This is a follow up to this post: Samsung PS63C7705 (PN63C8000) review and settings.

It’s now been two weeks since I received the Samsung PS63C7705 and I’ve received a lot of feedback (from both comments and different forums). I’ll try to answer some of the questions in this post and if you have any questions or things you want me to test just write a comment or an email.

I pointed out in the previous post that the screen has some line bleeding – after 14 days of use I hardly notice it and it’s a non-issue for normal tv/movie use.

Samsung C7705

Samsung C7705

Wall mounting

I received a few requests for pictures of the back of the TV.

The TV can be wall mounted with a VESA600x400 compatible wall mount. The mounting holes are 27 cm from both the bottom and top of the TV (centered – both horizontally and vertically). You have to use some spacers (about 1 cm deep) that comes with the TV (also when using Samsungs own slim mount kit). The power cord is only 1.5 meters long, fixed and can’t be removed (it’s fitted to the TV with a proprietary plug, so forget about changing it).

Back of the C7705

Back of the C7705

Plasma buzz

The Samsung still suffers from some buzzing noise issues. It’s not bad and you can’t hear it when the volume is at a normal level. But I wanted to measure how loud it actually was, so I tried using my sound meter (which I normally use for setting up surround sound levels). The meter goes down to 30db (+/- 0.5db), but it’s probably not precise enough to be used for anything really scientific, but the meter did pick up the noise from the screen (repeated the test 5 times and the meter showed the same values each time).

Measure Sound level (db)
Room with screen turned off 34.0 db
Screen on at a distance of 1 meter 34.8 db
Screen on at a distance of 3 meters (normal viewing position) 34.3 db

Calibration and settings

This time I’ll also go through each step of the calibration. As I knew the screen from before I did things a little different this time.

Brightness

Setting the brightness correctly gives you the best blacks without any black chrush or raised brighness/black level. To do this I loaded up the brightness test pattern and adjusted the brightness so that only 17 and aboves blinks (hard to see on the image). The setting of 51 seems to be the optimal value (no matter what contrast, gamma or cell light is set at).

Contrast

Since I was aiming for a white level of 30 fL I loaded up a 100IRE window and adjusted the contrast to 81 which gives a white level of 30.4 fL / 104.2 cdm2.

Gamma

As the Samsung provides gamma controls it was pretty easy just trying out a few values and making some test measurements. With a gamma of 0 (standard) it gives us the following gamma of 2.43:

Setting it at gamma 2 gives us a almost perfect gamma of 2.20. (Setting gamma at 1 gives us something about 2.31).

Cell Light

Samsung has an option for setting the Cell light. This only affects the white level (not the black level) and the gamma curve. I’ve tried different settings for Cell Light came to the same conclusion as two weeks ago. Only a setting of 17 gives a “flat” gamma curve.

Here a few measurements of the different Cell Light levels (contrast adjusted each time to 30 fL).

Cell Light at 16:

Cell Light at 17:

Cell Light at 18:

Adjusting the white balance I was able to get this (probably could have gotten it closer if I had the time), but from 10IRE we are below 2 which should be good enough.

Adjusting the colour, tint and cms I was able to get this (only the red y value a little bit of, but I was unable to remove the green).

Settings used

Firmware: 1016.
Picture Settings
Mode: Movie
Cell Light: 17
Contrast: 81
Brightness: 51
Sharpness: 10
Colour: 47
Tint: 50/50
Advanced Settings
Black Tone: Off
Dynamic Contrast: Off
Gamma: +2
Expert pattern: off
RGB Only mode: off
Colour Space: Custom
- R 50 0 0
- G 28 50 0
- B 7 0 50
- Y 45 50 0
- C 34 50 50
- M 50 0 61
White Balance: RO-25 GO-23 BO-24 RG-18 GG-24 BG-25
10p White Balance: (Interval: R G B)
- 1: -1 0 -2
- 2: 0 -1 -1
- 3: 1 0 0
- 4: 0 -1 0
- 5: 1 0 0
- 6: 0 0 0
- 7: 0 0 0
- 8: 0 -2 0
- 9: -2 -2 0
-10: 0 0 0
Flesh Tone: 0
Edge Enhancement: 0
Picture Options
Colour Tone: Warm2
Size: Screen Fit
Digital Noise Filter: Off
MPEG Noise Filter: Off
HDMI Black Level: Low (16-235 video levels) or greyed out if using YCbCr signal.
Motion Judder Canceller: Off

Picture quality

Over the last two weeks I believe that the picture quality has become a lot better. I’ve also seen a few reviews of the screen now which mentions that it has a picture quality better than the Panasonic VT20/25 which I’m really happy to hear (If Panasonic was able to deliver the 65VT20 a few weeks ago I would have bought that instead as there was no reviews of the Samsung back then).

Check here for a comparrasion of the Samsung and Panasonic: 3D TV Review Shootout 2010 Samsung Vs. Panasonic.

And here is another review of the Samsung: Samsung PN50C8000 Review – 3D Plasma TV

Black level

I don’t have a meter that can measure black levels precisely at such low levels and I’ve seen a lot of people on forums doubting the 0.02 cdm2 that I measured a few weeks ago. All I can say is that when the C7705 is placed next to my old screen (which is known to have a calibrated black level of 0.05 cdm2) the C7705 is darker, so I do believe that 0.02 cdm2 is close to being correct. As the i1pro doesn’t go down at these low values the only meters I had around was a i1 display 2 and a Spyder which both should be stable (at measuring luminance) down to 0.02 cdm2. They both reported the same values when measuring the black level on the Samsung C7705 – 0.02 cdm2 (the spyder peaked at 0.03 cdm2, but stayed at 0.02 cdm2 most of the time).

So when comparing to other screens this places the Samsung a bit above both the Pioneer Kuro and Panasonic VT20.

Plasma s creen cd/m2 fL
Samsung PS63C7705 0.02 – 0.03 0.006 – 0.009
Panasonic 50VT20* 0.009 (0.012 after first MLL rise) 0.003 (0.004 after first MLL rise)
Pioneer 5090* 0.003 0.0008

*) sources hdtvtest.co.uk and avforums.com.

I’ve noticed that the plasmatvbuyingguide.com review measured the C8000 at 0.06 cdm2, but they also have the brightness set up quite high at 57 (making 0IRE brighter than it should be. A brightness value of 57 would make video level 12 become black where it should be level 16). It’s clearly visible in a dark room that a value of 57 is brighter than what the display is capable of.

We’ll have to wait for a hdtvtest og avforums test for a true measurement of the black level (as they have the meters to measure it).

However – I watch a lot of TV in a completely dark room – and it’s black enough for that. And there are more important things than black level :-)

Update about the black level: Samsung C7705 plasma black level at 50Hz vs. 60Hz.