The “Break it Down” Blog

I’ve been tweaking my WD-65831 for about an hour and I think I’ve come up with a configuration that looks really good to me, no garuntees that you will like it. In fact it’s quite a bit different than some of the other one’s I’ve seen people post.

Disclaimer: I always thought the defaults that this set shipped with looked excellent, so if you don’t fall into this category it’s possible you won’t find these tweaks helpful at all.

Source: Cable Box (HDMI-1)

Cable Box: 720p 1080i Output - The reason for this is that no broadcaster is saturating their bandwidth in order to broadcast 1080i/p and I even doubt many are broadcasting at a full 720p anyway. So I set this to 720p and let my TV do the upscaling instead of the cheap cable box. See Update #1 below.

TV:

• Deep Field Imager: OFF
• SharpEdge: ON
• Noise Reduction: HIGH
• Display: BRILLIANT
• Color/Tint: 31 (Default)
• Contrast: 63 (Max)
• Brightness: 24
• Sharpness: 0 (Min)

Because of the comparatively crappy quality of SD and broadcast HD the quality of not only the image but the colors suffer. Keeping DFI off helps to avoid blasting out the inaccurate colors. Also, the SharpEdge algorithm seems to be fantastically accurate to me, so keeping it on while softening the noise and imperfections out of the picture by turning Sharpness all the way down gives a nice edge-enhanced look to sometimes overly soft SD images and really helps make broadcast HD pop. I also bump Noise Reduction up to HIGH to help smooth the picture a bit more, and especially on SD you can really see the difference, especially against solid colors (like if someone is wearing a black shirt).

I found, using the Playstation 3 that turning the Brightness down to 24 or below seems to be a stepping stone from “Washed out” to suddenly changing to “inky blacks”. So I keep the brightness on all sources to 24 or below now.

In case you couldn’t tell, I like a bright image so turning the display to BRILLIANT and contrast all the way up can really give a beautiful picture IMO.

Source: Playstation 3 (HDMI-2)

Playstation 3: 1080p Output - Not much to say about it, it supports it, so turn it on

TV:

• Deep Field Imager: ON
• SharpEdge: ON
• Noise Reduction: OFF
• Display: BRILLIANT
• Color/Tint: 31 (Default)
• Contrast: 63 (Max)
• Brightness: 24
• Sharpness: 31 (Default)

Here you can see a slightly different tune to the adjustments. Because the signal coming off the PS3 is so clean and crisp I turn off all noise reduction, turn DFI on to really make those sharp colors pop and have nice depth to them and also bump the Sharpness back up to the default of 31. In all honesty you cannot see much difference by adjusting the Sharpness, it’s very subtle. It seems to make it a bit easier for me to read fonts from the PS3 web browser, store and cross bar.

Source: XBox 360 (Component-1)

XBox 360: 720p Output - There have been rumors on the web for a long time that the XBox 360 can only realize a true 720p resolution but can upscale and output 1080p as seen recently by the VGA connection and the new HDMI connection on the XB0x 360 elite. Suffice it to say I trust my TV to upscale a better image than the XBox 360, so I leave it set on 720p.

It may be true that with static sources like images, 1080i would look better, but I never view images on it and there is no browser available so the Dashboard being sharper doesn’t mean anything to me, just games.

TV:

• Deep Field Imager: ON
• SharpEdge: ON
• Noise Reduction: OFF
• Display: BRILLIANT
• Color/Tint: 31 (Default)
• Contrast: 63 (Max)
• Brightness: 24
• Sharpness: 31 (Default)

Pretty similar to the Playstation 3. A nice clean signal coming from the XBox so turn off noise reduction, turn down the brightness a bit while leaving DFI on and also add SharpEdge because it really makes the signal pop the rest of the way.

Source: Nintendo Wii (Component-2)

Nintendo Wii: 480p Output - It’s all it supports.

TV:

• Deep Field Imager: ON
• SharpEdge: OFF
• Noise Reduction: OFF
• Display: BRILLIANT
• Color/Tint: 31 (Default)
• Contrast: 63 (Max)
• Brightness: 24
• Sharpness: 63 (Max)

A few things to notice here. The Wii has what I would consider relatively terrible output, at least on a large screen it looks horrible, but it’s a relatively clean signal. I leave DFI on to help the colors pop a bit more, but the difference here is I turn SharpEdge OFF but Sharpness all the way up. For the Wii this just happens to look a bit better for me. Because the signal is so poor in quality, turning SharpEdge ON attempts to put edges around too many things and makes the signal not look sharper, but look ugly. Turning Sharpness all the way up is just about as sharp a picture as I can get without going into the ugly realm. So turning on off and the other to max, did the trick.

Incidentally because of the poor signal, turning any amount of Noise Reduction on ends up mixing/smearing out what little detail there is in smaller sprites (like rain drops or the static on the un-used TV screens at the main Wii screen). So I leave Noise Reduction completely off, allowing me to see a bit more detail and it seems to have lessened some of the blurring I was seeing in Zelda that made me sick after a while.

Well those are my settings after a lot of tweaking and I think they really look fantastic. The PS3 by far has the most “pop” to it, so games on it and Blu-ray titles really look excellent.

Hope this helps anyone out there with the WD-65831 or with a TV in general that is curious what different settings might do their image.

Update #1: It seems I may have jumped the gun on the TV-broadcasting-1080i issue. Laurence Hartje in typical ninja fashion has pointed me to an example listing of plenty of broadcasts going out in 1080i over at Engadget HD. I guess I will be flipping that setting back!