My Sony 40" Bravia "V" series LCD has... a "green push"? (1 Viewer)

[Joel Fontenot]

I hope I can describe my problem well enough that someone can help me out.

I got my Sony Bravia KDL-40V2500 before Christmas, and I've been playing with the picture ever since. We got it from Circuit City online with free shipping and was able to wrangle down a decent price too good to pass up. Of course a better price can be found now that Christmas is over, but we figured that would happen.

I had also purchased the Sony 32" Bravia XBR1 earlier in the summer and was able to easily tweak a great picture that the wife and I have enjoyed ever since.

Because of that, I had no qualms about getting the 40" and setting it up myself. While the HD picture is great, and even SD-DVDs look darned good, I can't seem to make myself perfectly happy with the color.

While everyone has always talked about the "red push", especially with Mitsubishi sets (I used to have their 50" RPTV), I seem to have a "green push" on this Sony 40". Certain greens tend to be almost too fluorescent, when on the 32" the same greens are much deeper and natural looking. In solid shades of white or pale colors, the transition from light to dark, such as in the edges of shading of a face or the edge of a fuzzy shadow on a wall, will have a green tint in that transition with no hint of green in either side of that transition. Green foliage, like tree leaves will in some cases almost glow. Not all shades of green does this. The green grass on most football fields for instance is not as affected. Dark areas of images from an SD channel (feed from the Motorola HD/DVR cable box via component which actually heavily compresses even the lower SD channels that should be analog) that should have a dark grey or brownish color will also have a heavy green tint in the shadows. If the image on the station is low in contrast, the green tint appears all over the darker areas. Another example is a teal color might pop out a little too much as if it was "colorized" over the prop or whatever.

I don't know if I'm describing this very well, but the HD stations aren't as affected, although it's still there. Same with any DVD source going into the other set of component inputs - great color at first glance, but the unnaturally appearing greens are very faintly there.

Strangely, I don't see this green tint in any specifically black and white image. Not even when viewing the greyscale image from a DVD using that TXH Optimode feature.

I've played with all the user settings like backlighting, color temp, wide gamut, tint, etc..., and ended up with basically the normal settings using a "Custom" setting since the default "Vivid" was really bad at first. I can't get rid of the green edginess or tinting to everything.

And, no, I have not played The Matrix on this set yet

It's gotten to where I even found out how to get into the service menu and played around with those setting - making sure I wrote down the original setting first of course. I've actually gotten rid of the green in the shadows, but other colors are a bit out of wack now too - dark areas get to be too purplish-brown.

At this point, I've only cut the green overall just a tad and darker areas look almost okay, but when a strong medium or bright green comes in, it can still glow unnaturally, the way I see it. At one point, the greyscale got a little off (slightly blue), but right now it's okay.

I'm almost okay with the picture right now... but it's still just not... quite... right.

Of course, I realize I'm just "eyeballing it", and I know that's dangerous, but is there anything else I can try? Short of calling someone in to calibrate the thing. Does this sound like maybe there's something actually wrong with the set that none of these setting can fix? Is there another setting that might affect this? I haven't gone anywhere else in the service menu other than the R,G,B DRV and R,G,B Bkg settings.

Do I make any sense?

Thanks.

 

[Dave Corbitt]

Hi Joel,

I looked for published specs on this model and was not able to find an exact match. I was looking for the coordinates for the RGB primaries since it sounds like you might have a display with a Green primary that is a deeper green than the industry standard. This is not uncommon these days with LCD displays. Sony is marketing a wider than standard color gamut with color points for RGB similar to the old 1953 NTSC colors, a much wider gamut than what has become industry practice utilizing Rec 709 color space. The result would be just the sort of image quality you are describing. Try shutting off the Wide Gamut feature and perhaps the monitor will matrix itself to approximate Rec 709 colorimetry.

Home Theater Magazine publishes RGB coordinates on video displays they test and these are usually very informative. I did find a similar model to yours called Sony BRAVIA KDL-40S2000 LCD HDTV that was tested by HT mag back in the fall of 2006. The link to their test results is here:

http://hometheatermag.com/lcds/606lcdfo/index1.html

On their CIE chart, Green is somewhat off the chart, enough to cause a color difference to someone used to viewing Rec 709 colors.

I hope this steers you in the right direction. If indeed your set has an unusual Green primary, you should still balance the grey scale to look good on black and white images, preferrably set to D65 or 6500K for a neutral white, black, and midtone grey balance. By distorting the grey scale, you will not effectively improve your Green "push" problem. To correct that requires a decoding matrix or look up table to get the colors correct. I suspect "Wide Gamut" mode is meant to display images correctly that were photographed with a wide gamut camera, something the production industry has not bought in to yet. All video is mastered nowadays for Rec 709 color.

Dave

 

[Joel Fontenot]

Thanks for the info Dave, that helps a good bit. My Wide Gamut is already off, but short of getting something to help me out, I'm still just eyeballing it.

The strangest thing is, there's one certain hue of green that I just can't seem to tame. On everything else (including the 32" LCD), it's a deep green, but on this set, it's almost a glowing aqua green that stands out from the other tones that it's supposed blend into. I'm still playing with it. I'd like to find out what someone else's actual values are for the color drives for this set - I know that's dangerous to directly copy, but may help me to see if anything's too far off. But no matter what I do, I always double-check with a good B/W image to make sure nothing's too far out of wack.

 

[Dave Corbitt]

Hi Joel,

Does your problem look the same in HD and SD? Can you take pictures off the screen that illustrate your problem? If you can, try emailing them to me direct and maybe I can figure out a little more from those. My email is DCorbitt77 at comcast dot net.

Dave

 

[Joel Fontenot]

Yes, it happens in both SD and HD, and from the DVD sources (the only other thing hooked up to the TV). Both the cable box and DVD player are using their own respective component input.

I'll see what I can do about taking pictures of it, and hopfully compare with the same image shown on the 32".

 

[JasonRabb]

When you look at a white screen, do you see any color irregularities in the corners? Green lines or green shades?

 

[Joel Fontenot]

Can't say that I do. A full white screen looks clean and clear. I only catch such a screen when an HD channel shows a white screen as a background for a commercial that might have just text on it. But the white background itself looks solid.