Home Theater – Page 6

HDMI Cables

HDMI has been around since late 2002, but until about 2006 it was a total non issue for most folk and I’d consider it still in the fairly early adopter stage. Easy for me to say, I’ve got an HDMI video chain now.

If you are considering a new TV / Display then HDMI should factor in to your decision, but don’t buy into any of the sales pitch on deep colour etc. The real benefit to HDMI is that it is a digital connection between your source (DVD Player) and the display (TV). The content it carries is the same (for the most part), but keeping it in the digital domain is a real benefit.

Most of the cable makers are taking people to the cleaners. FutureShop’s cheapest HDMI cable is $49.99. If you want to stick to a big brand name, the Monster cables start at $83.99 up to $156.99 for a 1M cable. What is shocking here, is that almost all of the cables come from the same small set of factories in China – you really are paying extra for the name brand.

From my research and reading, assuming a reasonable level of quality in the cable construction, up to 5M you don’t need to worry about the bandwidth capabilities of the cable. Even the cheap cables will handle 1080p and beyond. Additionally, as most consumer equipment is only just starting to pass 1080p there is no reason to support more than that – with the one exception of cables that are run in the walls. For a 1M cable, you don’t need to spend a lot, and you can buy in wall rated cables relatively cheaply as I did.

My choice was to go with Blue Jeans Cable, specifically I bought their Tartan line of cables. Let’s take a look at what came in the mail:

So for my setup, I needed two 15foot cables. One HDMI/HDMI for my new Oppo 980 DVD player, so I got the slightly more expensive 24AWG cable for $15.75. The second cable is for my Starchoice DSR 505 for which I needed DVI/HDMI, since the best I can get out of this box is 720p/1080i I chose the less expensive 28AWG for $6.00. Yup, six dollars, and it will very likely support 1080p over that distance.

Here you can see them plugged into my projector:

The 24AWG cable jacket is bigger than the power cord. I strongly suspect that the FutureShop cables are 28AWG at best, very likely a smaller gauge. Oh yeah, and shipping was $5.75 – so I still came out way ahead.

The cables work great, no issues at all. In summary, yes HDMI is a good option to have but don’t pay an arm and a leg for the cables.

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”

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”