Month: March 2003

After stumbling through the manual and the online help I seem to have managed to get a reasonable sized image that doesn’t wrap and seems to fit the screen quite nicely. I’m going to chalk this up to ‘correct physical alignment’ but I honestly have no idea what I did right.

The image started out shifted quite a bit on the green tube, visibly off to one side. In the end, I had an image that filled the screen and looked ok. Re-checking the tube face(s) I had a fairly well centered image.

Again, more praise for the Ampro ‘registration’. It is a lot more complicated than using point convergence, but it seems that this unit is a step above the ECP for getting a high quality image.

I’m going to have to figure out how to set the G2 levels. It seems that the green is much higher than the red or blue. In the pluge test pattern, only the green shows the moving black bars — the red and blue tube have nothing. I suspect this is what is making the overall image seem ‘green’.

Well, more to do, but it is starting to get back to a state where I’d watch (and enjoy) a movie again.

The projector was too low sitting on the coffee table. Tonight we raised it up 10″ by placing part of the old seating platform under the table — this brings the projector up to just below the bottom of the screen (my screen is mounted fairly high on the wall, 34″ or so). We also took some care to make sure that the projector was close to center and square to the screen.

Turning it on to check how we did, shows that I need to re-do the mechanical setup — but also that the setup menus are off to one side of the tube face. I’m going to have to go back to the manual to sort out why.

I also still haven’t figured out how channels work, since I can’t seem to get RBG input on channel 1 (or 2 for that matter).

At least the physical layout is much better, I can start atcually tweaking the unit now.

Well, I hadn’t had time to work on the setup any further, but we had a small party for the kids and it seemed like a good idea to show them something on the big screen.

Even with the warped image, 1/3 off the screen, and poor colour balance — it seems they were very happy.

Tonight I had a chance to sit down and go through the ‘registration’ procecure (seems to be what Ampro calls convergence). I also figured out how to unlock things so you can make changes (20 code).

I was able to address the image wrap slightly by using the ‘phase’ to shift the image to be centered, then ‘size’ to shrink the image within the raster. I still have a little wrap on either side of the image but its really hard to see.

The registration procedure is confusing at first, but now that I’ve been through it a few times it seems to make a lot of sense. I was concerned that I wouldn’t be able to be as precise as I was with the point convergence of the ECP. I was wrong. I think that the Ampro is capable of much better fine tuning than the ECP was.

I was able to get a watchable image — not perfect by a long shot. Observations: the blacks are better (I suspect the liquid coupled lenses help here) and it seems brighter (as expected with the move from 7″ to 9″ CRTs). Problems: The colour balance is off. Everything is a little green. The black detail needs some work too. So lots of work to do — but I’m well on the path.