HT Labs Measures

Contrast & Resolution

	2D	3D
Peak white level:	30.1fL	22.4fL
Black level:	0.005fL	0.005fL
Full-on/full-off contrast ratio:	6020:1	4480:1

These measurements were taken with Smart Dimming on; turning it off doubled the black level to 0.010 foot-lamberts in 2D mode and 0.009fL in 3D. Displaying a black field, the LEDs remained on for about 5 seconds before dropping to 0, leaving plenty of time to measure the effective black level. I had to turn the backlight control way down from its default setting to achieve a peak-white level of 30fL in 2D mode. In 3D mode, the backlight defaults to its maximum value, which is appropriate. Grayscale & Color Accuracy

I measured the out-of-box condition (Standard picture mode, Normal color-temp mode) in 2D before setting any basic picture controls or calibrating the grayscale. The results were not bad at all—slightly deficient in blue across the brightness range, but delta E (a measure of the error in grayscale at each brightness level) was less than 4 up to 70% and 5.8 at 100%. Anything less than 3 or 4 is indiscernible to the human eye. The average gamma was 2.2, right where it should be.

I ended up using the calibrated Movie picture mode and Normal color-temp mode, because this resulted in a better average gamma. The grayscale calibrated very nicely, with delta E less than 1 across the board and an average gamma of 2.4. Calibrating Standard picture mode, the average gamma was 1.7, which makes the picture look totally washed out.

Starting with the out-of-box settings in 3D mode (Standard picture mode, Cool color-temp mode), the grayscale was way off, and the average gamma was 1.9.

I calibrated the Movie picture mode and Custom color-temp mode for 3D content, and delta E was less than 1 at all brightness levels except 100%, where it was 5.5 (too blue). The average gamma was 2.3.

The pre-calibration colors in Standard picture mode were not so great. Green, yellow, blue, and magenta were all oversaturated, red was undersaturated, and cyan was biased toward green.

The colors after calibration in Movie mode were better than Standard mode, but still not that great, especially red, green, and blue. Also, the secondaries were better than in Standard mode. Without a color-management system, there wasn't much I could do to improve the colors, but they didn't seem to adversely affect real-world content too much. I tried different settings of the Color Enhancement control, but they were all worse than keeping it off.

Before calibrating in 3D (Standard picture mode, Cool color-temp mode), the colors were pretty far off, especially cyan and magenta. Also, notice how the white point is biased toward blue.

After calibrating the 3D mode (Movie picture mode, Custom color-temp mode), most of the colors were much closer to correct, though the primaries were still somewhat off.

Video Test Bench

3:2 HD	2:2 HD	MA HD	3:2 SD	2:2 SD	MA SD	VIDEO CLIPPING	LUMA RESOLUTION	CHROMA RESOLUTION	SCALING
PASS	PASS	PASS	PASS	PASS	PASS	PASS	PASS	PASS	BORDERLINE

3:2 = film-originated content sent interlaced to display (broadcast movies and many TV shows)
2:2 = progressive video-originated content sent interlaced to display (not common)
MA = Motion Adaptive (interlaced video-originated content sent interlaced to display; common for 1080i TV shows)

The set barely passed the motion-adaptive deinterlacing tests in both HD and SD, showing slight jaggies and moiré distortion. Also, it clipped above-white from 253 to 255, but that's still well above 235, so I gave it a pass.