Noise In Black Bars

[Ruby]

Just finished setting up my new Panasonic 42PE50B yesterday. Great picture with good black levels (better than the Pioneer 506XDE, which I owned for a couple of days), even in dark viewing conditions.

However, my question is that I noticed noise in the dark areas of the picture, especially in the black bars. I was able to get rid of this by lowering the brightness setting. Is this noise issue normal with plasmas?

I also noticed a slight rainbow like effect against in some scenes with light backgrounds, but it was nothing too distracting. Anybody else noticed anything like this?

 

[mal60908]

If you set your plasma up using DVE or maybe a THX disc for now, you lower the brightness until the pixels stop filckering, this is the lowest level of black you can get, you have to right up to the screen in a dark room to see it.
You DVD player may even have a test pattern on it.