Inspired by Kal’s recent home theater get together where I got to see his new Zenith Pro 1200x which he’s got completely dialed in, I’ve started to get back to fiddling with my setup. On my short list: get some light fixtures for the theater, a pair of bare bulbs is really hurting the whole look of the room; finish painting – the back 1/3rd of the room is still just primer white; finish painting the projector black; endless CRT tweaking..
Kal’s projector very clearly had scan lines on the screen if you got right up close to the screen. They were just barely touching – but you could see them. I started to wonder if my Ampro had visible scan lines on screen. At first glance it didn’t appear so, maybe I was just seeing some texture on the screen. So I cranked up the vertical size – spacing out the scan lines. Yup, I’ve got them – but they are not as sharp as Kal’s. Hmm, knock down the contrast and look in the lenses – can I see scan lines on the CRT? Yeah, but with the 720p squeezed correctly not really (which is fine) but I’ve got scan line noise on my tube face (I really will have to try to take a picture of this to explain what it is). So I switch to HDTV to see if its a source problem, or something inside the Ampro, and it appears to be a source problem :( With the Quadscan I’ve always had a warm-up problem with 720p (line triple) so I tend to leave the quadscan on all the time which avoids that, but now I’m wondering if line triple is also introducing this noise – so I’m going to have to try other settings to see if its the DVD player or the quadscan.
While I was poking around, I also noticed that my G2 was set too high for Red and Green so I fixed that. I also experimented a little with the electronic focus – which turned out to be a lot easier to do than I thought would be. While I was at it, I also adjusted the output on the quadscan to get the DVD image to fully show on screen – in the past I was running with a real mis-mash of overscan (nearly 5% on the right side, and almost none on the left). I like to run around 1% overscan.
There was also a recent posting about setting the yokes on the CRTs such that with 55 [code] to turn off registration your cross hairs were nicely horizontal and vertical – it appears all 3 of mine are a little bit off – so in theory fixing that will reduce the amount of convergence I need to use resulting in a more stable image. As well, I’d lke to try Guy Kuo’s “Holy Focus” procedure at one point, but it seems I’ve got to track down some binoculars.
Lots to do..