater tune-up dvd and have been playing around with the

different settings, trying to improve things...but I'm not doing so good.

Just when I think I got the settings down, I put in a different DVD in and

it looks as if I need to change things. For example, going from Band of

Brother to LOTR.


Can anyone give me some insight into optimizing these settings?


Keith

 

[Andrzej]

Kweezr,

DVDs vary in the quality of transfer (from film to video) so some fine tuning may be desirable. However, surprisingly a lot depends on your lighting environment. If you watch your DVDs in a relatively dark room (the best environment), once you calibrated your Panny, the settings should give you very good picture on all your DVDs. For such conditions my settings for Picture and Brightness are both below -20 on VGA, component, S-video, and composite (can't remember the exact numbers). However, my media room is large and has lots of large windows facing the south, and if I turn my Panny on during a sunny day to watch news the picture with these settings is completely washed-out. That's probably what people see in most stores like BB or CC. For such (infrequent) situation I just switch the settings to other mode where both picture and brightness are set above 0. However, watching plasma (especially, IMHO, ED Panny) under such conditions cannot possibly do any justice to the PQ that the Panny is capable of. I believe that Pio and Fuji are better if, for some reasons, you are forced to watch plasma during the day.


Andrzej

 

[deeann]

I bought dark curtains and close them if I watch movies during the day. Like Andrzej mentions above, there can be lot of variances between DVD's. For the majority of them I use my 'standard' preset that I tuned with Avia, but if something looks really out of whack (washed out transfer or bad mastering on the DVD) and I know it's not supposed to be like that (not using filters like Minority Report or the Matrix) I'll switch to another preset (like 'cinema') and use that to tweak the settings. That way I won't accidentally mess up my Avia settings.

 

[pcrx]

I put aluminum foil on all my widows so it would be...


just kidding.


kweezr, My experience was the same...it took me a good month to get it to where I had a decent balance.


Luckily though I watch movies about 99% at night anyway, (component) and TV 99% in day or with lights on (composite)


So I jsut set up each input differently for the lighting situation.



Amazingly, to my eyes it has been looking like the image on my plasma has gotten better with time.


.....of course my wife looks at me like I am a freak when I said that to her....

 

[kweezr]

Thanks for the tips guys. Fooled around with it a bit last night, SD is the

worst, from channel to channel it needs to be tweeked some.


Anyone mess with advaced settings?

You know....the 4 different white balance settings.