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People people people ! Set your HDTV up correctly for consoles/PC !

iMax

Member
No, but this thread is about setting up your HDTV for consoles/PC. That's full RGB source material.

I like to argue about IQ more than anyone and all my screens are calibrated to sRGB using a Spyder4 :p

I don't think the hassle's worth it, considering the amount of content that's being fed into a TV. Most is 16-235, so I keep it that way, especially considering as the Xbox will adjust the colours accordingly if needed.
 

Panajev2001a

GAF's Pleasant Genius
Hello, I use the 40'' version of the model described here http://www.hdtvtest.co.uk/news/samsung-ue32eh5000-ue40eh5000-201212192466.htm and I always kept my sharpness settings at 50 after noticing the image was a little bit soft on PS3 games and on Netflix shows.

This has always looked great for Netflix's 1080 super HD content, bitrate less than 8 Mbps, but I noticed how a lot of fonts on PS4's UI/main screen looked aliased, way too sharp, the ringing was so bad it actually added what looked like font shadowing to labels such as the game name when you have the game tile selected. The 'O' in flow had a non trivially thick inner black outline.
This outline would grow bigger when I increased the sharpness above 50 and would get thinner and thinner as I deceased it below 50.

I think that the problem for me was that the sharpness enhancement on Netflix and some sub 1080p content actually worked too well and I got stuck with a way too high sharpness setting. It is normal that sub 1080p sources on a 1080p panel do not look as crisp as 1080 p sources would. It is also normal for Netflix 1080p Super HD not to look as sharp as a Blu-Ray would as you are comparing less than 8 Mbps of bitrate to Blu-Ray movies which are often well above 20 Mbps using a comparable codec (H.264 or VC-1). Still, I will probably have to turn the sharpness higher when watching Netflix content and then lower it back down when I play games or watch Blu-Ray movies.

When I have the sharpness set to 10 or less, I do not have blurry text and images and I do not see any trace of that extra black outline. Recently tried the Blu-Ray of Chronicles of Riddick's Directors' Cut, which is visually an amazing transfer from the digital master, and it appeared neither blurry nor over sharpened, but just right.
 
I keep seeing people say "use limited RGB for Bluray," but I've always read that if your TV supports it, Blurays and DVDs should be output in the YCbCr color space.

(The RGB range settings are inaccessible on my Samsung TV when a YCbCr signal is present, so it's not like I would bother putting it on limited or full anyway.)


I've seen some arguments about the names for the settings, but as of my 2009 Samsung LCD, Low = Limited (16-235) and Normal = Full (0-255). I am absolutely, positively, 100% certain of this after many hours spent calibrating the inputs.
 

Ogs

Member
"Default" Settings vs Renamed to PC

normal7dosh.jpg
pcruo47.jpg
 
I then went into the PS4 settings and changed it to RGB limited. This is the correct setting for TV's.

It is not the correct setting for ALL tv's, as has been stated multiple times in this thread. Setting my plasma and ps4 to full gives me a far superior picture quality showing both dark and light at the full 0-255 range.
 

Jonboy

Member
"Default" Settings vs Renamed to PC
Did you ever tweak your settings before doing that? I'm pretty sure you can accomplish the same thing by going into the settings and manually disabling all the "extra stuff" like overscan, vivid color, etc...

This seems like a quick way to do it though.

It is not the correct setting for ALL tv's, as has been stated multiple times in this thread. Setting my plasma and ps4 to full gives me a far superior picture quality showing both dark and light at the full 0-255 range.

Yeah my PS4 was set to auto and I think it was detecting that my TV had the capability for Full RGB; however, the TV was set to standard RGB by default and thus, I've been playing with crushed blacks for months.
 
By the way, if you have a PC with a NV GPU an want to use full range with a TV you might find this useful.
Wow, thank you so much for this! I was getting really annoyed that whenever I tried to downsample on my HDTV I would get dark colors and black crush, which I chalked up to the custom resolutions being in full RGB, but I couldn't find a way to change that. I always had to change the black levels on my HDTV if I wanted to downsample, but now I can just leave it on the same setting for all resolutions!
 
I had an issue initially with my Vizio 50" M-Series (M501d-A2R) where it added all types of extra filters to my screen. I'll try to drop back in here later and post the menu trails to set this up.
 

Shadow780

Member
So I have a KDL-52XBR3 and the "PC" label is used exclusively for the VGA input, should I use that to connect my PC to it?
 

ohlawd

Member
my Samsung TV don't do shit when I rename it to PC.

I think that's because I already turned off all that extra garbage in the settings.
 

Shadow780

Member
You should be able to rename per input. My tv also has a pc vga input, but I can rename any hdmi manually to whatever I want.

I renamed my HDMI input into PC but to no difference, I changed my connection to VGA and the graphics seems to be "smoother" than HDMI which has rough pixels for text.

I think I'll stick with VGA for now and use HDMI for surround sound. Thanks!
 
D

Deleted member 245925

Unconfirmed Member
On my Samsung TV (UE40C6000), the renaming to PC only works on HDMI1 input. I had already tweaked my settings for HDMI4 (connected to my PC) with some info from this thread and thought I might aswell try connecting my PC to HDMI1 and renaming it to PC to see what happens. The result was far better than the default HDMI1 settings and pretty much identical to my custom settings on HDMI4, so you can get the same results by disabling/tweaking all the stuff yourself.

The only difference I noticed was that when HDMI1 was set to PC, I was unable to activate Game Mode and when I compared HDMI1 (renamed to PC, without Game Mode) and HDMI4 (custom settings, with Game mode) by playing some Super Hexagon, I felt there was less input lag on HDMI4. May have been my imagination though, but as the IQ was basically the same, I stayed with custom HDMI4.
 

hateradio

The Most Dangerous Yes Man
My Samsun's pretty old, so it actually only has one input (HDMI) where it qualifies a "PC" input. I use my PS4 on it, but it sucks that I have to switch it back to my PC after.
 

Vizzeh

Banned
On my LG LM7600

RGB Limited, Black level Low, looks fine on my tv, Brightness is calibrated at 50 and Contrast at 78 - Has good bright images with decent blacks

Problem I have found while using RGB Full, Black level : High is that while there seems to be more colour detail, when re-calibrating the set the black levels stipulate I need to go to around 39 In brightness on the calibration disc.

39 In brightness on Black level high, leaves the overall brightness a bit low, regardless of the better blacks. It looks better when I ignore the calibration programs and bump it up closer to 50, but it kind of defeats the purpose.

Kinda of thinking RGB limited is perhaps the way to go.

Anyone else found this?

(HDMI port4 Label:pC/Game Mode/Avmode:Game - smooooth) Local dimming: Low
 

nikos

Member
This is Samsung specific. On my old 46A650, changing the input to PC (only worked on HDMI2) would lower input lag and change the image settings. You'd have less calibration options, but it would be far less sharp than Game mode, and the improved latency was a plus.

On the topic of sharpness, setting it to 0 is not always the solution. On my new Sony W802A, I have to keep the sharpness much higher than I did on the Samsung. It seems to blur the image if I go too low. I also find the need to turn some image enhancing features on to get better black levels from this set.
 

DrPreston

Member
On a side note to this, make sure you've set your RGB range up properly. Goes a very long way to ensuring accurate image quality.

Choose 0-255 if you're using a PC monitor and Limited if you're using a TV. Getting these mixed up will give you crushed blacks or colour loss.

If you choose 0-255 for your TV because it thinks it supports it, double check with a grayscale calibration, because many actually don't.

Many TV's (or at least my Samsung plasma) let you specify whether the source color range is full (0-255) or partial/NTSC (16-235). If you have this option, set both your console/PC and TV to 0-255
 

Salsa

Member
I have a very cheap local brand 40 inch HDTV and hooking it up through HDMI to my PC makes it look like ass for anything other than watching movies/series at a distance

it serves its purpose for that, but it's a bummer for everything else

there's no setting to change the name of a source, so I cant do this so-called "name it PC" trick. bummer. playing around with the settings doesnt really help that much either. desktop looks like ass and text is unlegible

has some pretty bad ghosting against white backgrounds too



here's the kicker tho: changing res from 1080p to 1080i actually makes the text a LOT better, but y'now, 30hz. makes no sense
 
I recently had a revelation with my HDTV. I found i wasn't using the correct HDTV settings, causing god knows what shit to ruin the image quality.

When i got my PS4, i noticed immediately that things still sort of looked a bit like my Xbox 360, stuff i chalked up to being because it was at a lower resolution, so never bothered. Now i had a PS4 that should be outputting games at 1080p, and still seeing some of these iffy things on screen, i decided to look into it.

I basically found that the TV was adding all sorts of processing to the image, with this crazy amount of sharpening that was making everything look like it had been through a Photoshop filter. The TV also didn't display the full picture, but i had changed that donkeys ago using the option "screen fit", so that wasn't an issue.

I had also tried using my PC through my HDTV, and the desktop looked like ass, overly sharp with shitty colours ass. I thought "well i guess my TV sucks". It wasn't until somebody (sorry I couldn't find the post or name) in the Thief console war thread brought up the name of the exact issue i was having, that i realized what was going on with the image.

I didn't feel like fiddling with the settings too much, as i knew i would be at it for hours. I was getting a bit miffed that there wasn't some option to just remove all processing that the TV does to the image. But then i found it .....

On my Samsung 32" HDTV, when selecting the "Source" input, i found i could rename them. I was given a list, and I selected the "PC" name for it.

Immediately, the picture looked as good, if not better than my PC monitor. The screen resized itself to screen fit automatically. Picture quality was amazing, to the point where I wonder how i even played things before (i kind of want my 360 back now to see what they all looked like !).

I hooked up my PC again, Desktop now looked crystal clear, sharp and awesome. Loaded up Crysis 3 and good lordy ..... i don't really like the game that much but crikey what a spectacular treat it was seeing it on a 32" TV.

So basically, take a look into your TV settings to try and find an option that removes any processing the TV does to your console/PC signal (unless you like it of course).

I've got a new samsung too... I should try that. Definitely turned sharpness all the way down on all my inputs earlier.. it looked like complete shit.
 

Mashing

Member
I have a Panasonic VT50 plasma, does anyone know what the ideal gaming settings to reduce IR on that set? I had pretty bad IR when I was playing Tales of Vesperia, enough so that I stopped playing games on it for months. I tend to game in long sessions so that could be one problem.
 

Hylian

Member
pc mode basically guarantees all processing is disabled. the only thing being done in that mode Is matching the pixels 1:1. the downside is that with all the processing turned off your motion resolution is about 300(on a lcd). so while you get a nice 1080p image when not moving, everything goes to n64 mode as soon as you start playing.

I play this way, game runnign 60fps synced to 60hz screen at native 1080p. I always thought that LCD dispaly can update all of its 2073600 pixels of information 60 times a second?.
 

slapnuts

Junior Member
Great Thread, OP

Owner of a G10 50inch panny plasma and UT50 55inch panny plasma

One thing i want to say is that even though i am pretty seasoned with stuff like this from years of being a home theater nut...Just want to warn some of you greener peeps to not get too caught up with this stuff because it can become obsessive and you will begin to notice all kinds of flaws,etc with your big screen lol. It's just a common problem with a lot of us over at avsforums.com . You tend to get stuck in some of the threads over there and before you know it..the more people point out the flaws they noticed in their HDTV's..the more chance of you hunting down those same problems..may it be motion blur, uniformity issues, discoloration on the screen (yellow/pink blobs on white backgrounds) and the list goes on and on and on.

Not saying its bad to fine tune your set ..just be careful not to get too deep in it because some may get so obsessed with it and once they find an issue on their set...it becomes a everyday struggle to eliminate that problem...yeah i know sounds crazy but there are many people i know that get too stressed over it.

This thread though is a good thread because its not really getting into that kinda of thing i explained above...just be careful if you head over to avsforums ...it came become your best friend or your worst enemy.

By the way...those of you using your HDTV for PC (like i do) make sure your videocard settings (Nvida or AMD control panel) settings are set correctly for the Pixel Format settings...i.e. YCbCr and RGB Full/Limited,etc

8wcug7.jpg
 

iMax

Member
Many TV's (or at least my Samsung plasma) let you specify whether the source color range is full (0-255) or partial/NTSC (16-235). If you have this option, set both your console/PC and TV to 0-255

Mine does too, but the signal doesn't always get through properly. For instance, my Xbox One is set to 0-255, as is my VT60. But 0-16 blacks are totally invisible. I assumed it was down to my AVR but it didn't work over direct HDMI either.

Don't just switch it if the setting is available. Verify first with a 0-16 test.
 

mo60

Member
I have a RCA 32 inch 720p RLDED 3258A-B tv.The colours on the this tv are really washed out and really dark most of the time when I use this tv.I have only used my 360 on this tv and not my wiiu.I may start to use this tv again soon.I tried to play around with the tv settings to fix this problem awhile ago,but I failed to fix this problem.I also played around with the colour/colour temperature settings,but this did not fix this problem.To try to explain this problem in more detail here is an example.If I look at an object like a blue canister in halo reach it's a really dark blue colour in the rca tv while it's a lighter blue colour on the living room tv which is a sharp aquous 720P LCD tv.The same example applies to every other game I tried on this tv like halo 4.The ground textures and other envirinmental textures are way darker than they should be and the colours are weird.I also can not change the tint settings on the rca tv.
 
I used the monster dvd calibration tool about a year ago when I got my TV(Toshiba 39" 1080P model 39L22U). It seemed to look fine and I really never had an issue.

I'm using my PC connected to my TV via HDMI and I just popped in the DVD and it seems like when I watch the DVD on the computer I can't see the black X that should show if your brightness is too high. I tried putting my TV brightness all the way up and I still can't see it. Weird thing is if I try to calibrate the color using the windows color calibration module the same image of a man in a black vest with a black button shirt shows and I can see the black X and correctly make it disappear by lowering the brightness. It's like video looks different from the actual desktop. Another thing is when I downsample games everything gets much darker. I can barely see things in Mirrors Edge in 1440P downsampled to 1080P.. I set my color filter to RGB 4:4:4:4 Full and tried the other 3 and it didn't seem to fix it.
 

Ogs

Member
One thing i want to say is that even though i am pretty seasoned with stuff like this from years of being a home theater nut...Just want to warn some of you greener peeps to not get too caught up with this stuff because it can become obsessive and you will begin to notice all kinds of flaws,etc with your big screen lol. It's just a common problem with a lot of us over at avsforums.com . You tend to get stuck in some of the threads over there and before you know it..the more people point out the flaws they noticed in their HDTV's..the more chance of you hunting down those same problems..may it be motion blur, uniformity issues, discoloration on the screen (yellow/pink blobs on white backgrounds) and the list goes on and on and on.

Not saying its bad to fine tune your set ..just be careful not to get too deep in it because some may get so obsessed with it and once they find an issue on their set...it becomes a everyday struggle to eliminate that problem...yeah i know sounds crazy but there are many people i know that get too stressed over it.

This thread though is a good thread because its not really getting into that kinda of thing i explained above...just be careful if you head over to avsforums ...it came become your best friend or your worst enemy.

By the way...those of you using your HDTV for PC (like i do) make sure your videocard settings (Nvida or AMD control panel) settings are set correctly for the Pixel Format settings...i.e. YCbCr and RGB Full/Limited,etc

8wcug7.jpg

Yeah that's the reason I created the thread. I always knew about the various tweaks that can be done to perfect an image, my problem is that I would get too knee deep in the various settings, and never be able to settle on something "perfect".

Learning about all stuff a TV does to the image, I was looking for an option that basically removes all this, which I think I found with renaming the source to PC (literally with a few clicks of the remote). Its either removed some if not all of them, creating an image that looks razor sharp perfect (For me), and I feel comfortable now that's its displaying as intended.

Thread is purely to highlight to people there nay just be a similar quick simple option to perform the same thing, probably under a variety of different names, without getting too technical :)

Although why HDTV manufacturers haven't made something like this obvious and better named I don't know !
 

Lima

Member
Mine does too, but the signal doesn't always get through properly. For instance, my Xbox One is set to 0-255, as is my VT60. But 0-16 blacks are totally invisible. I assumed it was down to my AVR but it didn't work over direct HDMI either.

Don't just switch it if the setting is available. Verify first with a 0-16 test.

That is because Full range RGB is currently broken on the Xbox One.
 

Jonboy

Member
Great Thread, OP

Owner of a G10 50inch panny plasma and UT50 55inch panny plasma

One thing i want to say is that even though i am pretty seasoned with stuff like this from years of being a home theater nut...Just want to warn some of you greener peeps to not get too caught up with this stuff because it can become obsessive and you will begin to notice all kinds of flaws,etc with your big screen lol. It's just a common problem with a lot of us over at avsforums.com . You tend to get stuck in some of the threads over there and before you know it..the more people point out the flaws they noticed in their HDTV's..the more chance of you hunting down those same problems..may it be motion blur, uniformity issues, discoloration on the screen (yellow/pink blobs on white backgrounds) and the list goes on and on and on.

Not saying its bad to fine tune your set ..just be careful not to get too deep in it because some may get so obsessed with it and once they find an issue on their set...it becomes a everyday struggle to eliminate that problem...yeah i know sounds crazy but there are many people i know that get too stressed over it.

This thread though is a good thread because its not really getting into that kinda of thing i explained above...just be careful if you head over to avsforums ...it came become your best friend or your worst enemy.

By the way...those of you using your HDTV for PC (like i do) make sure your videocard settings (Nvida or AMD control panel) settings are set correctly for the Pixel Format settings...i.e. YCbCr and RGB Full/Limited,etc
Great post and so very true about the obsession thing. You can drive yourself crazy over the tiniest detail.

Now that I finally got rid of my crushed blacks by addressing the RGB issue, I'm set. I can guarantee there are others out there like me though who aren't getting the best picture because either the PS4 doesn't detect the correct RGB when set to auto, or because my tv didn't detect the PS4 signal properly. I get identical pictures if I set both my TV and PS4 to auto, limited, or full, but if either of them is set to something different from the other, it immediately crushes my blacks.

Edit: Wow, just stumbled upon this thread here: http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=717488 Guess I should have been paying attention.

Edit 2: Very helpful link on the RGB question. http://www.nicolaspeople.com/ch3rokeesblog/?p=16
 

GAMEPROFF

Banned
Great topic, OP should be build into a OT. Learned a lot of interesting stuff about picture optimisation on a TV, will later try to mess a little bit around with my KDL-32D300.

Should I turn superwhite on or off? Picture looks now with all Picture Optimizers darker and even white areas are not as white, as they are supposed to...
 

d9b

Banned
Samsung Smart 40" 3D HDTV and PS4 here.

Full range ON (PS4)
ShadowDetail NORMAL(TV)
Rename HDMI to Game(TV)

Try it!
 

Sykotik

Member
By the way...those of you using your HDTV for PC (like i do) make sure your videocard settings (Nvida or AMD control panel) settings are set correctly for the Pixel Format settings...i.e. YCbCr and RGB Full/Limited,etc

How do we know which setting is the correct one?
 

aro52

Member
Any difference on Samsungs between renaming inputs to Game vs PC?

I'm curious about this too. I can't remember right now (at work) what my input label is, but I always set 'E.Mode - Game' before starting a game. Otherwise, I get some noticeable input lag.

My TV: Samsung LN46A650
 

Klocker

Member
game mode vs pc mode on samsung's has ben really varied between specific models but in most cases where it's been compared, pc mode has less input lag than game mode, although close.

newer models have shown game modes making strides to be better or ahead of pc mode

there is a website or two that tests this
 

VICI0US

Member
Any difference on Samsungs between renaming inputs to Game vs PC?

samsung owner here (UN50EH5000) mine looks much better with the input labeled PC compared to GAME. input lag is negligible on both, but PC looks so much cleaner and aliasing is drastically reduced. it actually looks like games us AA now! crazy.
 

Ogs

Member
samsung owner here (UN50EH5000) mine looks much better with the input labeled PC compared to GAME. input lag is negligible on both, but PC looks so much cleaner and aliasing is drastically reduced. it actually looks like games us AA now! crazy.

Yup, my first thought with KZ;SF was "I thought this was 1080p + AA ?".
 
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