I was quite worried about IR myself from things like the taskbar being permanently there, but i've honestly seen none even after leaving it sitting for an hour. You could also set the taskbar to auto minimise itself so that it's out of the way most of the time, or as I say a screensaver set to say 15 minutes will make sure you have no problems. Just set your picture to Cinema, warm colour and knock brightness and contrast down a notch or 2 below the middle for the first 200 hours. As the phosphors harden you will get less chance of IR or burn, but even from day one mine has never had any IR whatsoever. Although i've got to admit I won't leave it sitting on a static screen for more than half an hour 90% of the time just incase. Don't let it put you off though as the PZ80's seem very resilient, you will be more than impressed compared to an LCD.
James Miller/Anyone else using a Panny 42PZ80 as a computer monitor
- Thread starter Alexrose1uk
- Start date
- Joined
- 26 Apr 2004
- Posts
- 9,785
- Location
- Milton Keynes
Well I managed to get the 42PZ80 from John Lewis, with a bit of price matching for the princely sum of £699 down from £850! Collecting it on Monday/Tuesday.
Absolutely chuffed, and if there is any problems in the long run I have a 5 year warranty to back me up
Absolutely chuffed, and if there is any problems in the long run I have a 5 year warranty to back me up
Soldato
- Joined
- 26 Dec 2005
- Posts
- 16,187
- Location
- Paisley
I use mine for my media pc and sometimes use it for general browsing (ive got a dual setup with the panny and a 22" dell cloning at 1920x1080 to save me switching). Ive not had any bother with image retention or anything, i played wow for 3 hours on saturday while my daughter watched on the big screen, and had no worries with retention after even with the static things on screen for that time.
- Joined
- 26 Apr 2004
- Posts
- 9,785
- Location
- Milton Keynes
Well I've collected the set with the help of my dad, and have set it up...Im writing this using the 1080p/60 set Panny (I noticed 59hz which it defaulted to added borders...odd!)
Text is readable; I'm using these settings,
http://www.hdtvtest.co.uk/Panasonic-TH42PX80/Settings/
and apart from it needing to settle in, it looks fine and text is readable.
As these settings are a bit duller; the blacks are noticeably darker compared to my PVA 24" screen....pretty happy!
Will tweak with colour; brightness etc once the set has had a chance to settle; dont want to cause IR unneccessarily!
Text is readable; I'm using these settings,
http://www.hdtvtest.co.uk/Panasonic-TH42PX80/Settings/
and apart from it needing to settle in, it looks fine and text is readable.
As these settings are a bit duller; the blacks are noticeably darker compared to my PVA 24" screen....pretty happy!
Will tweak with colour; brightness etc once the set has had a chance to settle; dont want to cause IR unneccessarily!
- Joined
- 26 Apr 2004
- Posts
- 9,785
- Location
- Milton Keynes
OK, anyone who's using one of these and an ATI graphics HDMI output; with newer drivers go into the TV attributes and change from limited/full RGB, and change it to YCBCR 4:4:4....noticeably better blacks!
Will try and take some pictures to show the difference it makes.
Alex
Here we go:
(Limited RGB - my amp doesn't do Full unfortunately)
Component
Not the best pictures, but its hard to show relative black depth; as you can see the limited RGB ones dont blend with the Bezel. the Component ones do.
Will try and take some pictures to show the difference it makes.
Alex
Here we go:
(Limited RGB - my amp doesn't do Full unfortunately)
Component
Not the best pictures, but its hard to show relative black depth; as you can see the limited RGB ones dont blend with the Bezel. the Component ones do.
Last edited:
Soldato
- Joined
- 17 Aug 2003
- Posts
- 20,160
- Location
- Woburn Sand Dunes
thats a can of worms that lol. depending on the sources you have, you would be better off calibrating for limited lol
Hehe can remember when me and you had an argument vs plasma and LCD text viewing!
The Panasonic is an excellent plasma and shouldn’t give you any problems as long as you don’t be silly
- Joined
- 26 Apr 2004
- Posts
- 9,785
- Location
- Milton Keynes
As this only affects the PC, not the other stuff being fed into the AV amp/TV, that seems a slightly moot point. I've checked a few videos and played some games, and can't see any major differences in picture quality; bar better depth of dark colours.
The fact my AVR cannot feed a full RGB signal may be causing this issue; but it doesnt hurt for people to test if they have have a similar setup, and see if they notice any improvements
If they don't like the effect, they can simply default to Full/Limited RGB
As it is, with *my* setup, the recommended settings I dug up look fine, very natural if a little muted, and blacks are good in general, but for PC viewing, I find I get better black/dark colours by setting to component output, as can be seen from the pictures above, possibly because there is less conversion/cutoff being caused by the limitation of my amp. If Yamaha release a 'fixed' firmware that allows full RGB passthrough, then I will test again using Component 4:4:4 vs Full RGB.
It's not something a lot of people have even fiddled with most likely, which is why I thought I'd mention it.
In general am loving this TV so far; although it has persuaded me to spend more money on a nice MX Revolution and *InsertNewWirelessKeyboard*
Last edited:
Soldato
- Joined
- 17 Aug 2003
- Posts
- 20,160
- Location
- Woburn Sand Dunes
if you have different calibration settings for both inputs then yes. its not moot if everything is plumbed through the avr (interesting that your avr doesnt pass full rbg) or you are using the same tv settings for both limited and full input.
if you calibrated that display to limited then black would be black on the pc input, and visa versa with full. the problem comes when you have different sources all plumbed through an avr then sent on to the tv. blurays dont have BTB or WTW encoded on disc (blacker than black, whiter than white) - they have the same 16-236 range than rgb limited does. so does all terrestrial transmissions - sky, virgin ect. the pc is capable of full rgb output as you know, but calibrating for full makes it harder (but not impossible) to calibrate correctly as BTB and WTW are used to calibrate. remove them from the signal (0-15 and 236-254) and you have no reference for calibration.
back to the main point....if you have that display calibrated for full range and dont have the bluray player set to expand limited to full (Full RGB option or YPbPr with superwhites off on the ps3 for example) then with the tv calibrated for full you are actually crushing the blacks and possibly the whites. As there are no options to do the same on tv boxes, you wont actually have the correct black level for those either.
in short, its always better to calibrate for limited wherever possible for uniformity if nothing else. i sleep easier knowing my display is calibrated corectly for every input it recieves
my pz80. calibrated for limited, YPbCr 4:2:2 (same as rgb limited) output over hdmi via an ATi 4830
here's a great post Kilgore over at AVS forums made:
the only thing i can add is that if you have the pc plugged directly in to the tv and everything else through the AVR, then make sure you calabrate the avr input on the tv for limited. Either way when calibrated correctly, you wont see any difference.
Last edited:
- Joined
- 26 Apr 2004
- Posts
- 9,785
- Location
- Milton Keynes
Heheh, I know what you're getting at, unfortunately my original explanation perhaps isn't the clearest.
Unfortunately the full RGB crush is an issue Yamaha haven't fixed, saying they can't fix it as it's hardware...yet strangely they fixed it in the higher end version of the box. There have been major discussions over at AVS about writing a custom firmware; or trying to persuade Yamaha to correct the issue; but so far Yammy's head has been in the sand on the issue.
I actually have all my other equipment set to limited rather full RGB, and to be honest, in my opinion they all look really good, very natural, and the blacks don't bother me as in comparison to anything I've used previously, I just found for 'whatever' reason, the PC seemed to be slightly paler in it's blacks; and changing to component fixed that for me, probably because I use a lot of blacks on the pc; now this MAY be an intricacy of the amp vs the HDMI ATI setup and less restriction being placed on component feeds, however I do get what you're saying, ideally I'd have everything calibrated to high hell, but given the recommended settings already look brilliant for my HDDVD/PS3/Xbox it seems a shame to change the universal settings to suit the PC more; whereas changing to component output from my PC dealt with that issue.
As I say this may well be an intricacy of the combination of my AVR, TV and the ATI output, because when set to default limited RGB in CCC, whilst the computer loads from bios, before it hits Vista, the blacks are actually blacker (identical in my eyes to the component output setting). When this switches to windows and the ATI drivers/settings load, and the switch is made to default RGB output over HDMI; the blacks lose that inkyness slightly, reverting to the slightly greyer blacks.
Sorry its a little hard to explain without sounding like an idiot, but this is part of what makes me believe it is something particular with the setup, as everything else looks fine, and are as far as I remember set to limited RGB where controllable due to the amps inability to pass full RGB, and instead cutoff the WTW and BTB parts of a full RGB signal (NOT GOOD!)
Last Samurai (HDDVD), Transformers (HDDVD) Dark Knight, Xmen 3 and Wall-E look stunning via the respective players.
Out of interest what settings do you use; I'd be interested in trying them!
Last edited:
Soldato
- Joined
- 17 Aug 2003
- Posts
- 20,160
- Location
- Woburn Sand Dunes
this whole full vs limited debate confuses the hell out of people. it did me for a long time untill i sat and thought about it. At the end of the day it really is as simple as Full RGB causes the crush, not limited. Full RGB remaps 16-235 to 0-254, so you loose both of those portions of information. There shouldnt be anything there anyways because of this video standard, which i should add wasnt originally decided upon for calibration purposes - it was put in place to stop clipping on terrestrial broadcasts. Think about it of 0 on an analogue signal = 0 on the tv, then anything problems at that extreme would cause signal clipping and be VERY visible in the picture. thats the real reason 0-16 was deemed Blacker than Black so that that clipping never occured. its a system that has been adheared to ever since, it just so happens its very handy for calibration purposes.
remember, there is nothing that will output the full range other than a pc sending full range. so its not even a real issue of the amp doesnt support full rgb. however if in doing so that is causing other unforseen issues with the amps video processing, then that would go to explain why you are getting conflicting results.
if you calibrate the display's input from the amp (whatever input it is) for limited then you should never see any problems with it
if you had the pc running through the amp as well then it should be exactly the same in regards to black levels as everything else, assuming the avr isnt doing something oddball. im on my laptop atm but ill fire the tv up tomorrow and let you know
one thing i will tell you now is that i prefer normal mode to cinema. cinema is just little too flat for my liking. Warm colour is also a little too warm for me and again i prefer normal. what amuses me is that everybody seems to religiously stick to some magical recommended setting that were originally published for the 42px, even on sets like my 50pz. I know panasonics factory settings are good on average, but they arent perfect (as we know, we wouldnt be altering them otherwise) and they certainly are NOT uniform across one range of panels out of the factory, let alone the entire brand of various sized x80/x82/x85/z80/z82/z85 ect ect ect.
- Joined
- 26 Apr 2004
- Posts
- 9,785
- Location
- Milton Keynes
im on my laptop atm but ill fire the tv up tomorrow and let you know
I could be wrong but I thought the PS3/Xbox etc were also capable of full RGB, I'm liable to be wrong though!
And yes I agree with what you say about the oddity of the settings, I don't think they're bad myself, but I also noticed they're actually for a PX, which seems odd. But then by now you'd think someone would have challenged the standard settings if there was a much better setting for the 42PZ(80/85 etc use the same panels in my understanding, the difference being in the driver/processing boards), given its a fairly popular, semi-enthusiast plasma (I'd class Loewe, Pioneer etc as true enthusiast/rich mans Plasma). I'm not a man who can afford calibration though so perhaps I'm missing out here!
Considering my luck I'm not even going near the service menus!
Last edited: