Late night session

Well, having noticed that the RGB input card had some pots on it for doing ‘color balance’ as described in the user manual I decided to take a shot at it.

This certainly didn’t address my G2 issues, I still have too little output on the red and blue tubes, but I did manage to get a slightly more balanced image. (or maybe it just seemed that way).

I also tweaked the convergence (registration) a little more — I now have a pretty good image. It does seem that the unit warms up a bit as the convergence drifted a little after startup, but not enough that it would bother me.

After tweaking around for a while, probably about and hour and a half I opened up the cover to take a peek inside. The three neck card cooling fins were pretty cool. The HVPS was a little warm, the LVPS was cool. The heatsink on the RGB card was pretty warm. I really need to get some temperature sensors hooked up so I can get some baselines before I start thinking about modifying the fans.

Upon closer inspection of the neck cards, it appears the G2 controls are on them (duh). I’m going to have to fiddle with these at one point soon. On the black bars pattern on AVIA I have _no_ output at all from the blue or red tubes. It is also clear from the position of the controls that the green CRT is a lot higher (and IMHO too high).

Closer to correct setup

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.

Improved physical alignment

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.