TV calibration, calibration tips, settings etc.
By Steve
#17095
Here are a few different spins on settings. Notice, OLED level is like 30 out of 50 on the back light. 50 is a lot more bleed. Watching with a light on helps.

https://www.rtings.com/tv/reviews/samsu ... 8/settings

https://www.lifeintech.com/2018/11/10/samsung-q7fn/

https://reviews.lcdtvbuyingguide.com/sa ... -q7fn.html

There is talk here about how to jazz up your display, and color correcting for post 10k white point. It's worth reading into other pages on the thread to find what people found:

https://www.avsforum.com/forum/166-lcd- ... html?amp=1

My own personal favorites jazzed look is something like:

Whatever mode:

Back light 30-50 to taste.

brightness 0 to -2 to -5 depending on room brightness and back light level. These maintain black better at high backlight and increase saturation. I tried this on the season 1 lost in Space Trailer intro, to get the star field black while the dynamic back light is blooming out the sky due to the spaceship. But the star field my well be meant to be grey to represent the sea of minor stars too small to see (from earth we don't see much) rather than be black between the main stars. This along with -2 gamma, works makes a nice look anyway, but will crush low tones. So, its up to you to set it how you prefer. Some cases, the -gamma etc will detract from the scene.

Contrast 45-50 out of 50.

Depending on mode (like hdr+ simulated HDR) High contrast enhancer will take away from scene brightness, others it will add. Low works on the low end, high works on the high end as well.

High local dimming.

Color, 25 is regular, 30 pop a bit, but once you get to 36/37 colors will suddenly start blowing out. On some scenes 36/37 will still look on, some stuff won't, like skin tones. So 30-35 is my recommendation.

Color tone. Cool is just overblown bluish, and standard is still a bit bluish but I use it. Warm1 and warm2 just looks too yellow etc. Problem is, some people make their films this way. Warm2 is normally recommended as most accurate in the calibration links. I Don't like it, but gives a rosey yellow picture to me.

Screen modes:

HDR+ just doesn't look as popy as dynamic etc when using these settings. By adjusting all modes, dynamic is most poppy, followed by the third mode in the list, followed by the second mode, followed by the forth mode, movie, which seems to be designed to track the picture values better. So, if you want a more authentic jazzed up look, you should try different levels of the settings here in movie or the second mode (can't remember the name).

Some poppy content to try out looks:

Startrek Discovery trailer season 1:

A contrasty colorful ride with use of some poppy colors.

New Shaft movie, trailer:

Some poppy color, especially the titles, the Brazilian dance fighting scene, and the skyscraper swinging scene. This is a good test, because the intro car scene just looks too gleamy if things are too bright. It also has some strong overhead city night and day scenes, with blacks, lights, strong colours.

Luke Cage, season 2 trailer:

Par excellence for opening scenes with a contrasty look with excellent color usage. Here Luke cones out of a burning exploding truck. He has an excellent crisp skin contrast showing off his skin texture and the flame brightness texture and color are beautifully rendered. If you look through the rest if it, it is a stunning look with some strong color key light and blue flame color usage.

Lost in Space, season 1 trailer:

As mentioned before, these settings make the intro star field look blacker when the shine of the ship causes the auto dimmed full strength backlight to washout things. Shifting the brightness down reduced this by making the brightest parts of the ship less bright. Gamma helped this, but you can play with the back light too. 5, about 100 nits is about as black as you will get, but is not worth it, as everything else is then dark. 14 or so is good, but 19-26 is much preferable. 30 to 40 is desirable and seems to be OK. Normal scenes have enough brightness to make backlight glow deepen and blend in. But you get to a point where the glow cones through normal scenes and colors, visibly desaturating them. I think I noticed thus around 40 in a distinctly visible scenes. It might be noticeable at 30, but I would have to check. The problem is with the way these black filters are working, or is a balance between the ratios of glow pass through to general real image values and how much you perceive black of light pollution. Its a matter if physics. I've tried to cone up with my own black filter solutions to get around this over the years, but haven't heard of anybody using that range of techniques. The movies has a crisp look on these settings, with some strong or glowing colors. The explosion near the beginning, the robots face and body, the red lit internal ship scene, the eerily blue night snow landscape. You can see crispness in the exploding landscape scene, the snow night landscape etc. It gives a bit of a three dimensional pop. But, the aforementioned film clips give more color pop, detail and contrast look.

Beats, movie trailer:

A difficult one. Yellow cast, just accept it. The initial scene looks great with the above settings, stunningly great contrasty glowing mild colors. Notice the contrast in the scene, in the PC and his hand, and the skin on the back of his neck and the yellow speaker cone, yummy. We move to the outside scenes. Take notice of the greens (especially the latter scene of the kids playing ball down in the park). The scene of him walking outside, just looks yellow and wrong (get used to it). The buys in the hood next to the orange wall will look OK, or overblown, depending on the setting, but some occasional sacrifices must be made to get most things up. We move past the orange cupboards down the hall. You can notice big shifts in the red notice hung up on the pin board in the principles office, as you play with settings and modes (as with the takeaway menu board latter). The blue night club light, just doesn't look blue enough, but this is likely the camera and or grading of the picture used, don't sweat it, you can't compensate for these things, you will just put other correct things out, don't sweat it, just make it look a better firm of the crazy blue, as with the crazy yellow look (which is something you often get with certain cameras, or as a trend with grading cinema camera "raw" footage). We move over to the scenes progressing to the recording studio. Here we see excellent yellow cast usage in silky smooth deep golden tones. The vibrancy of the toning s d contrast really sets it off). Now, there is a scene with red bed apparel showing what bright red looks like. By the end you get a good contrasty look at the main characters face with colorful purple key light on it, giving an excellent colorful contrasty effect. In this trailer, is a second clip of the boy in his bed room studio, where it flashes over the dial face of his volume read out. Check out the yellow white vibrancy of the dial face with these settings, its stunning. The guys filming here certainly had an eye for it.

Finale Space cartoon, season 1 trailer:

Some bright color. The initial cabin wakeup scene is a difficult one to get good at the same time as the rest of the clip. Some strong colors used. The green main character is a good one, to get vibrant green, but in one main scene he is actually yellow lit (on a cartoon mind you) don't sweat it, it was meant to be that way. :)
By Steve
#17097
OK, I've determined a curiosity/fault with the Contrast Enhancer local dimming combination.

To get the best blacks at full backlight (or many levels) with my high dynamic settings. With contrast enhancer off, low local dimming seems to give the least bleed through, and high, the highest. But when you put contrast enhancer on standard dimming gives the best results, and it seems to gradually get there on scene changes, which might be a bit distracting, but worth the result. Using high local dimming with high contrast will give particular bleed through. On the lost in soave trailer, when the robot comes down the icey slope in the dark, to be introduced to everybody, incredibly enough there is a halo of light in the letter box above his head. Unbelievable, as this is not a bright scene. What is the use of local dimming if it can't even dim a standard letter box black bars (which helps judge bleed through though :) ). So, try either local dimming low or standard when using the contrast filter. But though in a lit room this combination makes the blacks look black in an unlit room they look greyish. But I am far from convinced I don't have a did contrast filter. People have reported variances in their units to do with light bleed, and I wonder if it is caused by variance in the manufacture if the contrast filter? If anybody knows anything, please post here? Thanks.

You loose out some of the brightness in some scenes not using high local dimming with high contrast enhancement. So, it is probably best to set up one of the other modes like this, as a dark room mode, and leave dynamic as the lit room mode using the high values. This gives you a chance to tailor brightness and gamma separately for dark room use too in the second mode The dark setting is one or two values lower, which makes things a bit too dark in a lit room. Once set to the same settings, all modes are steps away in contrast etc. So, one of the other modes might give even better light bleed control and dark tendering than dynamic. I have not tried it yet.

Improving local dimming and contrast enhancement:

The local dimming contrast enhancer should work a lot better if they buffer the video at least one second ahead, so the contrast filter and dimmer knows what is happening ahead of time, and can control light bleed in dark scene. A special black enhancement option could be made for this. These things should preference the maintenance of black and colour purity. Using internal apps, this can effectively be done with the app responding to the content position being displayed when using playback controls. So, companies like Netflix could support that. In this way this auto leveling will be hidden and determined before you see the footage (it really needs it, the Netflix screen saver picture levels are jumping around as I write).
By Steve
#17098
OK. Some people will be happy to know, that I found movie mode controls black levels much better, and the overzealous use of the color control. I recommend 39-45, but you can push it as far as 48 out if 50 but dark skin, or oddly lit scenes, are going go bad shades, particularly in low light. I'm struggling with one oranging low light scene at 42 at the moment, in the Lost in Space trailer as Mrs Robinson has words with doctor Smith around 2:19, but the color in many of the scenes is great even at 44. To get great dynamic visuals on something like this you can accept some compromise, but I have dropped it back to 39, as you want to set it up for regular viewing (but there are more modes to add different levels of look).

The odd local dimming contrast enhancement issue, appears to be just Dynamic mode. The other modes appear to be more regular, and Movie mode even more controlled, including black levels. Dynamic and Natural seem to be similar modes, so I don't know if Natural is completely free. Movie and Standard and standard are similar too, but did not detect the black control there so much.

The values for a dynamic movie mode varies from the dynamic values like this at backlight 50:

Brightness -4, gamma control -2, this mode is very different and tightly controlled mode to dynamic (but I live dynamic, and natural has a better standard color then dynamic, and warm options, for those who think dynamic standard color us too cool).

Color 39-45. Color tone standard. Color space auto. Where native will give you brighter colors in dynamic mode, here it often dulls colours and gives some more situation, but to have a bright and bleed through counter effect, I put on auto which is brighter here).

Contrast Enhancer high. Local dimming gives less bleed through the lower you go (but the bright TV menu system mucks this visual testing up a bit, so I'm not completely certain). But at high you get greater brightness and the visible bleed through doesn't give too much extra appearance. So pick what you want, and play around with values here.

The black levels with this setup are tolerable. If you want to run the TV calibrated with a backlight level to match an normal RGBW OLED, then the black levels should he better again. One of those articles I posted (or another forum I saw) gave black level brightness values at various back light levels. The levels were rather controlled through much of the tested scale, then jumped up. I've never seen such behaviour myself, but I didn't test Movie mode for it. But I have noticed washout in scenes as I've pushed the backlight high with probably high local dimming, high contrast enhancement, and whatever else I was doing in dynamic mode. But seriously, I expected this screen to do better than what I'm seeing.

PS, zone control is very poor, and I'm seeing large circular glow around band away from icons etc, over dark scenes at times. These are four sided zones I presume, why would they round shade them wrongly? Maybe it is some fashion statement around netflix pause icons? :(
By Steve
#17099
A note, turned down the set to backlight of 5 with the above movie settings, and it looked good. So I watched Rabids Invasion season 4 episode on it at 0 or whatever the bottom of the backlight setting is, and it was surprising his good it looked. A little dark in the dark, it actually looks better than at 50. The show s bright. But, even with the backlight turned to bottom, there was still a mild dark grey perceivable in a very low illuminated room. Maybe turning local dimming down might get rid of this, and maybe fiddling with dynamic contrast at the same time, but I'm not really complaining.

So, it looks like it's not a smart filter. I've tried to work out ways to eliminate backlight and angular bleed over the decades, and I should be able to virtually eliminate it at high back light. I don't know why the industry hasn't figured this out yet. But this is common that I come up with mechanisms industry doesn't for decades. I'm still wanting to do my own backlit screen design one day. $100 for a large 8k+ screen with high HDR, wide color gamut, hopefully reference quality, but I don't know how well that particular design will work. $100 manufactured target is pretty good, but I had presumed printed oled would do a lot better than they have, they are still at similar manufactured cost, and reportedly are not that good in performance and life. Looked like I trusted others people too much. One of the front lit designs might be a better choice.
By sunToxx
#17266
Have you realized there is a problem with the auto motion plus in certain scenes?

I just changed from LG to Samsung GQ55Q7FNGT and realized there are some problems. I already upgraded to the latest Firmware 1270.6 via USB, but that did not help either.


The Problem is that with any setting of auto motion plus enabled (auto or any manual setting) on certain scenes that flicker/flash (for example electricity flashes or similar), the picture gets badly distorted. Even pictures that are not even realy moving.

For anyone who has Netflix, you can find one such scene on "Dirk Gently" season 2, chapter 4 (house within a house) on 19:50 minutes for about 1 minute length. It's basicaly a white room with some wood and the scene has a flickering light. Motion plus now causes the whole background to get badly distorted, even though there is hardly any movement. Shapes showing up on some parts, that should not be there (on the white wall surfaces), while details disappearing on other parts (a crack on the door). Any setting of dejudder higher then 1, causes this problem.

My old 32" LG TV, which is also 100Hz, does not have this problem, even at highest motion smoothing settings. On the Samsung I basically got to set smoothing so low, that it totaly defies the point of buying a 100Hz TV.