Re: Panasonic VT30

Re: Panasonic VT30

Home Forums Calibration Discussion By Brand Panasonic VT30 Re: Panasonic VT30

#2273
Anonymous
Inactive

(A little background info – Calibrations are not my full time job, we took the THX course so we could offer more of a complete solution. With every calibration I get better and better and I’ve been able to get some pretty nice results with other displays.)

I had a client call me up who just bought the VT30 (US model) and wanted us to calibrate it. He read a lot of forums and new the VT30 could be “auto-calibrated” using CALMan. I too use was curious to see how well this new feature would work and told him we would calibrate it for him. As usual, read the manual, read the threads on here. I knew i should use the THX mode because of the color gammuet concerns as Gregg pointed out.

I was able to get the IP connection up and running with firmware (TV=2070-1000. Stat3=0.28.4) and CALMan 4.3.257. In order to accomplish this you need to goto “Custom” >> highlight “Pro settings” then hold the red button for 4+ seconds then click connect on CALMan. Upon doing so you will get communication and you can use CALMan to add the ISF Day Mode and ISF Night mode. Although THX mode is visible natively, you can not select it in the drop down menu to work with.

Once the ISF day/night modes were added by the CALMan software it did not look like i could make any manual adjustments in the user menu or the service menu.

Despite knowing the color issues i may/would come across i still wanted to see what it could do. So i proceeded. I used the “Advanced DDC” workflow (SpectraCal recommended) and started to get down to business. The first thing I noticed that the Advanced DDC workflow has you do the CMS before the grayscale. I thought this was a little strange, in class it was the other way around, but i followed the steps in the work flow. On the first HDMI input, it seemed to do an ok job. I tried to copy the settings to the other hdmi inputs but it seems it has discrete settings for each inputs and no easy way of copying ISF settings to other inputs. There is no way of adjusting the ISF modes through the user modes.

So i ran the process again on the other two HDMI inputs (i wanted to see if i could streamline the process). The next two inputs went funky. The auto process seemed to get confused and couldn’t make the adjustments it needed. at 30IRE it dropped the Red channel and no amount of dragging it up or the Blue/Green/Luma down seemed to fix it. Despite it saying it was being cut in the graphs when i looked up on the screen it was over driving the red and maxing it out. I tried to go back and forth and adjust the CMS then re-try…. no luck.

I did not see any way to adjust the white balance through the user menu for the THX mode? Or did i miss something? When i went into the service menu i found the WB-ADJ and cycled through the inputs. It had Vivid, standard, Cinema, Game, Custom. But no THX was listed.

At one point i tried using the 10IRE levels in custom to see how well that would work, I would make adjustments on 30 and it seemed other levels would get effected. Not sure if there was an offset here. So i went back to adjusting the W/B High RGB and W/B Low RGB. After several hours of messing around with the TV, i calibrated the Custom mode as a temporary solution. It was better then out of the box but i know i can make major improvements on it. I know this TV can get some decent results, and I know i can improve my original calibration settings. Jennifer( aka the red head -pretty sure that’s her name) looked good in the sample material but the Delta E 1994 needed serious improvements.

The manual states that 2D/3D modes will be retained independently. if you calibrate in 2D first does it use this as a starting platform or do you need to start from the beginning in 3D mode? My QD780 has 3D test patterns to I have to manually select those, throw the 3D glasses over top of the meter and start from scratch adjusting the Brightness, contrast, WB etc etc?

Like i said before, my experience grows with each set, this one gave me some issues at first – but i want to go back and make it right. To add to my frustration the client wanted day/night modes calibrated for multiple inputs + 3D calibration on multiple modes.

I’m curious to find out other people’s experiences. More to the point For those that used custom did you use the 10IRE (is there an offset by 10?) or did you stick with the High/low RGB. If you used the THX mode where did you make the settings, as i said earlier i did not see the THX color mode in the service menu. This isn’t a reference calibration but i would like to get it as good as i can get it. I would like to use the THX mode, but if all else fails I’ll try the custom mode and try to dial it in as much as possible. I don’t think i will waste anymore time trying the auto calibration with CALMan. I don’t like leaving it in the hands of the computer and not being able to make adjustments when it gets confused.

I know there is a lot of info here, but i’d rather post here among professionals then have people rant at me on forums.

Thanks for any input,
Jeff.