Any helpful hints for adjusting sharpness? (1 Viewer)

[Gary_E]

Using Video Essentials I can get my set looking very good but adjusting for sharpness drives me crazy. I don't find the sharpness grid all that helpful, it just never looks right. Sometimes playing a disc with sharpness at 7, the picture looks fine. Play a different disc at 21 and it looks fine too.
For example:
Using a close up of a person's face, the detail around the eyes and face are quite good. If two faces are in the frame neither one shows that level of detail, it just 'blurs' up a bit but the picture is still good, just not razor sharp. I just can't seem to nail the sharpness just yet. What do you look at to aid in adjusting sharpness?
Toshiba 40H80 calibrated and focused being fed by Toshiba 5109 through Monster 1000 into HD input 2.

 

[Ryan Pream]

This is easy. Set the sharpness to 0. I have a TW40x81 and this is definantly the ideal setting, especially on DVD's. The sharpness control is just adding noise to the picture.
Ryan
------------------

 

[ThomasL]

Gary, I am not familiar with VE but with Avia, the Sharpness pattern has a number of ways to test sharpness. The one that I use is to watch the vertical bars in the middle. I set the sharpness to 0 and then tick it up until the bars don't look blurry/fuzzy but stop when I just start to see a haloing effect around them. I'll usually then tick it down once and that is usually good. I've done 4 sets and almost always the sharpness is down at 20 percent or less.
hope this helps,
--tom

 

[Brian Harnish]

My video essentials results for sharpness on my WEGA KV-32FV27 is 0. Everything looks gorgeous at this setting.
------------------
- Brian
My DVD Collection

 

[Randy Boecker]

IMHO, this is why we pay calibrators big bucks to come in and fine-tune our sets.
I have a TW56x81, so I can make fine adjustments in the designer menu. Before I figured out how to do the designer menu adjustments, I could never get sharpness right using the user menu. I had it down to 0, and it still looked like too much.
But my point is, I've used VE and Avia, and I always get the same thing: stare at the pattern too long, and you start to see ringing (halos) no matter what. Look away for a minute, they go away. Start making adjustments again and they come back. I think you have to train your eye to deal with these patterns. I think I'd see ringing no matter what if I stared at the damn thing too long! Maybe it's not the pattern that's ringing, maybe it's my brain
The end result should simply be: as long as it looks good to you, that's what counts. Don't burst a blood vessel trying to get it perfect. It'll never happen...
------------------
[Edited last by Randy Boecker on July 16, 2001 at 01:14 PM]

 

[Mike Bushroe]

I just used Avia for the first lime yesterday to tune a 32 in Sony direct view TV. I seemed to do OK just tuning for no halo on the veritcal black lines.
A note: Human visual system can create the halos out of nothing. If you stare fixedly at one spot in a pattern long enough, the rods and cones in your eye begin to bleach and create a negative of the image you are looking at. With the slightest movements, this causes bright line next to dark lines, and dark line next to bright lines. It would make it vary hard to tell what was real, over-shoot induced haloing, and what was just bleaching of the eyes. Solution, keep you eyes moving around the pattern, and maybe look away from the set all together half the time. Give your eyes a long break before accepting the final setting to verify that it still looks good. I set mine to about %20, and the picture looked really good after (or atleast Gladiator did :bg
Mike