Ampro Resource

So the fancy mounting of the sensor to my tripod ended up being some painters green tape.. I set the spyder sensor without the LCD filter attached facing the screen (to capture reflected light from the screen) a few inches away from the center – and at a slight angle to avoid the shadow of the sensor itself. A quick run with AVIA to get IRE10 – IRE100 and I was able to capture some interesting data.

While I didn’t let the CRT run for more than about 10 minutes, things clearly need improving. I tested the uncalibrated screen of my laptop with the sypder sensor and it read fairly flat (if you ignored the low IRE numbers) – as I would have expected – so I have some level of confidence in the software actually trying to do something sensible.

Of course – now I need to learn how to properly interpret the data, and what steps to take in order to make sensible improvements. The absolute first thing I should do is a full setup (mechanical, etc) of the basics. Its been a long time since I’ve taken the time to properly calibrate the system doing the things that I know how to do.

I did come across a useful article on Curt Palme’s site. How to set G2 on ES focus sets. This isn’t how I’ve done it in the past – having simply blanked the tube (to give a completely black image) and then set the G2 such that the raster just disappeared. Having just searched this blog for g2, it seems I haven’t taken the time to really sit down and document a full setup procedure – and I should as it would serve as a good reference for myself later on.

Well, the title makes it sound like I actually did something with the projector – and the truth is I’ve had very little time to mess around with things lately. I did recently have an opportunity to A/B compare (very quickly) the Ampro and a Sanyo Z5 (Matt was kind enough to bring his over). There was an astonishing difference in black level (where CRTs always out-do a digital) and more surprisingly, colors. If you watched either image for a short while – you’d quickly get used to the look and things were ok. It really makes you wonder if people fuss too much about calibration..

I recently purchased a Sypder2 Express kit. This has both Mac and Windows software to (mostly) automatically adjust your monitor to be correct. For $100CDN it seemed like a reasonable purchase. Especially since the HCFR software also supports the spyder2 sensor and I can use it for the projector too.

The soffrware is pretty straight-forward, and I did a tune up on the mac mini. The downside to the Express software is that there are very few knobs to turn, you get what they decide is best. It does lets you do an A/B comparison between the original and the calibrated, and I wasn’t really that impressed – sure the test image looked better, but not so much better that I was floored.

Then we checked out some of the digital pictures (and videos) stored in iPhoto. WOW. It made a huge difference. I’ve always believed that calibration mattered, and the color accuracy was important but seeing the images post calibration really sold me on how big a difference it can make.

The HCFR Colorimeter software can be found here. Version 1.2.2 is what I downloaded. It supports the Sypder2 sensor and has english language support – including help. The english appears to be mostly machine translated, but that’s good enough. The Google translate service is pretty handy to surf the HCFR forums to read up on various things, and I know that AVS has had several threads on HCFR usage.

In order to get your Sypder2 sensor to work with the HCFR software you need to copy the cvspyder.dll from the DataColor software into somewhere the HCFR software can see it. The simple way to do this and have the right drivers installed for your sensor is to install the Spyder2Expres software (no need to run it, just install). Then assuming you’ve used defaults for everything copy cvspyder.dll from C:\Program Files\ColorVision\Spyder2express to C:\Program Files\Colorimeter_HCFR. This will allow the HCFR software to use the sypder2 sensor.

I’ve done some simple testing to ensure that the software/hardware was working – but I’ve yet to sit down with the sensor and my Ampro CRT to see how things look, and if I can figure out what to do in order to improve things. At this point, I’ve got the tools in hand. I will need to build some manner to allow me to mount the spyder2 sensor on a tripod and I’ll need to read up on using DVE to get the right test patterns up on the screen. HCFR supports a manual DVD mode, and they have a PAL format DVD image with some test patterns on it – but the test patterns are all very basic (IRE10, IRE20, ..) so DVE should have all the things I need.

Hopefully I’ll get to part two soon..

And my Ampro continues to keep working just fine. Back in November I finally finished painting it black, and considering it was a quick job with a paintbrush – it turned out pretty nice. Up close in detail, you can tell it isn’t an ‘original’ finish – but from the seating position in the normal dim light (or no light) of my theater, it looks really sharp.

There still hasn’t been a re-occurrence of the “burning component” smell, or the accompanying loss of image – but I did have some major convergence woes lately (but those too have stabilized).

If I had to make some guesses – I suspect that my HVPS is getting a bit sicker (the CRT is coming up on 15 years old!) and this shows itself in some focus drift I get. The registration (convergence) board is probably also starting to get cranky – and I’ll take some of the blame for this as my Ampro probably runs a bit hotter than some as I did modify the fans, it is also ceiling mounted in a not terribly well ventilated space – so with lots of people in the room it does get warm in there.

There are now some pretty reasonable (but far from perfect) 1280×720 LCDs out there – I expect within a year or two I’ll be moving on. However, I still really love the image that the CRT puts out, and get a real kick out of the tinkering part of this hobby.

So the other night we watched Pirates of the Caribbean and the projector was fine.  Then with the hockey season back we watched a little HDTV (which looks great – you really notice when they switch to standard def. feeds).  Again, no problems with the projector.

There does seem to be a new high pitched whine, and the low voltage power supply seems to have a lingering burning smell – but so far it hasn’t acted up.  I had pulled the LVPS and took a look to see if any of the components looked like they had burnt out, and everything was fine.  So I’m still puzzled as to what happened – and until something does, I suspect I won’t be able to sort the problem out.

Hopefully when (if) it fails, it will be easy to remedy.