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Like all great works of art, James Cameron’s Avatar needs some specific 3D television tweaking before the director thinks you’ll be in a good position to to watch his masterpiece, and Panasonic has posted the settings on its website.
Putting sceptical cat down for some meowmix for a second, we actually find ourselves applauding aspects of this idea. After all, setting-up a TV properly isn’t the easiest thing in the world, and in our reviews we always encourage people to fiddle around to get the best possible picture. These steps go a little further than most would though, getting you prodding around in the custom-installer menus.
The settings themselves seem pretty reasonable to us, especially the last step which tells you to disable the motion smoothing efforts of the Panasonic. Turning off these ghastly modes is usually the first thing we do with a review TV, but there’s something hilarious about James Cameron telling Panasonic that they don’t fit with his bright-blue vision. So while we want to believe Cameron was involved, we’re picking up a well-fed sceptical cat, as we don’t think Cameron sat there for hours prodding a Panasonic TV remote to come up with these settings.
All of this raises an interesting idea though. Why don’t television manufacturers adopt a system whereby you download settings for your TV from the Internet and install them on your telly? Cameron’s instructions prove that there are times when the default picture modes just won’t do, so it seems like there’s a market. We’re pretty sure you could even pop per-movie settings on a Blu-ray disc, and have the TV automatically tweak the picture to the optimal mode.
Even though the concept of following these steps to watch Smurfs in Space might amuse, it could be worse: imagine if Michael Bay were to devise a similar list. “Turn brightness up to 1,000,000,000, then fire rocket-propelled grenade at screen while pressing play on Blu-ray player.”
So, have you got a Panasonic 3D TV and a copy of Avatar? If so, visit panasonic.net/avc/viera/eu2010/avatar/index.html to get JC’s recomendations, and try the settings to see if you think they improve the picture. The comments section awaits your thoughts.
