Ampro Resource

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..

Back about a month ago I decided to take a bit of a risk on a cheap eBay transcoder vs. getting one of the ~$300USD high quality ones (for example HDConnection which is hand built by someone locally and has had great reviews).

My biggest concern was that it would not properly support the sync signal my Ampro required. Turns out that it does. It turns out that the eBay box I got is made by mayflash and is primarily advertised as an Xbox HDTV converter. Hey, it works. Not videophile quality I’m sure – but it enables me to view HDTV on my system and it was relatively cheap.

It took a while before we decided to take the leap and order HDTV programming from Starchoice (we were using the basic package which doesn’t include it). Well, with the Olympics on and all.. (hey, it seemed like a good excuse) we decided it was time.

Well, hockey in HDTV looks amazing.

It is pretty fustrating to see the mix of programming on the HD channels, a lot of upconverted material. Worse still, some of the ads are letterboxed, but in a 4:3 framing – so you get double letter boxing. The scores and other information on the hockey game are also clearly inside the safe 4:3 zone – which looks a bit odd on a 16:9 screen [I’m sure they do this to re-use the same feed for both].

It turns out that Die Another Day was on after hockey was over so I decided to check out what HD Movies would look like. Very nice. However, the sound was only in stereo which was a bit of a bummer. Commercial breaks also really interrupt movie watching – and as I don’ t have a HD PVR.. there is no way to pause things. It may look better than DVD, but I’m not sure I’m ready to give up DVDs quite yet.

Karl gave me a hand putting together a new cable to feed the projector. The project went really well, we both needed long VGA cables and did his a few weeks ago. If you do a google search for “RGBHV over shielded cat5” you should hit some relevant information. (Note: the google answers hit looks really bogus as they are talking about sending video vs. doing a long VGA run)

Here is what we used:
Shielded cat5 cable. This is 4 twisted pairs (8 wires) + a drain wire that is un-insulated.
DSub15 VGA connector with metal case.
RG59 BNC connectors
Heatshrink etc,.. to make it pretty.

HD-15 pin Cat 5 color
1. Red + Orange
2. Green + Green
3. Blue + Blue
4.
5.
6. Red - (aka GND) Orange stripe
7. Green - (GND) Green stripe
8. Blue - (GND) Blue stripe
9.
10. Ground (GND) shield wire.
11.
12.
13. H sync Brown
14. V sync Brown stripe
15.

For Karl’s projector (my old ECP actually) he needed both H and V sync. So as you can see, we double up the shield wire as a ground for the H and V sync signals. This just means you need to splice on a Y-split at the BNC end. The Ampro only has a 4-wire hookup, so we were able to leave the shield wire alone – soldering it to the metal VGA connector “hood” and leaving it unconnected at the BNC end — this also let us use the brown stripe wire as the ground for the combined sync signal which runs on the H sync line.

Since we are not using any shielding at the BNC end, we tried to keep the pairs twisted and kept the distance they were fanned out to a minimum (6 inches or so). We used coloured heat shrink to identify the connectors which turned out really slick. For my cable I also got some 1/4 inch nylon sleeve from TakeFiveAudio to make it black for the bit that runs across the ceiling as the cable itself is blue.

This new cable replaced the VGA break-out + BNC extensions I was using. The BNC extensions were pretty hacked up, and were using a steel core RG6 cable as well. I didn’t see any real cable artifacts in my image previously, and the new cable seems to be flawless. For Karl there was a more dramatic difference as he had a very poor VGA extension + VGA break-out cable — this was giving him a visible ghost in his image which went away with the new cable.

Cost was under $40 for each assembled cable. Everything was easy enough to find locally, the cat5 being the most difficult and that only took 4 phonecalls to a few network cable installers until I found one nearby who had some shielded cat5 that he’d sell small quantities of.

Recently with the shift in seasons – the CRT needed its usual reconverge and setup tweaks. I had been really busy with other activities so it had gotten pretty bad (think 3-D on non-3D movies). With the release of Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith — I was determined to watch it looking as best it could, sometimes you just need the right motivation.

Revenge of the Sith looked pretty amazing, once again re-confirming that CRTs rule compared to the digital projectors in my price range. The setup seems to have held fairly well and we’ve watched a few movies with no additional tweaking and it still looks great.

After over 10 years without cable TV or similar TV technology, we’ve finally broken down and decided to get satellite. Based on a number of factors I’ve gone with StarChoice – while I have got myself a HD receiver, I’m not expecting to do a lot of HDTV for a while. I’m almost hoping that the HDTV stuff isn’t that big a deal, since I really don’t want to make my DVD collection completely unwatchable.

I’ve also been trying to get back to doing some fiddling with my setup recently. Building new cables is near the top of the list, I promise more details when that happens. (both video and audio cables).