Upgraded TV; How best to dial in picture?

[Marc_G]

Hi folks,

Years ago I spent a huge amount of effort to get my circa 2005 Panny plasma (an old 1080i unit) dialed in with WMC. It really took some effort to get the colors and range close to right... Nominal Range Hack, gamma adjustments, contrast settings, all sorts of mess. The TV really wasn't designed for use with an HTPC.

Fast forward to two weeks from today: I'll have a new Panasonic TC-P60ST60 plasma delivered, and I'm wondering what I will need to do... or undo... to get it optimized as my HTPC TV. Sure, I'll rerun WMC (win7) TV setup and all... set for 1080p... yadda yadda.

For a modern plasma, what's the best starting point on the HTPC? Nominal range hack or not? Any recommendations re: RGP/y/CR/etc....

I'm using an ATI 5670 Radeon for what it's worth. If it makes sense to change this, let me know... I've got time to order one in.

I guess I had to tweak so many things to get the old TV close to calibrated in, I'm worried about what I'll need to untweak to get the nice new TV looking good.

Thanks in advance!

Marc

[STC]

Sorry, missed this.

I have a HD6670 and a Samsung Plasma.
The TV has been calibrated to Rec. 709.
TMT 6 is used for disc playback through Media Center.

These are my preferred ATI settings:

• YCbCr 4:4:4
  Use Video Player Settings
  Dynamic Range unticked and the TV set to HDMI Black Level: Normal
  Edge Enhancement: 15 (emulates the output sharpness of other hardware)
  Vector Adaptive Deinterlacing
  Pulldown Detection ticked
  Everything else off

[Marc_G]

Thanks... this helps. I mostly watch via WMC (have TMT, just usually watch MKV rips) but knowing your settings is a good starting point.

Folks, do I have this right:?
-The TV without any special effort expects the content dynamic range to be 16-235 in the YCbCr space
-A run of the mill video card with everything at default will usually be set to enable output 0-255 in RGB (tuned for monitors where 0 = black, as opposed to TV where 16=black)
-WMC without any modifications will interpret content in the full 0-255 space, so output on a good TV looses shading in deep blacks and whites, most noticeable by most as "black crush" where you can't see any shadow detail.
-TMT and other players can undo the dynamic range expansion; WMC accomplishes this via the Nominal Range Hack, to put out 16-235 instead of 0-255
-Modern TVs often have a mode to handle 0-255 PC output; there seem to be multiple opinions about whether this looks good or not
-Best bet is to tune the player / video card to output 16-235 YCbCr to avoid overprocessing the content

Is this right?

Thanks!

Marc