Calibrating Plasma via Catalyst?

[X-Nemesis]

Has anyone done this at all? Since an HTPC is directly affected by the catalyst drivers than is calibrating an HTPC not as simple as just changing parameters on the television itself but also through catalyst as well? I'm noticing on my lg 60ps11 that there is a slight red and green push but not sure what values in ccc to adjust since there is Contrast, Gamma and brightness for each of the three color values.

If anyone's done this are there any tips you can give to achieve optimal quality. And no I'm not interested at the moment in dropping a small fortune on a professional calibrator.

Thanks

[HiThere]

There are ways to color compensate via processing using the video card's capabilities (see AVS forum sticky thread), but at least one thing will be a hurdle for what some people call a "true" calibration: The Catalyst drivers won't pass blacker than black video info without a band-aid adjustment up for brightness...but to me, this is a non-issue...I think that although such information may be present on some media, if the studio intended for it to be seen on a properly adjusted set, than it would be above black. We live in a digital world, after all, and such things as where black is should be elementary, and we have a defined standard(s) that tells us this. It is a simple matter to alter your output at the source (increase brightness from 0 on the card) to verify where black is and whether it is at the proper point, even though you will adjust the brightness back down if you want proper output (unless you trust the processing on the card to the extent you re-compensate on the set or in an off-board processor). There are some reasons to pass btb info, including allowance for head and toe room in further processing done at the display or in your off-board devices, but they don't affect my experience in the vast majority of cases when viewing blu-ray. Yeah, there's movies you can trot out and show visible differences when btb is clipped, differences that are seemingly important to the quality of the image, but to me, these are examples of poor encoding.

In any case, I don't like doing color adjustments at the player/source for digital media. Even though the processing of such, done properly, should not result in things like false contouring, I find that it often does once adjustments to brightness and color are made on my ATI hardware. I prefer to offer my TV an un-altered digital transfer from my media in as much as possible, then do the adjustments on my set. Yes, my Panny does not offer me a gamma adjustment or saturation control, but it its color decoding is fairly accurate, and I find the output, once adjusted for greyscale in the service menu, is pretty damn impressive.

I used to be all about finding ways to adjust the output of my former DLP TV, but with this set (800U), I just enjoy. I am unable to show convincing differences between the output of my set and that of the best plasmas out there, except perhaps in black level. Yes, I can see the blacker blacks on Pio plasmas, but there's something about my Pana that affects rise out of black in a pleasing way, and although it may not measure as accurate, it offers me enough shadow detail that it compensates, for me, for the minuscule difference in the blackest of black areas of the picture.