Plasma performance

[steffche]

Of late I have been quite dissatisfied with the PQ I have been getting out of my Philips 42" plasma. I have calibrated it using DVE, but still not satisfied. I visited the shop where I purchased it from, to see if I had a dud product, or if I was sold a poor quality plasma.

So I had a look at the same model I had purchased on display, and I was very impressed with how HDTV looked, but not so impressed with a DVD. Although, the salesperson had connected the DVD player using composite lead, and to my surprise it looked better than what mine looks using component progressive scan input. Her theory is that becuase there is less information in composite that it may actually appear to give better PQ than component. Could this be true??? I will try it tonight on my tv to see if there is any improvement, but I doubt it!

The main problem I have is that if brightness is set too low, blacks appear as blobs with no definition, and if I turn up the brightness to improve this, I get alot of white specs showing up in the black areas.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.......

Cheers!

[aarsoe]

Steffche

I am a bit confused over your description, but will still try to help, if possible.

First, it is my experience that trying to use Avia for adjustning a flatpanel like your Philips is not that easy. First due the automatic correction that Philips have built into the set. So no matter what you try to adjust, the tv will re adjust it self afterwards - that is unless you disable it.. You need to look at the dynamic contrast in particular.
Best way to judge if your set have it enabled or not, is to use the middle botton on the last row in the remote, while running a picture from either a dvd or a tv channel. You will then get an overview of how much the tv is actually adjusting itself all the time (quite scary as brightness and contrast can really be popping all over the place) However I must admit that the standard setting (at least for my display 9965 works better than after having played around with Avia).

Then there is this thing that is a bit strange, you state that the set looks good with HD material - but the 9945 is NOT a HD set. naitive resulotion is 852*480 - also, as I recall you are in France, and in Europe we dont have HD tv..
So I am guessing that you are ref. to DVD playback - and if so then component is wastly better than composite. It sounds like you are experiencing noise on the signal (the snow effect) so you most likely have either a bad cable connection or something that interpheres on the power line. It could be a washing machine, fridge etc..
You should also check your cables for to sharp bends - as your 9945 have built-in media box, so the cables are attached directly to the screen and could be under pressure if you have it hanging on the wall.

if the snow can only be seen watching cable tv (Canal+ etc) then you are most likely experiencing the down side of plasma - namely the upconversion of noise means that even the smallest error will be displayed several times. One way to eliminate that would be to play around with the sharpness and the DNR settings.

I would however under all circumstances advise to get a mains filter for the plasma - I have done so my self with good result.

Anyway - hope this can be of some help - if not get back with more details and I will try to help again..


Anders

[aarsoe]

Forgot (I alwayes do) easiest way is to go back to factory settings and see if this improves things..

[steffche]

Thanks for your response Anders. Just to add a little more detail....

I actually live in Australia. We do have HDTV signals, and even though the 9945 is not an HD set, it looked really good in the shop. As I may have mentioned previously, I still do not have my set top box delivered to me yet (hopefully this week) so I am only going on what I saw in the shop where I bought it from. They had it connected to a HD set top box, and right next to the 9945 was the 9954 which was connected to the same set top box. To be quite honest I could not tell the difference between the two tv's which made me really happy.

As for my tv at home, I tried running the comosite cable last night, and it did not look any better (worse infact) which was to be expected. So I re-connected the component cables and tried separating them from all other cables just in case there was interference. The picture showed no improvement.

I agree with you that DVE setup patterns don't work well on a plasma, so I was a little disappointed there. I still find that setting brightness according to DVE and then watching a dvd movie has the brightness set too high. The dark ares on any given picture have a lot of little white specs in them that are quite noticable from 2 metres away. Decreasing the brightness to reduce these little white dots only results in loss of a lot of detail in the dark ares of the picture.

At the moment I have the following settings....

Brightness: 40/100
Contrast: 62/100
color: 78/100
Color temp: Warm
Sharpness: 1/7
Digital Natural Motion: On
Dynamic Contrast: minimum
Dynamic Noise Reduction: Medium

As for the Active Display setting, its on Medium which is what has been recommended from Philips (this is the one that constatly changes the settings to suit the displayed picture on the screen).

Don't know if this helps any....do you have similar settings on your plasma?
(I assume you have a philips?)

Once again thanks for your response, and look forward to any other responses.

Steve.