I got a rather expensive plasma TV the other day, a Sony PFM42V1, and I’m still working my way through configuring it to its optimum levels. At first it was difficult enough navigating my way through the bajillions of cables and connectors I had at hand and needed to get.
I’ve also looked around the internet a lot of places to see if I can figure out a few other aspects of it all, like when to use digital connectors, when to use component, composite, s-video, or DVI. I think I’m pretty clear on all that now. I’ve got my DVD player connected by S-Video, and my Digital Tuner is connected by RGB Component to an RGB 15-pin.
Everything is working now, all the cables are in place, I can get digital widescreen TV shows, I can play my NTSC and PAL DVDs, it is all in digital surround sound. Cool bananas!
However, I have a question - my DVDs are playing back with unusual contrast levels. The black levels sem to be a bone of contention with Plasma TVs and it seems to me that to combat this there have been developments to try and make as dark black colours as possible. But as far as I can see, they may have overdone it, because my black levels are way too dark. It gets to a medium level of shadow and it just turns into a solid mass of black pixelated nothing with very little definition.
I found a messageboard where someone spoke about 7.5 IRE or some such thing like that, but that referred to NTSC, and I’m in a PAL country. However, I did discover, as a result of that, that my DVD player has an ‘enhanced black levels’ feature which I switched off, and that appeared to help a little bit. But not entirely.
The worst thing is that the black levels on the digital TV channels are great, I just wish my DVD images were that good.
So here’s where I come to my question:
Is this the best I’m going to get? Are my DVDs always going to have some dirty shadow levels that will never improve? Are there optimum connections or equipment that will guarantee an improvement?
I’m pretty happy with it, and probably I’d get used to most shortcomings (like pixelation or slight ghosting) but this particular thing is quite distracting.