PostmanPot
Honorary Master
(TL;DR version further down)
Purveyors of flat and wide screen TVs can probably all agree that there are good and bad TVs.
There certainly are good and bad LED/LCD TVs, and there certainly are good and bad plasma TVs. They will debate about the best viewing environment. Some saying dim rooms like the cinema are best, others saying bright rooms due to other circumstances. They will debate viewing distance, some saying they need to sit close to identify Full HD, others saying they notice it from further.
The reason for this thread is that there will come a time where some of us will be watching TV at night with the lights dimmed, or in the day with the curtain closed. For some of us these conditions are more often than others, but that is not the point. There is one point most can surely agree on, because it affects our ultimate viewing experience:
Contrast Ratio. It is the difference between the blackest blacks and whitest whites, regarded by most professionals as the main contributor to overall picture quality. Something that is more interesting than just black level, is black level consistency. Many TVs can indeed produce deep blacks, however they cannot produce constant deep blacks.
According to the professionals at CNET TV:
TL;DR version:
Contrast ratio, black levels and black uniformity affect us all. Some will say they like a brighter picture with less detail, and some will say they prefer a dimmer picture with more detail. It mainly comes down to our viewing environments and personal taste.
I would like to invite you all regardless of your TV beliefs to step up to my challenge of posting pictures taken in a dim/dark room of your TVs displaying 1920x1080 (or native resolution) pure black images.
1. Please post as many pictures as you like taken in dim/dark rooms. Please try to take the pictures from a viewing angle in line with the TV, not from too far below or too far above which distorts black levels. Please try to use tags so we can view the pics in the thread and for best effect.
2. Please list model number and basic TV specs. In the case of LED/LCD TVs, please list the backlighting type if you know it.
3. Please list the main settings used. We need to know Picture Mode be it Normal, Dynamic, Movie/Cinema etc. We need to know Brightness level, Backlight level (LCD/LED), Cell brightness (plasma), Contrast.
I really hope this will turn out to be very interesting indeed, but I would like most of all to help future buyers with their purchases, since most people only test TVs in bright environments.
Any suggestions? Please let me know.
Cheers!
Purveyors of flat and wide screen TVs can probably all agree that there are good and bad TVs.
There certainly are good and bad LED/LCD TVs, and there certainly are good and bad plasma TVs. They will debate about the best viewing environment. Some saying dim rooms like the cinema are best, others saying bright rooms due to other circumstances. They will debate viewing distance, some saying they need to sit close to identify Full HD, others saying they notice it from further.
The reason for this thread is that there will come a time where some of us will be watching TV at night with the lights dimmed, or in the day with the curtain closed. For some of us these conditions are more often than others, but that is not the point. There is one point most can surely agree on, because it affects our ultimate viewing experience:
Contrast Ratio. It is the difference between the blackest blacks and whitest whites, regarded by most professionals as the main contributor to overall picture quality. Something that is more interesting than just black level, is black level consistency. Many TVs can indeed produce deep blacks, however they cannot produce constant deep blacks.
According to the professionals at CNET TV:
Code:
[U]Test procedure[/U]
Aside from the bright-room portion of the test (see below), all CNET HDTV reviews take place in a completely darkened environment. We realize that most people don't always watch TV in the dark, but we use a dark environment ourselves for a number of reasons. Most importantly, darkness eliminates the variable of light striking the TV's screen, which can skew the appearance of the image. It makes differences in image quality easier to spot, especially perceived black-level performance, which is severely affected by ambient light. Darkness also allows viewers at home to more easily match the experiences written about by the CNET reviewer. Finally, darkness is the environment we find most satisfying for watching high-quality material on a high-performance TV.
[U]Calibration[/U]
Choose the picture mode (typically Movie or Cinema) and color temperature preset (typically Warm or Low) that produces the most accurate initial dim-room picture, allows full access to detailed controls and comes closest to D65, or 6500K.
Disable or minimize any automatic picture adjustment controls, dynamic contrast, ambient light sensors, auto black, auto color/flesh tone, or other circuits that change the picture on the fly. Engage settings, such as local dimming on LED displays, that generally improve picture quality.
[U]Image-quality tests[/U]
We perform a broad range of tests on all televisions we review, organized into a few key categories. Most comments in a TV review's performance section are based on observations of a Blu-ray movie, since Blu-ray is the highest-quality source typically available to HDTV viewers today. We use a variety of films, as opposed to one or two "reference" films, to better illustrate that performance characteristics are universal and apply regardless of which movie's being watched (they also make the reviews more fun to read and write). An argument can be made for using the same movie every time, and we do have a few scenes in certain films that we return to over and over, but in general we prefer to spread it around.
[U]Black-level[/U]: We comment on the depth of black a TV is capable of producing. Since deeper, "blacker" blacks lead to more-realistic pictures, higher contrast, and more "pop" and color saturation, we consider black level the most important single performance characteristic of a TV. We also talk about shadow detail and gamma in this section. Subjective observations are supported by the "Black luminance (0%)" and "Avg. gamma" measurements in the Geek Box (see below).
[U]Uniformity[/U]: With LCDs and rear-projection sets, we use this section to subjectively address backlight uniformity across the screen, making subjective observations with full-raster test patterns and flat-color scenes, such as shots of skies, from program material. We also talk about off-angle viewing in this section, using similar material and subjective comparisons. Plasma TVs usually have effectively perfect uniformity and off-anlge viewing, so we don't typically don't include this section in plasma reviews, but we will if the plasma's uniformity is atypical to our eye.TL;DR version:
Contrast ratio, black levels and black uniformity affect us all. Some will say they like a brighter picture with less detail, and some will say they prefer a dimmer picture with more detail. It mainly comes down to our viewing environments and personal taste.
I would like to invite you all regardless of your TV beliefs to step up to my challenge of posting pictures taken in a dim/dark room of your TVs displaying 1920x1080 (or native resolution) pure black images.
1. Please post as many pictures as you like taken in dim/dark rooms. Please try to take the pictures from a viewing angle in line with the TV, not from too far below or too far above which distorts black levels. Please try to use tags so we can view the pics in the thread and for best effect.
2. Please list model number and basic TV specs. In the case of LED/LCD TVs, please list the backlighting type if you know it.
3. Please list the main settings used. We need to know Picture Mode be it Normal, Dynamic, Movie/Cinema etc. We need to know Brightness level, Backlight level (LCD/LED), Cell brightness (plasma), Contrast.
I really hope this will turn out to be very interesting indeed, but I would like most of all to help future buyers with their purchases, since most people only test TVs in bright environments.
Any suggestions? Please let me know.
Cheers!
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