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Michael A. Terrell

Cydrome Leader wrote:

wrote:
Cyndrome Leader wrote: wrote:
Your silence on this subject speaks
volumes. Out of the box, a new con-
sumer grade TV is like staring at the
midday sun for a half-hour to an hour.

It is typically set to "Vivid" or "Dynamic"
mode, which is useful only for display
in a retail sales floor environment.
Contrast, color and sharpness are
cranked, color temperature is skewed
to 10,000+Kelvin - ultra blue, and every
so-called "enhancer" under advanced
settings is checked(skin tone enhancer,
black level enhancer, digital noise re-
duction, etc.) Backlight(if it's a LED or
LCD) is all the way up, etc.

The problem I see with most LCDs is the color temp due to the LED
backlighting. Everything is way too cold (blue). Except for that, just
peek in a bar with multiple TVs, they're not perfectly matched, but far
closer than in the days of CRTs or plasma stuff. There's no phosphors or
electron guns to weaken at different rates.

The drift (in everything) in the plasma airport arrival/departure screens
was pretty amazing too, even if you cut some slack for those displays
having been used in the worst possible conditions. "

Cyndrome:
The reason you are seeing those "way too cold" color
temperatures is because in the advance settings the
highest/bluest color temperature is set by default!

The backlights themselves are really just too blue. This is a problem of
sorts when laptops went from CCFL backlighting to LEDs- the color temp
went way too high. It can probably be adjusted, somehow, but it doesn't
help the color is just wrong to start with.

As for the creature cantina scene - of course the TVs
in there are not matched: different mfgs have different
factory default settings; but what those settings do
have in common is: they were selected to make their
product stand out on a sales floor - NOT to be watched
for any appreciable length of time.

they all match pretty much, even in a place like best buy. All those
cheapo LCD panels are probably coming out of the same 3 plants. Nobody
cares about special phosphors or dot patterns or shadow masks like in CRT
days. Sure there's cheap and expensive display panels, but they just don't
seem to vary all that much otherwise.

Bet you a five-legged horse that if even just the user
controls(color temp set to neutral instead of high,
backlight on LEDs set in half, and the bright, contrast,

Even half brightness, they're still too blue too look natural.

color, sharpness all set via test DVD) you'd be
hard pressed to see any difference between sets at
opposite ends of the bar - assuming they are all
tuned to the same game, as they likely all will
next week for the series.

What more can I do to convince you guys that OOB
(out of the box) settings are no good for a consumer
display, or for your eyes? In fact, I find the factory
"BUY ME, BUY ME!" settings on modern flat panel
TVs are worse than the factory defaults on any old
CRT tube I've EVER seen.

I'll restate what I said before- LCDs lack the color and brightness
variations that affected CRTs. Default settings have always been and are
still pretty horrible, but at least these days if you buy a demo LCD TV,
it's safe to say the thing isn't already worn out like a CRT would have
been trying to dazzle customers with every setting turned way up.

For viewing at home, I use an Epson projector that seems to have 3 CCDs
and the starndard arc lamp. I forgot what the default factory settings
were, but they were garish and made even the OSD menu setup hard to look
at. It had to be something like high brightness, 14k color temp and no
doubt some sort of vivid control cranked way up. I did not bother with any
real calibration, but made sure white looked white and the brightness was
reduced so that set so that "black" on the screen looked black, even
though the screen itself is white.

How do you suggest adjusting a projection system?

WHite LEDs are actually blue, with a phosphor to make it into
something near white light. They fail in that attempt.