[andrewfee]

Originally Posted by Wobag

What the Sonys got going for it is possibly the edge on HD quality

Nowhere close - the BRAVIAs have the softest HD image I've seen once you get rid of the edge enhancement.

Originally Posted by Wobag

richer colours

Richer, perhaps, but totally wrong in certain cases. WCG-CCFL is terrible in my opinion.

Originally Posted by Wobag

bit better viewing angle, per input settings

Yep, certainly better in that regard, although the inputs on the Tosh seem rather well matched - I'm using the same settings for RGB and Component and things look great on both.

Originally Posted by Wobag

and a light sensor. Slightly better PC display options and Bravia engine has its strengths.

The light sensor doesn't work properly (at least nowhere near as well as my previous Sony LCD with one where it took over all backlight control) and while it will do 1360x768 over VGA, due to WCG-CCFL, colours look off. (there is no normal/wide colour space option on VGA)

Originally Posted by BOBBY BOB

Thanks NIALLI, i tried the settings you suggested last night, and you are right, it did improve, personally i am a little unsure about the brightness setting, as this seems to make the overall picture a little 'misty'.

Raising brightness will raise the overall black level a bit, but you get used to it very quickly.



A lot of people don't seem to understand what the controls do on LCDs, so I'll try to explain them.

Back Light: The LCD itself doesn't emit any light, and has to have one shined through to make the picture visible. Changing this adjusts the overall "brightness" of the set. Lowering it will not only make whites darker (they are far too bright out of the box) but it will also make blacks "blacker." Sets usually take a while to warm up, so I would recommend leaving it on an hour before adjusting it to try and find the "right" setting for you. You're probably best to start by having it too dim, and then find a bright scene and turn it up until it looks nice and bright, but not blinding. Having this set too high is one of the biggest causes of eyestrain with LCD. This should be set relative to the lighting conditions in your room. I prefer 15 for watching in a darker room, and 50 on a brighter day.

Contrast: On your CRTs, this would adjust the overall brightness of the set, but not here. With LCDs, Contrast is a picture processing adjustment that will let you make the bright areas of the picture brighter or darker without really affecting dark areas. As the backlight will still be shining bright behind it, lowering this has the effect of placing something over the screen to dim it, rather than making the set dimmer instead. With 8-bit video, brightness values range from 0 to 255. Lowering contrast effectively limits this range, and can cause banding in the picture. If you're finding things too bright, lower the backlight not the contrast. Best left at 100.

Brightness: This is one of the most misunderstood controls. It has nothing to do with how bright the image on the TV is, it basically just tells the TV what black is. With CRTs, lowering this would adjust how dark the blacks were in the image, but with LCD, this is not the case. Long before the brightness setting gets to 0, blacks will stop getting darker due to the backlight. If you have this set too high, dark areas will appear grey, and you're likely to see compression artefacts. If you've got it set too low, the dark areas will just blend together into one big black area. I found 65 to be the best compromise between the two on this set.

Colour: Adjusts how strong the colours are on the set. Too much colour, and people will look sunburnt, too little and they will look pale. 42 looks good here.

Tint: Tints the picture towards red or green. This should not be adjustable for PAL or HD signals, so leave it at zero.

Sharpness: Another misunderstood control - why wouldn't anyone want the sharpest image they can get, right? Sharpness is actually image processing that can make you think you're seeing more detail in an image, or that it's sharper, but it actually obliterates fine details, exaggerates any artefacts (MPEG compression especially) and adds rings / halos around objects. See here for more details: http://www.videophile.info/Guide_EE/Page_01.htm I would recommend leaving this at -50 for all sources.

Black Stretch: This control basically makes the dark areas darker, and the bright areas brighter, in an attempt to fool the eye into thinking there is more contrast on the set. Now, this will usually work, but it often comes at the expense of introducing artefacts into the image (I've not done testing on Toshiba's implementation of this yet though) however in doing this, it basically destroys all the shadow details in an image, making them all go into one big black area, and often does the same with highlights, turning them into large white areas. Strongly advised to be turned off.

MPEG NR: When people get a large LCD, they often wonder why fast movement breaks up into lots of little squares, and blame the TV for it. These are MPEG artefacts and will be there no matter what you view it on, but with LCDs being inherently sharper and often much larger displays, it can be easier to see. MPEG NR basically blurs the image a bit to try and blend these squares together, giving you a much softer image overall and destroying fine detail. Unless you find the artefacts to be a serious problem, I would highly recommend you disable this.

DNR: This works to remove "grain" from the image, and most implementations do this by blending frames of the image together, which will usually reduce/remove the effect, but usually means that motion starts smearing a lot more. Why is there grain in the first place? Most movies are shot on film, which is inherently grainy. Just like MPEG artefacts, this is nothing to do with your new LCD, it could just more obvious because it's sharper, and probably larger, than your old TV. Personally I don't find this an annoyance at all - it means I'm seeing things as they should be, because if the grain isn't there, then fine detail is being removed from the image, and it looks more "film-like" to me. Again, I'd strongly recommend you turn this off unless it really bothers you.

Colour Temperature: The way colour TVs work is that they basically have a "black and white" image, and then the colour is laid on top of that. Colour temperature adjuts the "tint" of this greyscale image. Ideally it would be "D65" or "6500k" which is a "neutral grey" as that is what most content is designed for, but the majority of displays are far from this. Turning the temperature cooler gives everything a blue tint, whereas making it too warm gives everything a red tint. I find the "Normal" setting best on this LCD - it's still far cooler than it should be, but "Warm" has a very strong red tint to it.

Colour Management: This will let you adjust the hue (shade) and saturation (how strong/bright the colour is) of Red, Green, Blue, Cyan, Magenta and Yellow. After doing some testing, I would leave the hue controls alone completely, as well as the CMY ones altogether. This adjusts the colour decoder in the set, and from using my colorimeter (display calibration tool) and patterns from my Freeview box via RGB, I have found that to have RGB equally saturated (when "Colour" is set to 42) the best settings are Red 0 0, Green 0 -1, Blue 0 -7.

Active Backlight Control: I don't use this setting, but I would assume that it lowers the backlight in darker scenes, to improve black level, and would raise it in brighter ones to make them appear more vivid. Personally I don't like the brightness fluctuations you usually get with having that kind of thing on so I would leave it off.

Cinema Mode: This will turn on/off 2:2 and 3:2 detection. Basically it will make films look smoother with less "jaggies." I would recommend leaving this on unless you are playing interlaced video games. If you're running in 480p or higher, it's fine, but basically if you're playing videogames and the option isn't greyed out, it's best to turn it off.

Active Vision M100: This enables/disables 100Hz mode. This works by using interpolation, so in some cases, it could cause artefacts and you might want to disable it. I tend to just leave it on all the time though.


Niall, for what it's worth, the broadcasts of Lost have been terrible over here (Channel 4 at least) making Lost appear far too dark. (although the way it's shot is very dark sometimes) I wouldn't adjust settings just for Lost, as everything else will look wrong.