Just purchased a Panasonic ST30, thinking of returning it, HELP

[ViperGT007]

Hey everyone, just found this forum, glad i did, seems like everyone knows what they are talking about here compared to other forums...sorry if i sound uneducated, i'm just confused and need some guidance, so ill get to it, I bought a Panny ST30 last week. It was on clearance and I got it for a GREAT price, but i've been debating on whether or not I should return it.

The new ST30 is replacing a 2009 model 42" Samsung 720p Plasma TV, and I confusingly have been thinking the Samsung had a better picture.

I have an HD DVR box (Motorola DCX3501) with Charter. And it has 1080p illuminated on the front of the box indicating that it is showing HD content. Also i've tried a few dvds on a Samsung upconverting DVD player, as well as a couple Blu Ray movies from my PS3. Everything connected using HDMI cables.

So, my main complaint about the TV is that HD just doesn't look...well....HD. In other words, HD content looks grainy, not as liquidy smooth as the Samsung this is replacing. Don't get me wrong, most HD content looks okay, but I can't help but notice the graininess. I've noticed it the most during the NBA playoff games, and even on the NASCAR race last night. The picture was kind of clear, but just didn't look as High Def as my old Samsung. I didn't look at it and say "wow, yeah this is HD" like before.

In some cases there is major artifacting, and when there is a color gradient like dark blue to light blue, it doesn't blend smoothly it shows a bar of color for each shade. Sometimes the picture looks kind of blurry as well, and on any content that isn't specifically high quality HD (ie an HD local news program cutting to an SD live report) it just looks plain bad, like a 360p video on youtube. Also motion doesn't seem as good, it seems almost choppy, and games like MW3 are hard to see detail, motion doesn't seem clear and makes me dizzy on this set.

The colors and brightness seem ok, black levels are great, so i don't think that my settings are an issue, also i've tried a LOT of different suggested settings after researching calibration threads on different forums. So far nothing about this TV, besides the size, and the price has made me say, wow!

Its all very confusing because every thing i've read says Panasonic is the king of plasmas, every review i've read for this model TV say the PQ is absolutely amazing, but i'm just not seeing it. I thought a higher resolution TV would look better than my old Samsung, but it seems the opposite. Whats going on??

I don't really WANT to return the TV b/c i just don't have a thousand to spend on a comparable size plasma with 3D and internet connectivity. And not to mention i sure don't want to pack it back up and carry it back down the stairs and haul it all the way back to the store, this thing was HEAVY. BUT at the same time i shouldn't be more impressed with an older lower resolution Samsung. So, anyone know what i should do? Is it my expectations set too high, or was my expectation of this TV looking better than my older 720p Samsung just a wrong assumption? should i just get used to it and keep it, or what?

Thanks for any help or advice, i'm really torn here...

EDIT: Forgot a few details, the panel is 55" and i sit as far away as possible but its only 7-8 ft

[Dierk]

You've told us you have (had?) a 42" 720p Samsung plasma.

What you haven't mentioned - that I can tell - is How Large the ST30 is, OR how FAR away from the panel you sit.

Depending upon size and distance, would EXPECT most of the material you mention to look BETTER on the 42" panel than on a larger panel, given the same viewing distance.

The only exception should be blu-ray dvds: the ST should smoke the older Samsung, assuming you have everything set up correctly - including the blu-ray player & the ST itself.

General consensus - and personal experience - is that the PQ on the ST is likely to Improve as the panel ages - at least over the first several hundred hours, and barring any Panel Flaws.

(We have 3 plasma sets: 1024x768 42"; 1366x768 50"; and a 60" ST. The 50" panel EASILY does the nicest job with SD material - including many-to-most "HD TV" channels, but the 42" also looks nicer with SD than the 60" does, given a normal viewing distance. OTOH, the 60" set is head & shoulders above the 42" for blu-rays, and trounces the 50" as well - albeit for reasons that extend BEYOND "mere resolution.")

Sift through some of the ST Owner / Calibration threads - you should find some useful setup info.

Best of Luck!

[ViperGT007]

You've told us you have (had?) a 42" 720p Samsung plasma.

What you haven't mentioned - that I can tell - is How Large the ST30 is, OR how FAR away from the panel you sit.

Depending upon size and distance, would EXPECT most of the material you mention to look BETTER on the 42" panel than on a larger panel, given the same viewing distance.

The only exception should be blu-ray dvds: the ST should smoke the older Samsung, assuming you have everything set up correctly - including the blu-ray player & the ST itself.

General consensus - and personal experience - is that the PQ on the ST is likely to Improve as the panel ages - at least over the first several hundred hours, and barring any Panel Flaws.

(We have 3 plasma sets: 1024x768 42"; 1366x768 50"; and a 60" ST. The 50" panel EASILY does the nicest job with SD material - including many-to-most "HD TV" channels, but the 42" also looks nicer with SD than the 60" does, given a normal viewing distance. OTOH, the 60" set is head & shoulders above the 42" for blu-rays, and trounces the 50" as well - albeit for reasons that extend BEYOND "mere resolution.")

Sift through some of the ST Owner / Calibration threads - you should find some useful setup info.

Best of Luck!

Thanks for the reply! i knew i was forgetting something, i tried to cover all my bases, but the panel is 55" and i sit 7-8 feet away, i know its closer, but its as far as i can possibly sit due to my living room size, i assume this would be part of the reason things don't look as good? If so, why? i thought a higher resolution set would look better no matter how far you sit....am i just dumb to think that? It just doesn't make sense to me that a higher quality, higher resolution TV would require you to sit far away for a good quality picture, its like saying in order for this tv to look good you have to be far away from it.

[Dierk]

Garbage In, Garbage Out.

A Larger, Higher Resolution screen, simply allows you to better see all of the FLAWS inherent in your source material - particularly when you sit close to the panel.


Still, at 8ft from a 55" ST, blu-rays SHOULD look Wonderful.

Suggest running through all settings options on your player - and, if possible, at least Borrow a newer blu-ray player as well, and give that try.

Then run through the settings on your TV - there are several threads that deal with the ST30.

Would also try switching out your HDMI cable(s) - although that seems a less likely source of the problem, might as well eliminate it.
(We had one HDMI cable that required us to TRIM the plastic around the connector before it would fully seat in one of our devices. Post-trim, cable has worked fine.)


Stepping from a 50" to a 60" panel, at a 9ft viewing distance, we were also Disappointed in the PQ from many SD DVDs, as well as MOST of the so-called "HD TV" broadcasts.
Still, we've done enough experimentation that it seems clear that The Source Material plays a large part in this; along, of course, with the Much Larger Panel Size!

OH: Also recall reading a recommendation to VERIFY the settings on your Cable box, AND to try whatever different output modes the box offers (1080i / 720p / "Native" - ?).

"HD TV" is coming across the wire (satellite / cable / whatever) in either 720p or 1080i format - so if your box is claiming "1080p Output" it is doing some manipulation.
(Unless Charter is doing it at their offices - which seems unlikely.)

[ViperGT007]

Nice, thanks for all the tips, ill def try them out....when i go into the display settings my DVR box reads 1080p @ 60fps. I see what you're saying about garbage in garbage out, but i'm still a little confused, for example, if i put my old 720p Samsung right next to the new 1080p ST30, with the same source, shouldn't the panasonic look better, more clear, more "HD" than the Samsung? If not, why? just because of screen size? If so, why wouldn't everyone just buy smaller 720p sets so they have better picture quality?

[SpHeRe31459]

We need sort out what issues you see and from which source(s) you see it.

It seems that most of your complaints are about the quality from your cable box, right?

It's not clear if you have any complaints about the image quality from your DVD/Blu-ray player(s).

I do see one mention of MW3 from your PS3, the motion certainly shouldn't be any worse, all plasmas have great motion resolution. That alone makes me wonder if you have a lemon... I've seen a few other reports of issues while gaming on the ST30 and it turned out to be a defective panel. Make sure you have the "intelligent frame creation" junk turned off in the TV. The TV also has a game mode that you can select for the HDMI input that the PS3 is connected to.

As Dierk alluded to, digital cable/satellite channels are seriously over compressed these days, the larger the screen you put them on the worse they look. I have a 60" TV that I moved up to from a 50" and I can tell you that compression issues immediately became noticeable on a TV that size. I sit farther away from my 60" than you do from your 55", you're sitting at a very good distance from your 55" for pristine HD content. However, the over-compressed junk that passes for many of the HD channels on cable/satellite will be painfully obvious. The "graininess" as you call it, I'm pretty sure are compression issues (mosquito noise, banding in color gradients, macroblocking in fast motion, etc.) that I've seen many lay people call graininess. You can see examples of overcompression in this thread here: http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=1008271
Do the images look similar to what you're seeing? Hopefully you're only seeing this sort of issue from the cable box and not from optical media (Blu-ray/DVD) right?

As for anything standard def, the larger you try to blow it up, the worse it's going to look. SD cable channels for example are notorious for looking bad on pretty much any modern TV. You'll just have to get used to the softness of SD content. Remember your last TV was not only smaller it was lower resolution, and so it scaled 480 lines to only 720 lines (1.5x the resolution of SD). Now with the 1080p native screen it is scaling the measly 480 lines of resolution to 1080 lines (2.25x the resolution of SD). At 42" from 8 feet away you can just fully perceive the full resolution of pristine 720p video. But at the distance but with a 55" TV you can not only resolve all the detail in a pristine 720p image, but you just start to perceive the differences between 720p and 1080p content. That means 480i/p content looks that much poorer. This chart is super handy for understanding more about the differences in TV size and what a person with 20/20 vision can perceive: http://s3.carltonbale.com/resolution_chart.html

[ViperGT007]

oh wow, thank you for taking the time to explain all of that, for the most part it finally clicks now. That thread you linked looked EXACTLY like the problems i'm having, so its all compressed "HD" channels from charter causing this garbage. I assume it looks better on the Samsung set b/c maybe most of the content is 720p, and may not look as great on my ST30 b/c its upscaling 720p to 1080p. Is that right? in dvds it almost looks the same as my "HD" cable, Blu rays its not as noticeable but every now and then there is some artifacting and graininess on darker scenes. I def use game mode for the PS3 input, where would i find "intelligent frame creation" exactly? Again thanks for taking the time to break it down, it makes a lot more sense now.

[SpHeRe31459]

oh wow, thank you for taking the time to explain all of that, for the most part it finally clicks now. That thread you linked looked EXACTLY like the problems i'm having, so its all compressed "HD" channels from charter causing this garbage. I assume it looks better on the Samsung set b/c maybe most of the content is 720p, and may not look as great on my ST30 b/c its upscaling 720p to 1080p. Is that right?

Well more because on a smaller TV you see the compression artifacts less. Technically most cable content is 1080i. The problem with digital cable/satellite isn't the resolution (720p versus 1080i) per-say, the main problem is the bitrate of each channel is being limited to quite a bit less than ideal by the TV providers to cram in as many HD channels as a system can allow.

As Dierk said earlier, your cable box is messing with the signal, you'd do better having it pass through the channels as-is. This is called Native mode. Your Motorola box has this feature. You can find how to set it on Page 42 of the manual here: http://www.motorola.com/staticfiles/...er%20Guide.pdf
It isn't going to make the compression issues go away, but it removes one extra step of processing when the TV is usually the best place to process the image, not the cable box.

in dvds it almost looks the same as my "HD" cable, Blu rays its not as noticeable but every now and then there is some artifacting and graininess on darker scenes.

That is still troubling, from Blu-rays you shouldn't see any artifacts. Can you check it out and try and describe what you see from a Blu-ray? If you're only seeing it in darker scenes it sure sounds like you have your brightness/contrast set wrong and you're seeing things that aren't supposed to be seen when a TV is calibrated. Check around the forums here for recommended settings for the ST30 series. Also here are CNET's recommended settings for movies: http://forums.cnet.com/7723-19410_10...=mncol;rvwBody

Depending what what titles you're seeing the grain in, real graininess (not other issues that people often call graininesss) on a Blu-ray isn't necessarily bad.

Remember film stock has an inherent grain in its' structure and on Blu-ray you're seeing the grain captured acceptably for the first time.
A good video answer about this here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e4RDxHEsUzM

DVD usually didn't have enough resolution and bitrate to portray film grain the way it really is, and so it was typically treated as noise and filtered out when the disc was authored to help with the limited 480i resolution and limitations of using MPEG2 compression.

I def use game mode for the PS3 input, where would i find "intelligent frame creation" exactly? Again thanks for taking the time to break it down, it makes a lot more sense now.

Picture Menu -- > Advanced Picture Menu --> Motion smoother: Off

On the PS3 you should have the Blu-ray playback settings:
RGB set to Limited
Super White set to On

[ViperGT007]

You've been so helpful, i can't thank you enough! I've always had motion smoother off, and ill check those settings on the PS3, thanks for the tips! Ill have to grab some blu rays and really analyze what i'm seeing, in the mean time I set the cable box to Native, i'm just curious, what exactly is the benefit of this? and also, what would be the bad thing about having it always set @ 1080p 60fps? And why would the cable box processing the picture be a bad thing, does it degrade the quality at all? And one last question, the color space is set to YCC 4:4:4, would there be any benefit in changing this to RGB?

[SpHeRe31459]

You've been so helpful, i can't thank you enough! Ill have to grab some blu rays and really analyze what i'm seeing, in the mean time I set the cable box to Native, i'm just curious, what exactly is the benefit of this? and also, what would be the bad thing about having it always set @ 1080p 60fps? And why would the cable box processing the picture be a bad thing, does it degrade the quality at all?

Because every place along the chain of image source to image display that messes with the picture is considered bad. Theoretically that means the image information is altered just a little bit every time it is changed. Ideally the only place you want any processing done is at the end point (the display). It also helps eliminate/troubleshoot issues that might be introduced by one of the devices in the display chain.

For example: cable boxes notoriously do not have very good video processing in them, since they're made for cheap in bulk for the cable companies. So by setting the cable box to 1008p/60 you're telling the cable box to convert everything to 1080p before the display even gets it. If you set it to Native, the display gets whatever the source channel is (480i/720p/1080i) and processes it itself.

This also allows you to have control over what is done in with 480i (SD) channels, without it, it is simply delivered to the TV as a 1080p signal. TVs usually have different stretch modes that only a 480i signal will enable. For example the stretch mode I use is one that keeps the center of the image mostly square (so people don't look super stretched out), but progressively stretches things more and more at the edges of the image to fill out the 16:9 widescreen. When you set the cable box to a fixed resolution, you're relying on whatever basic stretching, scaling, and deinterlacing algorithms have been thrown into the cable box for cheap.

The answer as to why the box even has the capabilities is simple: compatibility. By throwing in the ability to be set to any common HD resolution the average person can set it and forget it. Yes it may compromise image quality slightly, but it makes things super simple for the average cable installer tech and the average home user who does a self-install. And really the image quality of cable channels these days is so iffy it almost doesn't matter if it gets a smidgen more processed. But the "most correct" setting for those in the know would be Native.

[gadgtfreek]

I recently bypassed my AVR with a direct HDMI from my HDDVR (set on Native) and a direct HDMI from my Blu player (has two HDMI outs). I then calibrated both inputs on the display with signal generator. Now did it make it look better? Dunno. But I know now everything is moving into the display at it's Native format and going thru a little conversion as possible.

Many of the DVR's use a broadcom chip, and IIRC its not a very good scaler.

[ViperGT007]

ah i see, thanks guys for explaining that. Man this forum is great, you guys really know your stuff, very much appreciated! If my ST30 receives a native 720p or less signal, does it convert it to 1080 or does it only show say the 720 lines of resolution?

[gadgtfreek]

a display will always convert to it's native rez, so a 720p signal is taken and displayed at 1080p.

This is why native HDTV is good if your DVR can do it, instead of the box taking say ESPN, making it 1080i, then the display taking it again from 1080i to 1080p, the native conversion just has to jump change once from 720p to 1080p.

Blu-ray's native is to set your blu player for 1080p/24 ycbcr 422. I use 444 however because I tend to see less banding. My Directv dvr has Native, so I leave that one. It outputs 720p channels at 720p and the same for 1080i channels.

[ViperGT007]

So i just wanted to give a final thanks and update in case anyone ends up reading this that may be searching for stuff on the ST30, i know i try and use forums to research any electronics i'm considering purchasing so maybe this thread might benefit someone.

So i must have been blind, or just frustrated with how cable looked and grouped it all together in my head because i took a look at another blu ray and tried to really pay attention to what i was seeing, it looked absolutely stunning. I kinda laughed because i thought wow this is what i wanted to see! So it must def. be the compressed cable that my DVR is feeding to the ST30. All in all, after learning a bit more on here and understanding a lot of things better, i'm without a doubt going to keep the TV and i'm really glad i gave it another shot before packing it in. Now, the only thing i'm waiting for is the fluctuating brightness issue to show itself, so far so good though.

[SpHeRe31459]

Glad to hear you're enjoying the TV when fed good quality sources