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Vizio M602i-B3 picture settings

Jun 9, 2014 5:59AM PDT

Review:
http://www.cnet.com/products/vizio-m602i-b3/

Related products:
Vizio M422i-B1
Vizio M492i-B2
Vizio M502i-B1
Vizio M552i-B2
Vizio M602i-B3
Vizio M652i-B2
Vizio M702i-B3

Calibration report using these settings:
[see below]

TV software/firmware version tested: V1.34.23.0190

As usual with Vizio this year Calibrated Dark was the best picture preset, and again it was pretty inaccurate, with a plus-red, minus green grayscale and very light gamma.

The 2-point system worked well to fix the grayscale errors but left gamma relatively bright, so I dove into the 11-point system to fix it. It was a massive hassle until I realized that the settings were mislabeled such that each setting actually adjusted the light level one step above it; the 5% setting adjusted the 10% level, the 10% setting adjusted the 20% level, and so on. One I figured that out I achieved very good results, although I did rn out of adjustment room at the high end, making it impossible to perfect gamma at 80 and up--gamma took a particularly nasty dive at 90.

The color management system worked well, and that's a good thing because out of the box the Vizio showed big errors in red and blue. After calibration I was able to get everything near or below the level of human perception.

---Picture settings menu---
Picture Mode: Custom 1
Auto Brightness Control: Off
Backlight: 45
Brightness: 50
Contrast: 64
Color: 50
Tint: 0
Sharpness: 0

--Advanced Picture submenu---
Color temperature: Normal
Black Detail: Off
Active LED Zones: On
Smooth Motion Effect: Off
Motion Blur Reduction: Off
Reduce Signal Noise: Off
Reduce Block Noise: Off
Picture Size: [no change]
Picture Position: [no change]
Film Mode: Auto
Wide: Normal

---Professional Picture submenu---
Color Tuner:
Red [Hue, Saturation, Brightness]: -50, -25, -45
Green: 10, 0, -10
Blue: -8, 0, -12
Cyan: 3, 0, -4
Magenta: 5, 0, -14
Yellow: 0, -16, 0

Red offset: 0
Red gain: -22
Green offset: 3
Green Gain: -3
Blue offset: -5
Blue gain: 0

11-point white balance:
[Gain amounts for red, green and blue]
5%: 10, -1, 1
10%: 16, 8, 39
20%: 3, 1, 24
30%: -8, -6, -7
40%: -24, -23, -6
50%: -48, -39, -31
60%: -50, -50, -36
70%: -50, -50, -34
80%: -50, -50, -39
90%: -42, -45, -50
100%: 0, -10, 0

Discussion is locked

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Link to calibration results
Jun 10, 2014 11:06PM PDT
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Film Mode setting?
Aug 15, 2014 8:12AM PDT

I have not been able to find a detailed explanation of what the (Film Mode) setting does and if there is any benefit to using it. I noticed that your calibration has it left on auto. Does film mode need to be active in order to properly display 24p from blu ray?Or can I just rely on my blu ray player to send the 24p feed?

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New M502i-B1 and Settings
Nov 24, 2014 11:20AM PST

My new M502i-B1 arrived today. Set it up with the above settings and picture was horrible. Reds were purplish. Caucasian faces were wan, blotchy and had a distinct purple tint. African-American faces were blotchy with a greenish tint. All reds were purple. I saw another batch of settings posted by smeg36 below, but at that point I really didn't want to go in and redo everything. So I started poking about a little bit and tried changing the color temp. I know the settings above say "normal", but I switched to "cool" and things were quite a bit better. Then I switched color temp to "computer" and voila! There was the picture quality I expected all along. Perhaps Mr. Katzmaier did not actually have his color temp set to "normal" when he did his fine tuning?

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M552i-B2 Settings
Dec 10, 2014 11:19AM PST

I used the settings exactly as Mr. Katzmaier stated, but was really happy with the colors. After switching the color temp to "computer" as stated by spencerwasright, I was much happier with the colors.

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Thanks for the m602i-b3 settings
Jun 16, 2014 4:58AM PDT

Thanks for the settings. It definitely helped a great deal!

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Vizio M601d-A3
Jul 1, 2014 3:38AM PDT

My last years model recently had a firmware update to the new picture menu. Do you think these settings for the M602i-B3 will work the same? I had my tv set adjustments tuned to the settings cnet had for the M601d-A3, now I can't access those same menu items.

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Essential Calibration
Jul 1, 2014 1:07PM PDT

Thanks. We set all of these, and it made a HUGE difference!

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settings
Jul 10, 2014 12:25AM PDT

THis was very helpful, but for my eyes, the Reds now seem a little blah...what would you suggest tweaking in your calibration settings above to brighten up if you will the reds only while keeping everything else the same?

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Gray and green
Jul 14, 2014 11:58AM PDT

When I plugged in these values my picture ended up green and greyish...any idea what I'm doing wrong?

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Any luck?
Jul 15, 2014 12:00AM PDT

Any luck figuring this out? My M602i-B3 is being shipped to me today and I would love to know if you were able to get the picture tuned correctly.

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Also gray and green
Jul 21, 2014 1:22PM PDT

I too plugged in these values and the picture ended up green and greyish, I hope that someone will come up with a solution soon!

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No luck
Jul 15, 2014 12:28PM PDT

Still waiting on guidance on how to fix this. Right now using factory settings which seem decent
Enough.

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Did you try this?
Jul 15, 2014 10:35PM PDT

I won't have my TV for a few days or I would try it myself. But I noticed this in the original post. Maybe you saw it maybe you didn't:

"It was a massive hassle until I realized that the settings were mislabeled such that each setting actually adjusted the light level one step above it; the 5% setting adjusted the 10% level, the 10% setting adjusted the 20% level, and so on."

Did you play around with and and see if you could find out what he's talking about? Maybe you're mistakenly doing the same thing he did at first.

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2nd attempt
Jul 16, 2014 11:43AM PDT

I basically followed the instruction and took everything down by -5. Result is the same. Should I be increasing instead ? The standard setting is actually pretty good.

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RE: 2nd attempt
Jul 17, 2014 12:15AM PDT

I don't have the TV yet so I can't really walk through it with you. When I get it on Monday I'll see if I can get it right and if so I'll get back with you. Either way, I'm sure all but the most picky will find one of the presets to be fine just like you said.


But if you care to go through the process over again, it looks like he's going into some advanced menu for white balance or something. I'm mainly talking about the very last part of his settings (All the stuff below "11-point white balance" in his settings). I believe THAT is the part he is referring to when he says ""It was a massive hassle until I realized that the settings were mislabeled such that each setting actually adjusted the light level one step above it; the 5% setting adjusted the 10% level, the 10% setting adjusted the 20% level, and so on."

Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like he clarified whether he compensated for that labeling error in the posted settings or if we have to compensate for it on our own.

Lol I'm not sure if you understand what I'm saying, because I haven't even had a chance to look at the TV. I'm just going off what I see in this post.

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RE: 2nd attempt
Jul 17, 2014 2:30AM PDT

Totally agree with you that its advanced settings, because the picture looks excellent while all those settings are at 0.
Once I started messing with the red and green, it gets all dim, grey, and green. I somewhat lost patience to be honest lol. So once you have your TV, lets re-sync and we can post the proper settings for others.

I will admit the picture is impressive...definitely great value.

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Proper settings
Jul 21, 2014 1:26PM PDT

I too would like to have the proper settings

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Vizio M422i-B1?
Jul 17, 2014 3:50AM PDT

I see that the M422i-B1 model is listed as a related product. Does that mean these settings will work well with that model?

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RE: Vizio M422i-B1?
Jul 17, 2014 6:43AM PDT

So, I gave these settings a try on my brand new M422i-B1 just now. I get a bit of a yellow hue to everything with the settings exactly as they are listed. If I switch to a color temperature of "Cool" it seems to correct the color to a more natural color (and the whites are actually more white). Any suggestions or should I just stick with this?

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An easy solution, it worked for me.
Aug 8, 2015 10:13PM PDT

1. Set your TV to Standard mode.
2. Scroll down to Advanced Picture or More Picture depending on which update you have.
3. Click to open and set Black Detail to Medium and thats it.
4. Scroll down to Picture Mode Edit and name the custom setting and lock it.

Touch nothing else.

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Mislabeled Settings?
Jul 20, 2014 7:06AM PDT

I'm getting a M652i-B2 this week, and plan on calibrating it with a meter. I'm curious how you realized the settings were mislabeled? I'm not sure if the 65" will have the same issue, but would like to know what to look for when I do my calibration to determine if it does. Also, what did the 100% setting adjust if all the others adjusted the step above it? That would mean the 90% adjusted 100%. Thanks.

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Calibration Results
Aug 1, 2014 3:38AM PDT

Hello. I was curious if you figured out the 11 point white balance settings and if so, would you mind sharing how to achieve the same settings as Mr. Katzmaier ?

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Calibrated M652i-B2
Sep 2, 2014 1:33AM PDT

I'll answer my own previous questions for anyone who might be considering calibrating their own Vizio M-series. I calibrated my M652i-B2, and it was a thoroughly frustrating experience. I spent 10-15 hours trying to get both the grey scale and gamma accurate, only to have visible issues when trying to view content. I finally realized you have to turn off Active LED Zones when calibrating, even if you're going to have them on when viewing content. Having them on when you do readings will throw your gamma readings completely off, so when I was trying to adjust for gamma using the 11 point grey scale settings, I was lowering it way too far. This was causing dark screen to be extremely washed out, and blacks very grey.

After I realized that, is was just a matter of dealing with the mislabeled settings. As far as I could tell, 5% doesn't adjust much of anything. 100% didn't adjust anything that I saw. For the low end of the grey scale most settings adjust 10% above what they are labeled as. For the high end the red typically adjusts 10% above what it's labeled as, green adjust 10% or 20% above, and blue adjusts 20% or 30% above. You really just have to display a grey %, then go through the various settings in the 11 point to figure out which one adjusts it the most. Then go through the % above and below to see how much it threw those off. It's annoying, but you start to figure it out after a while.

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Post settings?
Sep 9, 2014 8:24AM PDT

Smeg36,
Would it be possible for you to post your settings so i can copy them?
Thanks,
Jesse

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M652i-B2 Settings
Sep 9, 2014 11:10PM PDT

Sure. They're always changing slightly as I make minor adjustments for gamma. For these I left the 10% gamma around 2.3. When I did 2.22 or BT.1888 for 10% the blacks got really washed out, and lacked contrast and punch. So I sacrificed a little shadow detail for a better overall picture. Gamma tracked right at 2.22 for 20-90%. I also did a seep rate picture mode for sports viewing that I calibrated to 50ftL for a bit brighter picture. Pretty much the only settings that changed for sports mode was MBR set to On, and the backlight increased.

Custom 1

Backlight - 37 (98 for sports)
Brightness - 48
Contrast - 65
Color - 50
Tint - 0
Sharpness - 0

Advanced Picture

Color Temperature - Normal
Black Detail - Off
Active LED Zones - On
Smooth Motion Effect - Off
Motion Blur Reduction - Off (on for sports)
Reduce Signal Noise - Off
Reduce Block Noise - Off
Film Mode - Auto

Professional Picture

Color Tuner

(Red, Green, Blue, Cyan, Magenta, Yellow)
Hue - 0, 0, -25, 9, 0, 0
Saturation - 0, 0, 0, 2, -4, -20
Brighness - 7, 3, 4, 2, 6, -2
Offset - 0, 0, 0
Gain - 1, 0, -1

11 Point White Balance

(Red, Green, Blue)

5%: 0, 0, 0
10%: -9, -5, -9
20%: -3, -4, -6
30%: 0, -3, -6
40%: -1, -3, -8
50%: 0, -6, -10
60%: 2, -9, -6
70%: 4, -6, -6
80%: 8, -3, 0
90%: 10, 0, 0
100%: 0, 0, 0

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Thanks!
Sep 10, 2014 2:51AM PDT

Thank you!

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Thanks!
Sep 10, 2014 11:40PM PDT

Thank you for posting your settings. I just bought a M422i-B1 and was finding the original settings posted by Mr. Katzmaier above to be subpar to Vizio's default "Calibrated" setting. Everything had a bit of a magenta tinge. I updated my custom settings with yours, and am finally very pleased with the picture! My only change was bumping up the backlight to 45 -- I like a brighter screen. I, too, created a separate sports profile with a brighter backlight, motion blur reduction, and "low" smooth motion effect.

The only question I'm stuck with is if it is possible to copy a custom setting over to another input mode. When I switch over to my Blu-ray player, my custom settings aren't available as a choice. Do I have to create a setting from scratch, or is there an easy move/copy function? Setting the 11-point white balance is tedious.

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Manual
Sep 11, 2014 2:22AM PDT

Each input is independent, and you have to copy the settings over manually to each one.

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You rescued my tv!
Dec 8, 2014 5:46AM PST

Thank you. The tv looked so bad out of the box, I was going to return it to Costco. You settings made the tv look "good" - finally. I still get some color fringing on glass edges.

Software ver. V1.34.44.0190

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M652i-B2 Settings
Jan 7, 2015 11:14PM PST

I don't see "Custom 1" when choosing a starting point to adjust picture settings. Which default setting did you start with to create "Custom 1" or does it matter? Thanks in advance!