January 2008 – Roo's View

1080UB Colour Calibration

Tonight I spent a few hours tinkering with the colour management system and setting the grayscale. I’m quite pleased with the results. I’m still just under the 10H mark, so as the bulb ages a little, I do expect this will change.

For details on my setup and measurement process – check out the recent post on colour measurements.

This is my first attempt at doing a calibration on a digital projector, my past experience has been with CRT projectors which have used analog controls. The ability to have memories and recall alternate settings is very nice. This lets you experiment with abandon, as well as perform simple A/B comparisons of before and after.

Some of the feedback I saw on the AVSForum was that some folk had started to use the settings suggested in the projectorreviews.com write up on the 1080UB. Specifically, it was suggested that Theater Black 1, modified in the following manner:

Theatre Black 1, 6500K color temp, Offsets: Red – 2, Green 0, Blue 3. Gain: Red 2, Green 3, Blue 0. For viewing I normally had the Skin Tone setting at 3, or occasionally at 4. – Art Feierman

Now I may have missed something, but I didn’t see a description of adjusting the primary or secondary colours – which from my first set of measurements are clearly not right for REC601 (they may be closer to REC 709 for HDTV images).

However, there are several comments about eye-popping colour in the review – I can’t help but wonder if this is due to the not quite correct red and green. There is a disturbing trend in new displays supporting a larger colour gamut, and using it to differentiate themselves from other displays by using a non-standard (non-accurate) colour mapping.

Using Theater Black 1, I also noticed that both the blacks and the whites were crushed. This may have something to do with my signal path, but this is contrary to my observations with Theater Black 2 which seemed right on.

One DVD I’ve seen referenced in some reviews is The Thomas Crown Affair. The skin tones in this apparently show off the colour accuracy of a display. Having the ability to A/B my before and after made it very clear when looking at shots of Pierce Brosnan, pre-calibration he appeared a little sun burnt and post he looked much more natural. My initial impression is that colours seem a bit more muted than the default, but the image is still very engaging – and the Thomas Crown Affair completely sold me on the post-calibration setting being much more correct.

This was more a learning experience. I’m still running in a very temporary mode with some cheap component cables and my old Sony player. The Oppo 980 arrived this week, but I’m still waiting on the HDMI cables before I can get it setup.

Folks interested in my actual settings and some pretty pictures, read on..

Continue reading “1080UB Colour Calibration”

The Blu-ray vs. HD-DVD “War”

This isn’t a A/B comparison – I don’t currently have the ability to play either format. I’ve been stalling for a few reasons, but its been getting a lot more tempting to leap in on one, or the other, or both formats.

This posting was prompted by the Engadget post Gartner: Blu-ray to win in 2008, HD DVD price cuts are “useless resistance”. My friend Matt claimed last week that the war was won:

“Some might say that Warner Bros. pre-CES annoucement of dropping HD-DVD was the tipping point, but true believers will recognize that Matt’s January 24th purchase of a PS3 and several Blu-Ray titles as the historic event.” – Matt

There are some crazy prices on HD-DVD players now, Futureshop has the Toshiba HD-DVD A3 for $148.99. I’m almost kicking myself for picking up the Oppo 980 (should be at the post office waiting for me) – but the A3, while it is apparently a very good upconverting player – still is fairly slow at layer changes etc. If it didn’t look like the format war was winding down, the HD-DVD support would be a lot more tempting – but as it is, it would be a severely underused facility of the player.

It is my opinion that Sony has pretty much bet the company on Blu-ray. 2007 didn’t seem like a great year for Sony, and I do strongly suspect that things like the Warner CES announcement came along with some cash from Sony. Hopefully their well won’t run dry before the format debate is over.

I guess I’m still firmly in the ‘wait and see’ camp, let’s see how long I can stall – my prediction is that I’ll have one or both before the end of this year.

1080UB colour measurements

So, I’ve finally got around to doing a few sensor based measurements. I still need to sit down and digest the Basic Guide to Colour Calibration using a CMS (Colour Management System) before I start trying to make changes.

For a 100IRE full screen field, I measured 12flL. This is pretty impressive considering I’m using the darkest mode, and the projector is mounted 17 feet from the screen.

I have noted visually that there seems to be a bit of colour shift from left to right, the sensor measurements verified this. The left of the screen is more blue, and the right is more red.

All of these measurements are really just out of the box performance, I haven’t even logged 10 hours yet. The bulb timer still reads 0H, and as confirmed by Epson support, it will not start showing different until I’m past 10H.

I did run through the basic brightness, contrast and sharpness settings using AVIA. The Theater Black 2 default settings were basically correct, so I left them alone.

So here is a CIE u,v chart, showing both the measured grayscale with primary and secondary colours.

So the good news here is that the 1080UB is capable of covering the complete REC601 colour space (not all digital projectors are able to do this), however out of the box – its fairly far off. Certainly watchable, but I’ll be happier when its tweaked a bit more.

More details follow..
Continue reading “1080UB colour measurements”