PW7 Settings - What Have You?

[tamthetim]

Just thought, i'd post my current settings to help others or for others to help me

Sky to VGA by conveter

Picture Mode - Normal
Contrast 6
Brightness 4
Sharpness 6
White Balance - Normal
Colour Management - Off
Advanced Settings - Off

DVD through component board

Contrast -7
Brightness 2
Colour 1
Tint 0
Sharpness 6
White Balance - Normal
Colour Management - Off
Advanced Settings - Off


Should the advanced settings be on, noticed that in them Gamma is set at 2.5 on the component, but the VGA is set at 2.2, does this matter?

Any help from the experts would be most welcome..............i know the next step is professional calibration....................but still a bit pricey.

Cheers,Tam

 

[adymartin]

my settings are the same as yours for sky. I had a muck about with the advanced settings but it didn't seem to make much difference. I think those ones must be for the calibration experts.I also think thats why you don't get many answers when you ask for peoples settings. so that the calibrators don't lose all their business!! (cynical me!!)
sometimes the colour management is turned on,it depends on the programme as to how good the effect is i think. football looks stupid with it on, all the pitches look a bit radioactive!! , so i generally just leave it off altogether.
I have my dvd through a scart connection and to be honest, i've stuck with the cinema setting as standard so far, i've only watched two films and they both looked really good to my eyes. I might have a play around in future. only had my telly a week!!, still grin when i see it!!

 

[tamthetim]

adymartin

I had a play with the advanced settings to match earlier threads about the PW6.............didn't see much difference.

still think in the back of my mind i can get more from the screen............its had over 400 hours now.

but its the fact that i will be changing equipment at some point that puts me off professional calibration at the moment.............want new DVD but still unsure about panasonic - HDMI, Bluray, HD DVD, etc.

my current DVD only cost £70 ISF calibration £250+

cheers,tam

 

[Peabo]

I'd imagine settings the the PW6 and 7 would be slightly different though. Has anyone seen these 2 sets side by side?

 

[Piers]

ady,

The reason that one person's settings (particularly in the advanced settings menu) won't necessarily be "right" on someone else's screen is that the panels do vary and the ambient light in their viewing room also affects ideal settings. It is all but impossible to set up a panel properly using the advanced settings without having the test equipment or at the very least a calibrated monitor to compare the panel against.


It's not that we are worried about losing business.....honest

 

[tamthetim]

ady,

It's not that we are worried about losing business.....honest

any chance then of posting the full settings for the last PW7 you ISF'd up

just as a rough guide of course

 

[Piers]

tam,

Good try mate - I'm a Scot also (Penicuik originally!) - you ain't getting it for nothing though and I still say that even if I posted those settings your screen might well be worse than it is right now, not because the settings were wrong on the last ISF job but because they would be wrong on yours.

 

[hornydragon]

also depends on source componets a a PACE Sky+ box and Amstrad one may not have same output voltages and hence will require different settings

 

[adymartin]

no cheek, no chance as they say!!

i'm sure you can answer this one tho.

in the sky box settings, when you go into screen set up, is it better to have the contrast rating set to high, medium or low?

also, when does the 'calibration' sale happen!!??

 

[Piers]

ady,

Low contrast usually gives the best results.

No plans for a "sale" just at the mo

 

[adymartin]

thanks for that, I would have thought the opposite, so i'm glad I asked.
I guess you won't have a sale until you've got your first yacht eh!!

(which won't be long at those prices)

you know i'm only yolking.

cheers mate.

 

[Deleted member 39241]

Piers,

When you callibrate the screen do you go into the service menu and change settings, or do it all from the user menu?

 

[rhodos]

This is all going slightly OT - but to continue in that way does the point made by HD mean that its better to have each source with its own input on plasma, e.g. Sky thru VGA and DVD thru Comp etc and then calibrate for each. Otherwise you're either calibrating for one or the other or making a compromise.

How does this work for ISF? Surely they are working against a 'benchmark' and not calibrating based on YOUR individual sources or do they?

Finally - again without wishing Piers to give business away, what about the difference from day and night time viewing. Is there a general recommendation of having each input calibrated for each time of day or to have each claiabrated for night time and accept that brightness is upped a couple of notches for daytime.

This is applies a lot to my setup where I have full wall size (almost) wondow at either end of the TV room - the ambient light in daytime is almost like being in the garden and shock horror I sometimes switch to dynamic mode to see the screen during the day.

 

[tamthetim]

This is all going slightly OT - but to continue in that way does the point made by HD mean that its better to have each source with its own input on plasma, e.g. Sky thru VGA and DVD thru Comp etc and then calibrate for each. Otherwise you're either calibrating for one or the other or making a compromise.

not necessarily.......................you could still have one cable going to the screen from amp.........................................but use the diff setting on the screen for diff sources.

Normal for sky switched through amp and Cinema for DVD..................suppose the problem is bigger the more sources you have.

Cheers, Tam

 

[hornydragon]

Piers,

When you callibrate the screen do you go into the service menu and change settings, or do it all from the user menu?

lisa

OK I'm not piers but ISF usually includes service menu adjustments (not for the faint hearted or untrained)

 

[Gordon @ Convergent AV]

The way that different plasma's work dictates how they are calibrated. The entire chain is calibrated so your sources are taken in to account wherever possible.

On a Panasonic the display loads up different paramaters in the background based on incoming signal type, refresh rate and resolution. The USER picture adjsutments are offsets applied to these background settings (the background settings are service menu ones). So if you do calibration in the USER menu of a Panasonic you need to hope that Panasonic got each of these hidden menu's to track the same. The ideal solution is to go to the service menu and adjust each memory bank individually so that as little or no adjustments need be done in user menu's.

The reason that the Sky box contrast should usually be set to Low is that on High or Medium it can cause the A to D's of the display or processor to clip causing a lack of bright image detail. It's not always the case it will and on a Panasonic there are other solutions as sometimes the home owner likes the HIGH contrast image on the TV's in other parts of the house.....

Day and Night settings....Well if you have a Lumagen processor in the chain you can use it's multiple memories per input to have day and night calibrated settings for each source. Of course you can't do this on every video processor..... You could have write down preffered settigns for day and night and swap them over as you see fit I guess....In USA they are starting to roll out ISF IC3 firmware that gets embedded in the display. This allows ISF calibrators to create user selectable ISF DAY and NIGHT settings. It's just Runco and Pioneer Elites that have this just now. As I say you can achieve the same thing with a Lumagen.

Hope this is all of use,

Gordon

 

[Deleted member 39241]

Hi Gordon,

Very helful, thanks

So, what would you say would be the usual settings on a PW7 panel for a freeview box connected via Scart - nightime settings?

 

[Gordon @ Convergent AV]

Well having never plugged a freeview box in to a scart input on a PW7 I wouldn't know...and even then who is to say that all freeview boxes have the same output voltage levels. Sorry....

G

 

[Piers]

Lisa,

Sorry not to have replied sooner - don't know how I missed it originally. With the Panasonics I calibrate from within the service menu which enables different settings to be applied for different input devices, different resolutions etc. Pioneers are mostly done within the pro adjust section of the user menu.


banjo,

yes we do calibrate for each source input where possible and if a client wants day and night settings programmed that can be done as well - oh and many need PAL and NTSC options also.