Thread: St50 calibration = difference?

Hello. I bought ST50 and the television is a big leap over my previous. I have never had a tv calibrated before. Does St50 benefit in a big way? Will there be a big improvement in black level, shadow detail, and color accuracy with a pro-cal?

Or would disney WOW get very close to the results a pro cal would?

Thanks very much for your time.

Have you run the 100 hours of slides and tried the D-nice ST50 calibration settings?
They work great for me.

A thousand times YES. The ST50 most of all needs calibrated. All of the units I've seen have had green-tinted greyscale in their best preset mode.

Originally Posted by David Mackenzie

A thousand times YES. The ST50 most of all needs calibrated. All of the units I've seen have had green-tinted greyscale in their best preset mode.

If that has been your experience with ST50s, what did you see on the ST30 line???

Our 60ST50 is head & shoulders above any of the 2011s we had (and/or viewed) in terms of Apparent Color Accuracy & Lack of UNwanted Tinting....


Did we simply "luck out" with this particular ST50?

Originally Posted by ImRizzo

The use of WOW or Munsil & Spears will definite give a much improved picture but not as good as a professional calibration will produce.

But how much a difference between calibration disc vs pro cal? Is it a $350 difference? (cost of pro cal)

Originally Posted by David Mackenzie

A thousand times YES. The ST50 most of all needs calibrated. All of the units I've seen have had green-tinted greyscale in their best preset mode.

Oh, hello David. I didn't know you were on this forum. Your advice means a lot to me as I love your reviews.

Originally Posted by rahzel

Like Michael said, YMMV. To some it's night and day, to others it might just be a little noticeable.

The ST50's best preset is Cinema mode and it's not too bad for a preset IMO, but there's definitely a lot of room for improvement. As David mentioned, it's a little green and the gamma is on the low side so it benefits the most from a calibration between the ST/GT/VT.

A calibration disc without a meter will just allow you to get the basic controls down, but it won't allow you to properly adjust the greenish tint out of the grayscale. Custom mode has a gamma slider to correct the low gamma issue of Cinema mode, but Custom mode has worse RGB balance than Cinema mode and will need even more white balance tweaking to fix the grayscale issues.

As Nighthawk said, you could try D-Nice's settings and see what you think, unless you have the 60/65" model (it's slightly different than the 50/55). They should get you in the ballpark and will probably look a little better than Cinema mode.

I dont know what gamma or greyscale is. Does adjusting these make a big difference vs cinema mode?

Black and White are adjusted with Brightness and Contrast respectively and gamma adjusts the midtone brightness. If it's too high, shadow detail will be harder to see. If set too low, more shadow detail is visible, but the overall picture will look washed out. The ideal range is around 2.2 - 2.5 (depending on lighting conditions). Cinema mode is a little over 2 so it's lower than ideal, but it still looks OK. That's one of the areas that can be improved with Custom mode via the gamma slider.

With grayscale you want all shades of gray as neutral as possible. You do this by balancing Red, Green and Blue with the White Balance controls so that there's no tint or shift in the grayscale. Too much red, grays will have a red tint, too much green, grays will have a green tint etc.
Both Cinema and Custom mode have white balance/grayscale controls, but Cinema mode has to be adjusted in the service menu and Custom mode can be adjusted in the user menu (or service menu). By default, Cinema mode shifts towards green and Custom mode shifts towards blue. You need a meter to set RGB where they're supposed to be because doing it by eye usually doesn't work well.

Originally Posted by rahzel

Black and White are adjusted with Brightness and Contrast respectively and gamma adjusts the midtone brightness. If it's too high, shadow detail will be harder to see. If set too low, more shadow detail is visible, but the overall picture will look washed out. The ideal range is around 2.2 - 2.5 (depending on lighting conditions). Cinema mode is a little over 2 so it's lower than ideal, but it still looks OK. That's one of the areas that can be improved with Custom mode via the gamma slider.

With grayscale you want all shades of gray as neutral as possible. You do this by balancing Red, Green and Blue with the White Balance controls so that there's no tint or shift in the grayscale. Too much red, grays will have a red tint, too much green, grays will have a green tint etc.
Both Cinema and Custom mode have white balance/grayscale controls, but Cinema mode has to be adjusted in the service menu and Custom mode can be adjusted in the user menu (or service menu). By default, Cinema mode shifts towards green and Custom mode shifts towards blue. You need a meter to set RGB where they're supposed to be because doing it by eye usually doesn't work well.

Thank you. Seems I need a calibrator. Who do I hire?

There's a directory on this site.
http://www.highdefjunkies.com/dynamics/index.php

You can always do what some have suggested and try a setup disc first, or try D-Nice's settings and see if you like them or not. If you feel that there's room for improvement or you would just rather have a professional calibrate it, then you could look for a local calibrator.

Make sure you let your calibrator know what you like, what you don't like, and what your lighting conditions will be for the majority of the time. The ST50 doesn't have the greatest options if you want separate settings for Day and Night. Custom and Cinema would be the best options but it might be difficult to decide which mode you'll want to assign to each application. Again, Custom mode is the better mode and is also capable of getting brighter so it will work better for Day OR Night. I would use this mode for whatever lighting conditions you do most of your viewing in.

A 60ST50 is on it's way to me. I'm looking for a consensus on the best way to get from point A to optimally calibrated with this unit. I do calibrations as part of my job as an electronics integrator, but have yet to get any experience with an ST50 model.

Ideally, I'd like a Day, Night and B&W calibration for both 2D and 3D across all inputs. However, from what I've been reading I can only realistically get 2 calibrations. Are those the same across all HDMI inputs? So Cinema on HDMI 1 is the same as Cinema on HDMI 2? I am presuming at the very least I can do a seperate cal for Component inputs?

If it's true I only get 2 cal's, and that Custom is the one that gets brighter and has more fine tune control, then I would use this for my 2D Night cal, being my most used. Cinema I would have to use for either a Day cal, or a 3D cal. I also read that I need to get into the Service menu to fully calibrate the Cinema mode? Can someone either post or PM me the procedure to get into the Service menu in order to do so?

Is the consensus 100 hours before calibrating? I'm a little confused about the posts I read which state to use slides to prepare for a cal, but that they are not recommended for preventing IR. What is the consensus on how to treat my set from the day I open the box to the moment I do the cal?

Thanks.

Appreciate the input. I will calibrate it right away. Wondering if I should still do anything to strengthen it against IR? I suppose just avoiding content with side/top bars, and fixed images for the first 100 or so hours.

Not sure though how I can do a night and b/w mode on Cinema. I would need two different color temperatures and I thought Cinema could only store 1 calibration? Also I thought Cinema should be the Day mode since the potential color gamut is lower (would prefer 2.2 or even 2.35 for my night mode. 2.0 would be OK for my day mode).


Any way to also calibrate seperately for 3D? What about across inputs? Service mode? Thanks again.

Interesting. Does this mean that I can save unique RGB high and low parameters not only to the various picture modes (Standard, Cinema, Custom, etc), but also to the Color temp settings within each? Sorry a lot of these questions will be relieved once I get my set, unfortunately the delivery date is not for a few weeks and I'm anxious to know what it will be capable of.