Just had the Panny PT47wx49 delivered on Saturday and starting to have my doubts. Still not satisfied with the picture quality after doing the Sound and Vision calibration disc and doing the user setting and convergence. This is my first rpt and the picture is nowhere near my 10 year old 27" Sony. I have a directv receiver and a dvd player hooked up to an Onkyo 600 receiver. Dvd player is panasonic but not progressive, will get that soon. Any advice on the best way to hook up all of my components and the type of interconnects would be very helpful. And please give me some reasons to believe that this tv will improve with more tweaking and ISF calibration. Also, what is the point of having a widescreen set if you still get the black bars on most dvd's and tv shows/commercials even though they were filmed in widescreen format.
Rick: Don't know where to start. First, you are used to watching "television," as seen on your ten-year-old direct-view TV. What are the user-menu settings on that set? How high the contrast and the sharpness? You're also probably used to the high light output and wider contrast ratio of the direct-view--and its wider angle of view. As for black bars: Rick, you will always have black bars. There is no universal aspect ratio. Your Panny has a native 1.78:1 aspect ratio. Therefore, a film framed at 2.35:1 will have black bars at the top and bottom still--only not as large as they are on a 1.33:1 screen. And on 1.33:1 material, you will have bars to either side of the image. As for connections: Make sure your DVD player is connected via component-video cables. When a certified technician goes into the service menu and does a full calibration, the picture will improve even more. If the technician uses a color analyzer, he or she will be able to perform a complete grayscale calibration. In the end, you will not have a super-bright picture. Instead, you will have an accurate picture that is best viewed in a darkened room. You will have to adapt. It may take some getting used to, but in a few weeks, you will be wondering how you ever managed to tolerate the picture on that decade-old direct-view TV.
Did you do all of these adjustments already? http://www.panny.tv/ Especially these: http://www.panny.tv/tweaks.htm
I have a 65" Panny, last year's version with 720p, and OOB it was pretty horrendous, as they all are. This is the price we pay for having the now highly whittled-down pricepoint - compared to when HDreadys first came out - finally within the reach of the average consumer. Fortunately that difference now leaves plenty to use towards a professional grade calibration. Mine took weeks of offtime to finally get dialed in, because when I bought it the calibrations being requested of me were coming in fast and furious, and I did not have the day and a half it takes to completely dial in a 480p, 1080i AND 720p capable unit. I couldn't believe it when they stopped producing them with 720p this year. But the results are EVERYTHING I would have wanted. I now sit 7' back from the 65" screen and am in heaven. Not all brands respond so well to calibration as the Panny's do. The Hitachi is one of them. I did everything I normally do in calibrating a unit, and it still did not respond with razor sharp precision the way the Pannys - and Toshibas and Pioneers, and Sonys - do. Each of these brands, other than the Hitachi, will give you back everything you put into it, in terms of return on the investment you are willing to make in terms of calibration energy. The Hitachi looked nice when I was thru with it, but it did not thrill me, and make me want to sit right down there and watch a movie, right now! I sit there and study the grain of the film used to shoot each week's episode of CSI each Thursday night, and Alias on Sunday - in elegant and crystal clear 720p, which has none of the motion artifacts that plague and pixellate 1080i on certain types of motion. The revamped colors are magnificent, now that the greyscale and the color decoder have been realigned, and the precision of their very linear convergence system is one of the best out there, markedly superior to several other brands. I love my Panny. I have calibrated MANY brands of RPTV out there - Sony, Pioneer, Hitachi, Mits, Toshiba, NEC, Magnavox/Philips, RCA - and I have not seen a better picture out there than my Panny now has. Pannys are worth the effort. Not all brands are. Pannys are. Get it calibrated and your doubts will TOTALLY cease. Mr Bob
