I am helping a poor musician friend get his modest a/v gear dialed in.
This is a pro bono endeavor, so I am not getting too far into this thing.

He has a 1080p Panasonic LCD TV, model TC-L32X5.

I have a PDF of the manual.
[Link: service.us.panasonic.com]

Here are the instructions that I have sent along so far:

---------------

In the main menu:
Select CUSTOM from the Picture Mode options:

- Turn the "AI Picture" mode OFF.
- Turn the "CATS" mode OFF.
- Turn the "Video NR" mode OFF.

For the color temp, find an image with a large area of white and pause it, then select back and forth between Cool and Normal. Cool may be too blue. Warm is no doubt going to shift into a dull orange (nodody ever uses Warm). As for settling on Cool or Normal, it's basically down to personal preference unless we pull out a calibration sensor.

Turn Sharpness down, the lower the better. It never makes a picture look better.

Under "Advanced Picture":
- Turn the "3-D Y/C Filter" OFF.
- Turn the "MPEG N/R" OFF.

-----------------

There is also a setting for Black Level that has two choices, "Dark" or "Light".
Back in the day when we had an ISF tech, I remember learning that DVD players outputted their signal via component video, and we had the 0 IRE vs 7.5 IRE settings to contend with.

That is no longer the issue with HDMI, correct? Is there a preferred default on a setting like this?

You bet. Turn picture all the way up. That's the way the guys at the clown store do it, so it must be right.

I have a Panasonic plasma and turned the CATS off, Black level to dark and tweaked the Picture and Brightness a little, leaving the color alone unless something just looks wrong. When skin tones and white looks correct, I stop. If I start losing detail in the darkest areas, I make it brighter. I leave the NR on. It's one of the X series, but the 1080 models were sold out and disco'd when I bought mine.

If you have a test disc or can download a test pattern with color bars, look at the red and if it's blown out, decrease the color level.

Here are my tips on setting up a consumer display. Following these tips will get you about 90% of the way to a true calibration, and will bring the display very close to what is seen and intended by the content producers.

1. Turn off EVERYTHING that sounds like a feature. Dynamic black stretch, motion flow, noise reduction, etc, etc.

2. Turn the sharpness down to ZERO

3. Optional - Set the color temp to Warm 2. (outside of a production environment, this doesn't matter as much as people like to think it does. Your eyes will self adjust to the white balance of the display as long as it is in reason)

Do pay some attention to black level to make sure it isn't clipped (make sure you can you see fine detail of dark hair in dark scenes). This isn't as big an issue as it once was, but some displays have a toggle setting for black level that must bet set correctly. With a trusted test signal you can fine tune the black level further.

I can honestly say that it is very, very, very unlikely anyone will see a difference in that extra 10%.

[Link: amazon.com]
Without any test equipment or reference to work with, his best bet is to pickup a simple test disc to work from. The Monster ISF disc is only around $15 and is a pretty good tool for your friend, that may have no knowledge of how to set things. It's very basic but has some good real world examples that are easy to adjust to. If you want to help him go thru the settings, you can follow along with him on the disc. If you don't have a copy of the disc yourself, you should pick one up. Like I said it's cheap and a good disc for 'ball parking' things.


Some notes:
You people that are saying turn the sharpness all the way down are just WRONG! There have only been a handful of TVs over the years, that the correct setting was all the way down. It is rare.
What you are doing is rolling off the high frequencies, loosing a lot of picture detail. The correct setting is where the false edging is going away but not so much that individual pixels become blurred. A multi-burst pattern is the best for setting this. Some fine text on the screen could also work. It's kind of like focusing the lens on a camera if you will.

On every display I have ever calibrated in my life, the 'Cool' color temperature setting is a blueberry. And is just wrong. You should never use that.
Depending on the display, sometimes the middle setting 'Normal' can be closer to correct than the 'Warm' setting. It just depends. Color is very subjective and if he complains the colors don't look right in 'Warm' (especially complaints of green or brown tint), then the middle setting might be best, in the absence of test equipment or trained eyes, to see what's going on. 

While I agree on your methods for setting sharpness, I have to disagree on the correct setting. Every consumer set I have seen (and I admit that you have probably seen more than I) sharpness should be set to zero. Anything above zero adds ringing and other artifacts. This is true for all the current Samsung and Panasonic displays I have seen.

Displays come in three general grades:

Broadcast/Production Reference display ($20,000-40,000+)
Professional (used in the AV industry)
Consumer

The broadcast displays don't even have such settings. The Professional displays fortunately are good about this too. Out of the box, they are usually reasonably close to a broadcast reference standard. Annoyingly, the consumer displays are bloated with picture ruining "features" and are usually terrible out of the box. The good news is that with some effort, a $1,000 consumer display will be about 90% (or better) the quality of a broadcast reference display.

The only exception I have run across are a line of Sony professional displays that had a baseline setting about 3/4 of the way down.

I can say that I have calibrated many consumer displays next to broadcast reference displays to come to this conclusion.

Looks like they've continued that in their new sets. On the X850B, neutral sharpness is around 35/100. Anything below that, and it actually starts to blur the image (seriously).

I think a good policy is to try to find source material (ie. paused frames) that demonstrates what each enhancement feature does. Anything that removes, smoothes or blurs detail should be disabled. Anything that adjusts black levels, contrast, color or tint in a way that significantly alters the image from a reasonable baseline, should be disabled.

Sometimes, there are settings that at perfectly fine to leave enabled on a low setting - a number of the upscaling-related sharpness settings on the X850B are that way, and if you don't leave Advanced Contrast Enhancer on at least low, you lose frame dimming entirely. There's a setting on my Kuro that if you turn off completely, the picture becomes a blurry mess.

You are correct. I should have stuck with Samsung and Panasonic and will edit accordingly.

This can still be an issue on RGB sources.

On component video signals (over HDMI, which should be cable boxes, BD players, and dedicated media players), the default should always be to have black at 7.5 IRE.

But on RGB defaulting sources (like game systems, HTPCs, and BDs if you set them that way), the range may actually be either "Full" or "Limited/Broadcast"... and while this should automatically negotiate between modern HDMI components, some screens can't, and even when they can, it sometimes doesn't work reliably.

I'd say the default setting on that screen should be "Light"... but if you feed it full-range you'll get horrible crushing, which may not be immediately obvious to an untrained eye - it'll just seem like everything's way too dark. Similarly, if you set it to "Dark" and feed it limited-range, blacks will become a medium-dark grey, which should be more obvious.

Every display I've seen seems to be correct with the Sharpness at the factory setting, which is usually 50%. Be careful about setting it to zero -- that's not 0 increase of sharpness, that's zero on a scale from zero that's lack of detail to 100 that's ringing and noisy.

My simple amateur setup for TVs is this:
Turn off all the fancy picture features, as recommended.
Set color all the way down. You'll run into some TVs that have color all the way down until that last click, but turn it off.

Set sharpness to middle. Set tint to middle.
Turn down Contrast (or Picture, same thing) until you do not see actual white in the picture. View several sources, especially live news. Don't rely on live camera shots in the field for this - use studio shots.
Turn up Contrast until you have a WHITE in the picture.
Turn Brightness (which is, ironically, black level) until the image has no blacks, only 50 shades of Grey... then turn it all the way down until you cannot distinguish adjacent dark areas from one another. Now that you've seen both extremes, adjust Brightness so that you can see details in the black, but there still is black. You should be able to distinguish the lapel and the main cloth section of a tuxedo jacket. Again, look at different examples of video.

Now you have a decent black and white picture. Turn up the color. Watch skin tones. Red or purple people are just wrong! Black people have skin tones that challenge TV systems, so you can do some further fine tuning with their faces.

Be aware that you might not be able to adjust the TV properly. I set up some Samsung RPTVs a few years ago where proper adjustment of black level for a dark scene resulted in a scene that went, from top to bottom, as sky, mountains, shadow of mountains, where almost all of the mountain shadow was almost solid black. Adjusting for that picture, the dark scene had various shades of gray. You might have to realize that you can adjust the TV to prove that it's a piece of crap!

Best of luck.