[LEEROY_UK]

Originally Posted by mintfresh

Can anyone give me some advice on my settings please?

I have the 37X3030 which I know puts me in the minority of X3030 users, so alot of the settings on this board seem very different to what I have settled on for now.

Anyway, after a week of having the TV and mainly watching TV(Sky SD) and playing Xbox 360, I have tweaked the settings to my own personal taste. I have also tonight tried using the calibration images linked to earlier in this thread via my XBOX and came up with very similar settings.

However, as I say, they seem rather different from others, but this may be because my TV is different.

The settings I have at the moment are:-

Backlight - 75
Contrast - 100
Brightness - 70
Colour - 40
Tint - 0
Shaprness - 0
Blackstretch - Off
MPEG NR - Low
DNR - Auto
Colour Temp - Normal

and via VGA I have

Backlight - 75
Contrast - 100
Brightness - 50
Colour temp - Normal

This seems to give me fairly bright whites, quite dark blacks(although noticably greyer than actuall black) as well as being able to see most of the different shades in between on contrast settings. I'm also put the backlight to auto adjust at the moment, although this is quite noticable on the calibraition tests when viewing the black screen. It takes about 1-2 seconds to dim the light down to get it really black!

I think I just need some advice on whether these are good settings, and where to take things from here. If any 37" owners could post their settings that would be great as well.

Also, the calibration pictures didn't seem to display very well on my TV via the 360. The text on most wasn't readable and they seemed to look very blurry and generally quite bad. They didn't seem like this on my LCD montior(much smaller screen though!). Anyone know if this is how they should look?

Also, does anyone know about the reference levels that become available when you connect the 360 via VGA? I have mine set at Standard at the moment.

Final question. The calibration tests showed quite a bit of colour banding on the full screen colour tests. Is this something to worry about and can it be fixed?

After reading your post im unsure why you are using VGA with your 360 on the tosh as it will not display 1080p via the vga port (only upto 1366x768).

Try using the component lead (red , green and blue phono's) that came with your 360 assuming you have the Premium version and not the Core as that only comes with a composite lead.

Then select 1080p in the display settings tab on your 360 and dont forget to switch the switch to HD-TV on the end of the component lead that plugs into your 360.

This is the reason that you are getting blurry images, once youve set it up for 1080p select the excact scan option on the remote (refer to owners manual if your not sure) and then youll be displaying the 360 on your tosh at the tv's native resoluotion and mapped pixel for pixel.

Youve payed for 1080p so use it lol !!!!!

I think youll find the difference in picture quality truly astounding compared with how you have it set up currently.

Hope this helps you out
Lee

[mintfresh]

Originally Posted by LEEROY_UK

After reading your post im unsure why you are using VGA with your 360 on the tosh as it will not display 1080p via the vga port (only upto 1366x768).

Try using the component lead (red , green and blue phono's) that came with your 360 assuming you have the Premium version and not the Core as that only comes with a composite lead.

Then select 1080p in the display settings tab on your 360 and dont forget to switch the switch to HD-TV on the end of the component lead that plugs into your 360.

This is the reason that you are getting blurry images, once youve set it up for 1080p select the excact scan option on the remote (refer to owners manual if your not sure) and then youll be displaying the 360 on your tosh at the tv's native resoluotion and mapped pixel for pixel.

Youve payed for 1080p so use it lol !!!!!

I think youll find the difference in picture quality truly astounding compared with how you have it set up currently.

Hope this helps you out
Lee

Thanks for the reply. I am actually using both cables at the moment(not at the same time!) Both give similar results in picture quality. I think maybe the issue is with stretching the calibration images making them look blurry and showing compression atrifacts. Both cables look great with games.

VGA does have the advantage of dvd upscaling as well as separate settings though.

Any tips on calibration in general?

[LEEROY_UK]

Look at the begining of this thread for all the calibration tips youll need thanks to runtime

As for settings info i cant realy help you there as the 37" has a different panel to the 42" so my settings may not look right on your set.

couple of thoughts (as I ordered this set yesterday), hopefully this is the right place to make/ask

1) is nobody astounded just how much the end user has to do in order to get something resembling a 'correct' colour representation on these sets? It doesn't just appear to be the Tosh - every LCD model to one sense or another seems to need 'tweaking'.

Now obviously, this is not a problem for those that have the gear and the ability to do so, but the calibration listed in this thread is more than likely overly complex for what the average punter wants to achieve, but why then should they achieve potentially inferior picture rendition?

Just strikes me as odd that the TVs enter our homes so badly calibrated...


and

2) is there any mileage to having some sort of sticky where people who can offer these sort of calibration services can perhaps make a few more beer tokens out of it?

I don't have the kit to calibrate the TV, so I can either spend the 60quid, or perhaps I could get someone to come round with their pre-existing kit, I give them (for sake of argument) 20quid, and they come up with a rough 'colour correct' calibration?

It's obviously something I'll attempt to configure myself once the TV arrives, though I very much doubt I'd want to go into either the service menu, or to buy a colour calibration dongle thingy... but, paying 20quid to someone to get my TV pretty well calibrated... now that's something I'd be happy to do.


Apologies, I guess if answered properly this could easily threadjack this thread - perhaps this should be moved to another thread?

Anyway, thanks for any replies - from a newly curious LCD owner

Tez

[marauder6666]

Here's the setting I've been using on the 42X3030 for the past 2 weeks, I've had the TV for 3 weeks and settled on these. Maybe useful for someone just setting up the TV for the first time. Mainly used for DVD, Blu ray, but the settings are a good compromise for DTV, games.

Backlight 30
Contrast 95
Brightness 60
Colour 38
Tint 0
Sharpness 0
Black Stretch off
MPEG NR Low
DNR off
Colour temp Normal
Active Backlight On
Cinema Mode off

[Lions1885]

Has anybody got any settings for 360 over component lead please.

Rob

[lucky245]

Had my Tosh 42x3030 for about 2 weeks now but only just been given time (by her indoors) to play with settings. Have semi followed runtime tutorials, and warnings. Noted all starting settings. Used the HCFR Colorimeter with Spyder2. My blue was miles higher than the Red or green and Delta E was 65 to 45 depending on whether 30IRE or 80IRE. Used techy menu and reduced blue but seem to have stalled now. Please could you look at my graph and tell advise me what else can be altered. I apologise in advance if I have missed a fundemental setting. (picture 100% better aleady than out of box) image taken while running on or 80IRE test

[runtime]

Originally Posted by lucky245

Please could you look at my graph and tell advise me what else can be altered. I apologise in advance if I have missed a fundemental setting. (picture 100% better aleady than out of box) image taken while running on or 80IRE test

BDRV looks like it might have been reduced a tad too much, you could try taking it up a couple of notches, and perhaps decrease BCUT a little (if BCUT already at 0, increase RCUT and GCUT to compensate).

Hi runtime (...and all others) ,

first of all I'd like to thank you (...and all other involved folks) for opening and attending this excellent thread. Amazing how you guys go to the time and effort of explaining your results. Whithout this very helpfull thread it wouldn't had been possible for me to calibrate my tosh, especially because this is my first LCD and I never did such a work before.

It took me a long time to understand all terms you described because I'm german...so please be clement with my english and please try to keep answers as simple as you can to prevent me for using my dictionary.

Since 1 week I got the tosh now and the factory-settings were almost the same than runtimes.
As you guys recommended I bought a spyder, got the hcfr application and the Test-DVD of hcfr. So I started calibrating the tosh as you described and ended to almost the same settings you figured out.

Unfortunately my blue is still oversaturated at low grey levels like the one of lucky 245. While trying of getting rid of it by rising red & green cuts as you recommend to lucky:

Originally Posted by runtime

BDRV looks like it might have been reduced a tad too much, you could try taking it up a couple of notches, and perhaps decrease BCUT a little (if BCUT already at 0, increase RCUT and GCUT to compensate).

...I noticed an oversaturation of green and red colours while checking the picture by viewing. It looks to brown. But the curve in hcfr was very straight!
(I did calibrate with PS3!)

Question 1:
Is BCUT00 definitely the lowest acceptable setting for Blue-saturation in the service menu (found out if lowering this value blue will also be reduced)?
What happens if I go lower?

Question 2:
If raising instead red & green Cuts might this cause an overall oversaturation of colours (must go over R/GCUT05 !)?

Question 3:
Calibration the set with my PS3 needs to make higher changes of values (no difference between full RGB and limited RGB) to satisfy hcfr-app than doing it with my DVD-Player. After doing it with PS3 it looks awfull, with DVD-Player it's more natural. Do you think because PS3 output is 1080p/24p?

Question 4:
Personally my picture seems to be a bit to dark. What do think about the correct gamma-level of 1.9 in Grayscale Assessment described here ? :

http://geekwithfamily.com/2006/12/16...tion-software/

Is it just good for projectors...should it make any difference: gamma is gamma, is it?


I will post my settings and cal-results later in next post, if you like.


thx to all and your answers

Sorry for the long post..

[alienzero]

Hi,
My x3030D 37 tends in purple.
I tried to modify the "magenta" in color managment but nothing happened.
In white and reds backgrounds i always see a little purple saturation.

Which "service menu" parameter controls magenta?
Any clues?

thank you...

[lucky245]

Thanks runtime, sorry I have been away and only saw your response today will try your suggestion and let you know how I go. Thanks again

Hi,

i've created an pdf document of runtimes "Basics to Callibration" Infos in this thread. Just a collection of all the infos and screenshots in one document.

For these interested in it could be downloaded here:

Basic Calibration Collection

Thanks to runtime for the great work.

Zaxxon

Hi everyone!

Can I apply the service menu settings to a 42 X 3000P (the one without Freeview)?


regards

[MiddleeyE]

Originally Posted by cbeck

Hi everyone!

Can I apply the service menu settings to a 42 X 3000P (the one without Freeview)?

regards

It's the same TV, without a digital tuner, so I guess the optimal settings should be about the same.

My 42X3030D is looking perfect now with runtime's settings. Just the red is a tad oversaturated, but I can't be bothered to fiddle with the colour controls, I'll leave it as is...

Tnx for this thread!

[larguitto]

Hi everybody. I´m spanish and this is my first post.

Excuse me for my english

Well, I have the Tosh 42xd3030 for two weeks an I have a problem.

Once a week my DVB tunner Settings reboots. So I have to look for all the channels and order them.

All the rest of settings (back light, tone, etc ..) don´t change, so I don´t know what is the problem.

Anyone with the same problem?

Thanks in advance.

[nagus69]

Sounds like a faulty TV to me. I say, return it.

Hi everyone,

Great site and great Thread all you guys really helped me calibrate my Tosh.

For the past few weeks I have been trying to calibrate my TV using Spyder2 and HCFR software. I manage to get the a great set of graphs and prob better than some that have been posted but when I turned my tv onto Sky+ I still did not think the picture was that great. I dont have a HD DVD and I am in a area where I cant get DTV so Sky was my only choice to compare picture quality and I was constantly changing settings and fiddle about with menus and it was driving my wife mad. I began to think that there must be something up with my TV because all the people that have praised this TV cant be wrong!!

Today I found out something that dramatically improved the quality of the picture from my Sky+ box and at first I thought that I was seeing things.

Anyway this what I found:-

In the Services / System setup / picture settings menu my video output was set to RGB (as recommended in other threads) but the Scart Control was set to Off. When I changed the Scart Control to On the and saved the settings and returned to the TV I thought I was seeing things and I could not believe how clear and sharp the pictures where. I dont know if anyone else has seen this?

All in all I have had the TV for about a month now and I am very happy (I am now) overall. The one minor complaint is the the poor viewing angle.

[RockySpieler]

Originally Posted by headdabaw

........................ The one minor complaint is the the poor viewing angle.

I agree the colours do wash out at fairly normal viewing angles, luckily it does not affect my set-up.

However I think Toshiba knew about the poor viewing angle, and also engineered a solution........the swivel base ....

[runtime]

It's been about 3 months since I bought the TV and I've noticed that I'm naturally less critical than when I first bought my set; I no longer spend my time looking for defects. Since there's nothing that stands out / bugs me, and I'm happy watching content, I figured now would be a good time to write down my final settings:

I use my TV predominantly with Media Center PC (over DVI->HDMI cable), Xbox 360 (Component) and PS3 (HDMI). I occasionally watch Freeview, but in general that's my wife's domain and she isn't particularly fussy about picture quality

[RockySpieler]

Runtime,

Thanks for posting those.

I have not tried changing the UVTT setting before, it has quite an affect.

Do you use any colour correction within your PC's graphics card settings, in addition to your TV's setup?

[runtime]

Hi Rocky, I haven't applied any specific correction to the PC graphics card (Aspire L100, nVidia 6150), mainly due to lack of time more than anything else - but despite that, I'm very happy with the resulting image. UVTT setting (aka baseband tint).

I previously tried running a VGA cable between the PC and the LCD and the PQ was dreadful (lots of noise / poor black levels), DVI->HDMI showed a *very* significant improvement!

Update: Sorry, I did tweak UVTT, shows you how bad my memory is and why I spend some much time writing this stuff down in this thread ! My factory default for UVTT was in fact 01h. I reduced UVTT to pair down the colour in-between successive rounds of calibration.

[gasteropod]

I don't understand why you set the colour temperature to 'warm'. Whenever I have tried it, it makes things look way too unnatural.

[runtime]

The 'Warm' setting gets the LCD to output colour at the 'right' colour temperature i.e. that prescribed by the HD 701 spec. (check out the section on colour temperature, middle of this post); of course you may just prefer 'Normal' or 'Cold', however that basically invalidates the rest of my settings

For a laugh its worth giving 'Warm' a try for a week or so to see if your opinion changes (just try to forget about it if possible); logically if you're used to a cooler colour setting anything warmer will seem unnatural. The Toshiba's 'Normal' setting reflects the manufacturer's (quite accurate) guess that most people like cooler colour temperatures. Nothing wrong with that

[gasteropod]

I've just set my TV with all of your settings (except the service menu ones, how do I get to that?) and the picture looks way too dark. Yes, you have blacks, but that means that there is no detail whatsoever in dark sections; and is way darker than the THX optimizer recommends. (I'm not saying that is the ideal thing to set your TV by, but it's clearly right about the Brightness levels). People wearing black tuxedos just look like their body is a black hole in space, lol.

[runtime]

Yes things are probably a little too dark without the service menu settings. Slight adjustments to the service settings make a big difference, particularly BRTC (brightness center) which affects black level. If you're interested you'll need to do a bit of reading in this thread to find out how to access the service menu (note all the warnings and disclaimers). Also consider that different devices output with different black levels, and the Tosh only has one set of picture settings therefore you either optimize for one device or find the best compromise between several as I have done for my equipment.

[gasteropod]

Is it possible to access the service menu without the need of that computer program, and a laptop, etc? I'm testing various Blu-rays with your settings and you've done a good job with the colours, but I'm very eager to change the service settings to how you have yours to improve the darkness problem.

Also, how come you've got DNR and MPEG noise reduction on? Not a fan of film grain? You shouldn't use those things, apart from possibly for Freeview.

I am also curious about how you came to choose -30 for Sharpness, did you use a test for that? I'm not saying it's wrong at all, I'm just curious!

Thanks a lot.

[gasteropod]

I've found the post now on how to access the service menu, I'm currently in it on my TV.

[runtime]

Originally Posted by gasteropod

...how come you've got DNR and MPEG noise reduction on? Not a fan of film grain? You shouldn't use those things, apart from possibly for Freeview.

I am also curious about how you came to choose -30 for Sharpness, did you use a test for that? I'm not saying it's wrong at all, I'm just curious!

It's true DNR/MPEG should generally be avoided although it looks to me that it doesn't kick-in over a HDMI connection using the 'Auto' setting; the same may be applicable to MPEG NR (besides which in this case the algorithm is particularly good such that at the 'Low' setting detail is preserved). Consider that I'm choosing the best compromise for my devices (and that includes picking settings that makes Freeview / Wii look a little better). In other words leave it off if you use HDMI/Component all the time, otherwise it's useful to leave it on Auto if you're utilising SCART or VGA connections.

I selected Sharpness -30 using a test pattern, found it made a difference on the VGA connection, but could not see any difference on HDMI/Component 1080p, which where both pixel perfect.

[stuart1976]

Originally Posted by gasteropod

I've found the post now on how to access the service menu, I'm currently in it on my TV.

Got a link for that please?

[runtime]

You can find instructions to access the service menu here (middle of the post), please read the warning and disclaimers first (in red) and back up your settings (write them down) before tweaking.