"Settings by Eye"
While preparing my next post on user / service menu settings and adjustments, I came across a post that I think is extremely relevant to owners of LCD screens, especially Toshiba displays.
Note: This information was originally posted by andrewfee in the WLT68 thread (its one beast of a thread!). I have taken the liberty of providing a little commentary and editing the text a little as some of the settings he specified are not necessarily valid for the X3030D model - hopefully he won't mind; if you'd like to read the original text you can find it
here.
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Originally Posted by andrewfee :
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 eye-strain with LCD. This should be set relative to the lighting conditions in your room.
[ runtime:
around 30 is good for most conditions ]
Contrast: On regular CRT televisions, 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 back-light 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 back-light not the contrast. Best left as close to 100 as possible.
[ runtime:
Yup - checked, there are no thresholding issues so go with 100 for contrast ]
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 back-light. 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.
[ runtime:
a test pattern will be helpful so that you don't end up with a brightness level that is too high or too low, around 44-48 is about right ]
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.
[ runtime:
38-40 looks good ]
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.
[ runtime:
Different LCDs / models employ different image processing algorithms, a 'frequency burst' test pattern will be helpful; there doesn't seem to be any ill-effects with sharpness set to 0 ]
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.
[ runtime:
MPEG NR on X3030D at Low or Medium is quite subtle so don't be concerned if you prefer it enabled ]
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 adjusts the "tint" of this grey-scale 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.
[ runtime:
X3030D performs closest to 6500K using the 'Warm' setting, everything else seems to be considerably cooler ]
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.
[ runtime:
The only way to accurately set this is to use test patterns and colour filters e.g. a video calibration DVD; or a colorimeter as discussed in this thread, otherwise settings will be very subjective and may not have the desired effect on other sets ]
Active Backlight Control: I don't use this setting, but I would assume that it lowers the back-light 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.
[ runtime:
I'd leave this feature enabled to obtain darker blacks, so far I've not been sensitive to brightness fluctuations on the X3030D ]
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.
[ runtime:
Leave it 'On' for DVD movies; if you hook up to a next gen console or other hi-def source it will generally do the 'right thing' when you change input. ]
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I've mentioned the use of test patterns on several occasions, these can be found in calibration DVDs, but if you don't want to splash out, you can download a series of images Blackbolt360 has kindly provided
here. Use an Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3 to view them on your TV; each test pattern contains some text in a caption, describing how the pattern should be used.