The “Break it Down” Blog

I found a great post by ‘JasonWW’ over on AVS Forums discussing his fine tuning of his A2000 set to get the best image quality. He did notice throwing up some of the HDTV test patterns that the TV isn’t resolving the finest lines (images below), but that viewing HD signals looks excellent.

‘JasonWW’ also provided his set’s current calibration settings:

Color Matrix to Custom
power saving mode=on
Picture settings
Picture mode= Custom
Advanced Iris= Auto 1
Picture= 65
Brightness= 51
Color= 51
Hue=G1
Color Temp=Cool
Sharpness=max
Noise Reduction=off
Detail Enhancer=low

Advanced Settings:
all off, except gamma=low
Edge Enhancement=low

White Balance settings:
r-Gain=-7
g-gain=-7
b-Gain=0
r-bias=0
g-bias=0
b-bias= 0

The most interesting part of the post is his tip about breaking apart your inputs, not necessarily routing all of your inputs to the TV over one single HDMI connection but instead separating them out like SD over S-Video, XBox over component, Set-Top Box/Cable over HDMI, Upscaling DVD/BluRay/HD-DVD over the 2nd HDMI input and so on. He recognized a boost in image quality when doing this because of the ability to fine tune the display for each input. This allowed Jason to setup his S-Video connection for SD TV with a lot of image correction-processing and softening to help improve the quality of the SD signal. Conversly on the HDMI connection settings he turned most of the image post-processing controls off, offering a more pure HD signal… very slick!

I think to very clean and tidy folks out there, a setup like this may feel better than routing everything into a box and out over HDMI, so it’s nice to know there is an actual motivation to doing this besides it just feeling better.