How many of you use calibration software or hardware?

[Taiyaki]

I'm totally OCD on all picture attributes but I have to admit, for all my LCD's and Plasma's I just use the pro reviewer settings. They tend to use the best equipment out there and then share their settings on message boards. I can't complain picture always comes out impeccable. :p

IMO gray scale and color calibration for CRT's is overrated. I have had some badly off crt's such as my former Toshiba and some Sony sets in the FS line up and they still gave off a really pleasant picture. What is most crucial for crt's imo is geometry, convergence and focus. Ideally one wants the gray scale and colors to be as close as possible to perfect as well but truth is, in most cases people will not be thrown off by those settings being a bit off.

For what it's worth, I have had 2 BVM sets and asked a friend technician to calibrate them for me but they were pretty much spot on on all the charts. They didn't need much calibration at all (on one we pulled back red a wee bit but nothing really noticeable in actual use). All I have to compare with are my calibrated HD tv's and some test patterns I can put up on crt's but as far as I can tell my FV300 sets have also come nearly perfect out of the box. Eyeing the gray scale shows outstanding consistency between each bars and no colors entering any shades on the scale. As for color balance red's tend to be a bit emphasized but a little tweaking is about all they need (YMMV).

[nissling]

I'm totally OCD on all picture attributes but I have to admit, for all my LCD's and Plasma's I just use the pro reviewer settings. They tend to use the best equipment out there and then share their settings on message boards.

That's like taking your grandmother's pills in hope that they'll cure your disease or using your neighbor's measures when going to a tailor. It's pretty much as far from OCD as it gets.

[vol.2]

I'm totally OCD on all picture attributes but I have to admit, for all my LCD's and Plasma's I just use the pro reviewer settings. They tend to use the best equipment out there and then share their settings on message boards.

That's like taking your grandmother's pills in hope that they'll cure your disease or using your neighbor's measures when going to a tailor. It's pretty much as far from OCD as it gets.

Not necessarily. He's saying that he trusts the pro advice on picture tweaking over his own because he doesn't have the quality of equipment they do. I can see using expert recommendations as fulfilling ocd. The compulsive need to do the testing yourself would be a whole new neurotic tendency above and beyond OCD.

[bonzo.bits]

I'm totally OCD on all picture attributes but I have to admit, for all my LCD's and Plasma's I just use the pro reviewer settings. They tend to use the best equipment out there and then share their settings on message boards.

That's like taking your grandmother's pills in hope that they'll cure your disease or using your neighbor's measures when going to a tailor. It's pretty much as far from OCD as it gets.

Not necessarily. He's saying that he trusts the pro advice on picture tweaking over his own because he doesn't have the quality of equipment they do. I can see using expert recommendations as fulfilling ocd. The compulsive need to do the testing yourself would be a whole new neurotic tendency above and beyond OCD.

From what I've read about plasma sets, differences between individuals set of the same model mean that using someone else's settings does not always yield the same result. Especially as the sets age and the phospors wear out (or something to that effect). That said, if you are totally OCD it's probably best if you steer clear of calibrating a set yourself, cos you'll always be looking for that % improvement and end up spending more time calibrating than enjoying content

[bonzo.bits]

Thanks to this thread, I'm right now preparing to calibrate my plasma for the first time in a year. I really can't be bothered but have only calibrated it for bluray player and XBone previously so it'll be interesting to see if there is any difference and how say for example, the XBone looks when using the SNES settings on it.

Will be using the 240p Test Suite for SNES (RGB-modded Mini), going via the OSSC to the display. Thinking of doing two profiles, one with scanlines at 25% and one with scanlines off. Not sure how scanlines will impact the colorimter readings, but hoping it will work.

Anyone else calibrated a display using 240p Test Suite?

Edit: had formed the incorrect impression that 240p was for full calibration of colour and greyscale. Turns out to not be the case. I did use the colour bars and PLUGE, no real adjustment to TV setting were needed. Just changed the brightness by +2.

[Taiyaki]

I'm totally OCD on all picture attributes but I have to admit, for all my LCD's and Plasma's I just use the pro reviewer settings. They tend to use the best equipment out there and then share their settings on message boards.

That's like taking your grandmother's pills in hope that they'll cure your disease or using your neighbor's measures when going to a tailor. It's pretty much as far from OCD as it gets.

Not necessarily. He's saying that he trusts the pro advice on picture tweaking over his own because he doesn't have the quality of equipment they do. I can see using expert recommendations as fulfilling ocd. The compulsive need to do the testing yourself would be a whole new neurotic tendency above and beyond OCD.

Well from what I've seen it works wonders. Especially for LCD's but I've also had no problem with my Panasonic Plasma sets VT25 and VT50. I've had several Plasmas even of the same next to each other and my experience is that out of the factory they do come the same (although I can believe that with age they may change a little). The guys on these sites have the gear, they get the results and share them, charts and all included. It's not like with CRT's where the tube will have irregularities of their own and never come twice the same. I've sometimes had several of the same with LCD monitors too, sometimes with different manufacturing dates, and yet they come identical on all measures (and obviously I'm not talking about the default menu settings).

I have a friend who's a technician and just spends his life calibrating sets for others, I've had him check my crt's a few times (he says I'm the last person he knows who still has these, and he let me take his remaining permalloy strips lol), and to my disappointment he never sees anything wrong with them on the grey scale or colors. I've seen him work his tools on other sets and he does it in a very measured careful manner. The one thing he taught me that I find interesting however is that when he used to deal with high end consumer crt's like XBR's (and in his opinion FV sets too), he more or less said: if you see nothing wrong eyeballing on all the tests then it's his advice to customers not to pay for the full calibration because cost will outweigh the benefits. In his opinion a lot of calibrating these sets ends up working more like a placebo effect, people feel great knowing the numbers match on the technician's colorimeter and other devices he has but in practice many of them might not really notice a difference.

[nissling]

Not necessarily. He's saying that he trusts the pro advice on picture tweaking over his own because he doesn't have the quality of equipment they do. I can see using expert recommendations as fulfilling ocd. The compulsive need to do the testing yourself would be a whole new neurotic tendency above and beyond OCD.

Two displays of the very same models will not measure identically out of the box and therefore there's no way to know that the settings that works on one set would work on another. For instance, compare the grayscale on my 910V to what Rtings got from their 9100 (US equivalent).

http://www.rtings.com/tv/reviews/lg/eg9100

If we traded settings both sets would've looked like crap.

[Einzelherz]

I had used a set of user settings for my S60 plasma that I'd found online for a couple of years. When I got my colorimeter, I did a baseline check with them and although they were close, there was a touch too much red and green and my blacks were slightly crushed.

It's subjective, so if you're happy with your colors, that's great, but until you've put a measurement device on it, don't say it's calibrated.

[Lord of Pirates]

I understand what vol.2 is saying about his co-worker mentioning that developers of retro games had a CRT TV next to their PC monitor and they viewed the game on both but unless someone can provide some concrete evidence that retro game developers used a standard color temperature when working on their games and that CRT TV manufacturers had all their sets calibrated to 6500K, I just don't buy it. I would actually bet money that they didn't use a standard color temp. Most game developers today don't even do this so it seems unlikely that retro game developers would have been doing this. I can believe that they would have designed the color palette of the games they were using based on the CRT TV they were using but I think it would have just been for that particular model CRT TV; I doubt developers were all using the same CRT TV to test their games on. In this case it would have been more about consistency between the PC monitor and the CRT TV and not about a standard color temp across the board for all developers.

6500K or D65 is the standard color temperature for TV shows and movies but it is not the standard color temperature for video games. 6500K was chosen as the standard color temp for TV and movies because it is the color temp at which white is neutral. It is also the same color temp as daylight at noon in North America. It makes sense to have chosen 6500K as the standard for TV and movies because the industry would want the picture of TV and movies to look as realistic as possible. However, there is no standard color temperature for video games. Each developer today works more from a position of games looking consistent on all of their monitors but this doesn't mean that they are aiming for a specific color temperature. For example, the developer might look at a monitor of one of their graphics artists and have all of their other monitors match the look of that monitor. I actually read a recent interview with a game developer where they said this is what they did at their studio. I'm not sure what their process was for doing this. It could have involved making sure the color temperatures of all the monitors was the same but that color temperature would have still only been used in that studio for that game and would not have been a standard for all game developers.

9300K is the standard color temp for PC monitors and is what I prefer but this was not necessarily the exact color temp used for CRT TVs in the 80s and 90s. I do believe that CRT TVs during this time period did have a trend toward cooler color temperatures and I played on a lot of them being in my 30s. If I was to guess a range, it may have been anywhere between 7500K and 9300K. I would bet there was a range in color temps among CRT TVs during this period. Some CRT TVs could have been set to 6500K but I don't believe it was a standard. When I play retro games today, they look like I remember them looking when I select a cooler color temp and they don't look at all like I remember them looking when I select 6500K as my temp. It is very likely that TV manufacturers favored cooler color temperatures because the more bluish hue in the image would have more easily caught the eye of the consumer and made colors pop more. The reason 6500K looks more yellowish or orange is because we are all used to cooler color temps.

Ultimately, I would say, just select whatever color temperature looks most appealing to you for the games you play.

Lots of games are sRGB and D65 is the standard for sRGB if I'm not mistaken. If developers are calibrating or profiling their monitors, and they likely are, they're also very likely doing so with 6500K as the target. Your eyes will adjust to warmer or cooler temps given time, especially if you set it higher or lower than desired and then adjust to what you wanted.

[vol.2]

Not necessarily. He's saying that he trusts the pro advice on picture tweaking over his own because he doesn't have the quality of equipment they do. I can see using expert recommendations as fulfilling ocd. The compulsive need to do the testing yourself would be a whole new neurotic tendency above and beyond OCD.

Two displays of the very same models will not measure identically out of the box and therefore there's no way to know that the settings that works on one set would work on another. For instance, compare the grayscale on my 910V to what Rtings got from their 9100 (US equivalent).

http://www.rtings.com/tv/reviews/lg/eg9100

If we traded settings both sets would've looked like crap.

okay. point taken.

[Taiyaki]

I had used a set of user settings for my S60 plasma that I'd found online for a couple of years. When I got my colorimeter, I did a baseline check with them and although they were close, there was a touch too much red and green and my blacks were slightly crushed.

It's subjective, so if you're happy with your colors, that's great, but until you've put a measurement device on it, don't say it's calibrated.

Ok. That's a revelation to me. I'll have to give a colorimeter a try at some point then.

[Brad251]

Lots of games are sRGB and D65 is the standard for sRGB if I'm not mistaken. If developers are calibrating or profiling their monitors, and they likely are, they're also very likely doing so with 6500K as the target. Your eyes will adjust to warmer or cooler temps given time, especially if you set it higher or lower than desired and then adjust to what you wanted.

You are correct that 6500K is the standard color temperature or white point for the sRGB color space. However, even though modern video games are produced using the sRGB color space, this doesn't mean that game developers are following the standard of using 6500K as the color temp for their games. You would think that game developers would be calibrating their displays and using D65 but we can't say for sure unless we have some concrete evidence (i.e. link to an interview with a game developer) that this is the standard being followed in the video game industry. I have been researching this on and off for a while and have never come across any information that indicated that game developers use a standard color temp and that they have a standard of calibrating their displays. If anything, the more I read about this topic, the more information I come across that indicates that game developers are not following any standard and pretty much just do what they want. I'm sure there are some game developers that do calibrate their monitors and design their games according to the D65 color temp but I don't think this is a standard across the industry.

I don't have the links to all the sources I have read in the past on this but I came across a discussion on AVSforum (a reputable source for all things video related) where two people who actually do work for game studios, chime in, and say that the game studios they work for generally do not focus on monitor calibration when making their games. Here is the discussion, http://www.avsforum.com/forum/166-lcd-f ... esign.html. I will note that this discussion is from 2010 but I still think it is relevant. One developer noted that none of the game publishers (including big ones) have ever required their studio to calibrate their monitors to a particular color temperature. The other person noted that color calibration was rarely ever discussed at their studio. However, this person also noted that the studio had recently purchased some equipment and calibrated their PC monitors but they noted that they also test their games on TVs and that the calibration equipment they did buy was not capable of calibrating their TVs for some reason. This same person then mentions that many video games are not in the realm of reality and are not using natural color tones that could be compared to the real world. Some examples that come to mind would be games like Rayman Origins, Jet Set Radio, Splatoon, etc. It would really only make sense to use 6500K in a game studio with a game such as Call of Duty that more closely resembles reality because you would be aiming for realism. Even some directors have broken from the D65 standard and used a different color temperature that more closely matches their vision for how the movie should look.

In the case of 8 and 16 bit retro games, almost all of them would not have been produced using the sRGB color space because the sRGB color space wasn't created until 1996. I'm sure retro game developers were using some sort of RGB color space prior to that but I don't know what the white point of that color space would have been. Even so, I'd bet these retro game developers were not following a standard. I don't think they were making a Mario game and concerned that Mario's skin tone or the sky in Ninja Gaiden or the grass in Sonic looked as realistic as possible. My guess is that retro game developers didn't have time to focus on things like monitor calibration and that they just wanted to get their games out.

You are correct that your eyes can get used to a color temperature. I have experimented using 6500K on my CRTs for a week or something like that and then switching back to 9300K. I have also done this using 7500K and 8500K. I've done this a few times but I still feel like the CRTs I played on growing up were not quite as warm as 6500K. I do think the color temp on those CRTs was on the cool side. I suppose the only way to be absolutely sure would be to run my colorimeter on a bunch of older CRTs from the 80s/90s and measure the native grayscale on those sets but I still believe they were on the cool side.

[Brad251]

I also want to point out that monitor/TV calibration is very much dependent on the lighting conditions in your viewing environment and the sensitivity of the viewer's eyes. You could have success using another person's calibration settings but if your viewing environment is different than theirs and your eyes have different level of sensitivity to light/dark then you really are not getting anywhere close to a quality calibration. As has already been pointed at, Plasma displays can have variance in baseline color accuracy, brightness, grayscale, etc., and this could mean that another person's calibration settings won't work for you. I'm not sure how much variance there is among LCD displays. To truly be able to say that your display is professionally calibrated, you either need to buy the proper equipment yourself or pay to have an ISF technician professionally calibrate your display.

[tacoguy64]

Not sure if this is true or not but I read that color temperature has an effect on the monitors longevity. I think it was on the care taking section for the sony fw900 monitor on the hardforums.

[Lord of Pirates]

You are correct that 6500K is the standard color temperature or white point for the sRGB color space. However, even though modern video games are produced using the sRGB color space, this doesn't mean that game developers are following the standard of using 6500K as the color temp for their games. You would think that game developers would be calibrating their displays and using D65 but we can't say for sure unless we have some concrete evidence (i.e. link to an interview with a game developer) that this is the standard being followed in the video game industry. I have been researching this on and off for a while and have never come across any information that indicated that game developers use a standard color temp and that they have a standard of calibrating their displays. If anything, the more I read about this topic, the more information I come across that indicates that game developers are not following any standard and pretty much just do what they want. I'm sure there are some game developers that do calibrate their monitors and design their games according to the D65 color temp but I don't think this is a standard across the industry.

I don't have the links to all the sources I have read in the past on this but I came across a discussion on AVSforum (a reputable source for all things video related) where two people who actually do work for game studios, chime in, and say that the game studios they work for generally do not focus on monitor calibration when making their games. Here is the discussion, http://www.avsforum.com/forum/166-lcd-f ... esign.html. I will note that this discussion is from 2010 but I still think it is relevant. One developer noted that none of the game publishers (including big ones) have ever required their studio to calibrate their monitors to a particular color temperature. The other person noted that color calibration was rarely ever discussed at their studio. However, this person also noted that the studio had recently purchased some equipment and calibrated their PC monitors but they noted that they also test their games on TVs and that the calibration equipment they did buy was not capable of calibrating their TVs for some reason. This same person then mentions that many video games are not in the realm of reality and are not using natural color tones that could be compared to the real world. Some examples that come to mind would be games like Rayman Origins, Jet Set Radio, Splatoon, etc. It would really only make sense to use 6500K in a game studio with a game such as Call of Duty that more closely resembles reality because you would be aiming for realism. Even some directors have broken from the D65 standard and used a different color temperature that more closely matches their vision for how the movie should look.

In the case of 8 and 16 bit retro games, almost all of them would not have been produced using the sRGB color space because the sRGB color space wasn't created until 1996. I'm sure retro game developers were using some sort of RGB color space prior to that but I don't know what the white point of that color space would have been. Even so, I'd bet these retro game developers were not following a standard. I don't think they were making a Mario game and concerned that Mario's skin tone or the sky in Ninja Gaiden or the grass in Sonic looked as realistic as possible. My guess is that retro game developers didn't have time to focus on things like monitor calibration and that they just wanted to get their games out.

You are correct that your eyes can get used to a color temperature. I have experimented using 6500K on my CRTs for a week or something like that and then switching back to 9300K. I have also done this using 7500K and 8500K. I've done this a few times but I still feel like the CRTs I played on growing up were not quite as warm as 6500K. I do think the color temp on those CRTs was on the cool side. I suppose the only way to be absolutely sure would be to run my colorimeter on a bunch of older CRTs from the 80s/90s and measure the native grayscale on those sets but I still believe they were on the cool side.

Presumably only the people working on textures and other colored images would need color accuracy. Anyone calibrating their display makes a choice based on preference in the end. I feel that 6500K is the safest target.

[vol.2]

You are correct that 6500K is the standard color temperature or white point for the sRGB color space. However, even though modern video games are produced using the sRGB color space, this doesn't mean that game developers are following the standard of using 6500K as the color temp for their games. You would think that game developers would be calibrating their displays and using D65 but we can't say for sure unless we have some concrete evidence (i.e. link to an interview with a game developer) that this is the standard being followed in the video game industry. I have been researching this on and off for a while and have never come across any information that indicated that game developers use a standard color temp and that they have a standard of calibrating their displays. If anything, the more I read about this topic, the more information I come across that indicates that game developers are not following any standard and pretty much just do what they want. I'm sure there are some game developers that do calibrate their monitors and design their games according to the D65 color temp but I don't think this is a standard across the industry.

I don't have the links to all the sources I have read in the past on this but I came across a discussion on AVSforum (a reputable source for all things video related) where two people who actually do work for game studios, chime in, and say that the game studios they work for generally do not focus on monitor calibration when making their games. Here is the discussion, http://www.avsforum.com/forum/166-lcd-f ... esign.html. I will note that this discussion is from 2010 but I still think it is relevant. One developer noted that none of the game publishers (including big ones) have ever required their studio to calibrate their monitors to a particular color temperature. The other person noted that color calibration was rarely ever discussed at their studio. However, this person also noted that the studio had recently purchased some equipment and calibrated their PC monitors but they noted that they also test their games on TVs and that the calibration equipment they did buy was not capable of calibrating their TVs for some reason. This same person then mentions that many video games are not in the realm of reality and are not using natural color tones that could be compared to the real world. Some examples that come to mind would be games like Rayman Origins, Jet Set Radio, Splatoon, etc. It would really only make sense to use 6500K in a game studio with a game such as Call of Duty that more closely resembles reality because you would be aiming for realism. Even some directors have broken from the D65 standard and used a different color temperature that more closely matches their vision for how the movie should look.

In the case of 8 and 16 bit retro games, almost all of them would not have been produced using the sRGB color space because the sRGB color space wasn't created until 1996. I'm sure retro game developers were using some sort of RGB color space prior to that but I don't know what the white point of that color space would have been. Even so, I'd bet these retro game developers were not following a standard. I don't think they were making a Mario game and concerned that Mario's skin tone or the sky in Ninja Gaiden or the grass in Sonic looked as realistic as possible. My guess is that retro game developers didn't have time to focus on things like monitor calibration and that they just wanted to get their games out.

You are correct that your eyes can get used to a color temperature. I have experimented using 6500K on my CRTs for a week or something like that and then switching back to 9300K. I have also done this using 7500K and 8500K. I've done this a few times but I still feel like the CRTs I played on growing up were not quite as warm as 6500K. I do think the color temp on those CRTs was on the cool side. I suppose the only way to be absolutely sure would be to run my colorimeter on a bunch of older CRTs from the 80s/90s and measure the native grayscale on those sets but I still believe they were on the cool side.

Presumably only the people working on textures and other colored images would need color accuracy. Anyone calibrating their display makes a choice based on preference in the end. I feel that 6500K is the safest target.

I still think that there is an inherent flaw in assuming an industry standard for calibration. Even if there was a suggestion for color temperature from the platform (Sony, Nintendo, etc) you couldn't assume that they would all have the same one, or that every developer would adhere to it.
Without an industry wide poll, it's pointless to make assumptions about calibration or temperature or anything.

I suggest that if people are really interested in this mystery, then some AMAs may lead to info from individuals that were present at the time.

[Brad251]

I still think that there is an inherent flaw in assuming an industry standard for calibration. Even if there was a suggestion for color temperature from the platform (Sony, Nintendo, etc) you couldn't assume that they would all have the same one, or that every developer would adhere to it.
Without an industry wide poll, it's pointless to make assumptions about calibration or temperature or anything.

I suggest that if people are really interested in this mystery, then some AMAs may lead to info from individuals that were present at the time.

This was exactly my point.

[bonzo.bits]

After a bit of playing around, including using 6500K calibrated settings with dE under 3 for the past year, I don't see that much benefit for calibrating for retro video games.

Where calibrating for viewing blurays and other content will reveal shadow detail and can make the picture 'pop', I'm not perceiving any similar improvements for retro gaming content. Obviously the colour palette for old consoles is much smaller so there's not as much scope of increasing the perceived image depth and whatever the other benefits of calibration are.

I'd say that swapping from a FM to an OSSC for the not sucky colour handling of the OSSC, would give more improvement than calibrating the display. Or just choosing whichever of the the typical factory presets (Dynamic, Custom, Movie, etc).

[Einzelherz]

With multiple screens and later consoles, it does. Several Saturn and DC games looked wrong on a couple of my screens until I calibrated them all as closer as I could manage.

Again, it's just ~$100 and time, so it's up to the user how important it is.

[Brad251]

With multiple screens and later consoles, it does. Several Saturn and DC games looked wrong on a couple of my screens until I calibrated them all as closer as I could manage.

Again, it's just ~$100 and time, so it's up to the user how important it is.

What aspects of the picture were you calibrating? Calibrating the black level (user menu brightness), white level (user menu contrast) and sharpness will always improve the picture, and generally the same is true for adjusting the user menu color with a blue filter. You can calibrate all of these without a colorimeter. I have an i1display pro that I use with the colorHCFR software and calibrating the grayscale has never actually changed the quality of the image being displayed (i.e. sharpness and detail); the exception being the cooler color temperatures make colors pop more. When you say the games looked wrong, do you mean that after calibration they simply looked more like you remember them looking.

The very thing in this thread we have been trying to figure out is if grayscale calibration of your display is important for video games. The lack of evidence for a standard color temperature being used across the video game industry suggests that it is not. For this reason, spending $100+ on a colorimeter to calibrate your display for video games is a waste of money. People are much better adjusting the user menu settings and selecting a preset color temperature setting to calibrate their display for video games.

[bonzo.bits]

The main argument I recall hearing for set calibration, is to bring the display as close as possible to reproducing the content per the creators vision.

Whilst not knowing the standard game devs used (if any at all) does mean we can't know if we're accurately reproducing their artistic vision, calibration can at least resolve or reduce the impact of any colour issues a display has when it leaves the factory. EG, iirc there were some Sony TV models where red was too high. Bit of calibrating should be able to fix that somewhat and thereby mean you'll at least not have a picture with OTT reds.

[vol.2]

The main argument I recall hearing for set calibration, is to bring the display as close as possible to reproducing the content per the creators vision.

Whilst not knowing the standard game devs used (if any at all) does mean we can't know if we're accurately reproducing their artistic vision, calibration can at least resolve or reduce the impact of any colour issues a display has when it leaves the factory. EG, iirc there were some Sony TV models where red was too high. Bit of calibrating should be able to fix that somewhat and thereby mean you'll at least not have a picture with OTT reds.

This is pretty much the only reason for doing it outside of personal growth or maybe just to "refresh" your color temp. Some folks like to recalibrate every so often just to keep it real.

I also agree that sets can be weird out of the factory, but I don't know if that is "baseline" or they just come with the user-changable settings tweaked. I have purchased more than one lcd/plasma that came with the "vivid" preset enabled, or some "picture A.I." thing that controls the white/black point. These kinds of settings are present even on CRTs as far back as the 90's.

In any case, if somebody want to do calibration, why not? Sometimes it's fun just to mess around with stuff and see what your choices are. Just as long as long as you don't mess things up without being able to put it straight again.

[bonzo.bits]

I meant to include in that previous post, that for viewing film, TV and such, calibration is very useful and I would say it is essential for getting the most out of a display. It was only after using a colorimeter and ColourHFCR and the display's detailed colour management system, that I was finally happy with the shadow detail on my plasma. Before that, just using the contrast, brightness and other basic controls did not satisfy (for retro gaming, I agree that tweaks to these settings should be adequate if using something like 240P Test Suite). That said, when fine tuning the gamma, I did have to choose between highest possible shadow detail and slightly darkened colours, so even that didn't achieve perfection.

Anyhow, back on topic, since jumping into this thread and playing around, I've found that for retro gaming, I'm enjoying messing around with different factory settings, changing the colour gamut between rec.709 and SMTPE-C. I'm currently enjoying SMTPE more than rec.709, not sure why, maybe it helps to more accurately trigger my gaming nostalgia or maybe it's just novelty factor. Definitely agree that peeps should have a play around and see what they prefer.