Westing House... You need to figure out your own settings. All cable boxes and DVD's output differenct color levels, everyone uses different cabling, and everyone has theur TV in rooms with differeing light levels and color reflections.
All of these things are reasons that YOU need to calibrate your set in your room with your sources. No one can give you the magic settings for your unique room/lighting/sources/etc.
Casey gave you the gold: Buy or rent an AVIA or DVE calibration DVD and be done in 30 minutes.
Okay- Lets be nice! Just Kidding. Anyways, I bought the Vizio 50" Plasma (also not so mainstream). Boy is it sharp! I dont notice any fan noise, Maybe Vizio fix the cooling fan problem w/earlier models. The picture is awesome.I guess i'm not one for big name brands either- Costco has a good return policy just in case.
The Vizio has been reviewed in detail. IN any case, each display needs to be self calibrated. Adopting someone elses settings even for the same display doesnt work very well.
Different lighting environments for instance will immediately lead to diffferent brightness levels on calibration. You can do it without a disc-- please search for " The Steaming Rat Method" thread by R Harkness at avsforum.com in the plasma section. It may be a sticky thread at the top due to its popularity.
it's hard for people to share their settings on the tv, because it may not suit your lighting conditions, distance from the couch etc, you need to get your own disc, like you said you spent 3K on a new set up, what's another 25 bucks. enjoy.
