Roo's View

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”

Of course, once I got it out of the box – my first priority was getting it hooked up to see what it looked like. Here is the projector in a very temporary mounting on a TV table.

The vertical lens shift has quite an amazing range, this combined with the horizontal shift opens up a lot of mounting options. The zoom and focus rings move smoothly, and its easy to dial in a nice sharp image.

Black Level – Initial impressions

The projector seems to come with some home theater friendly factory defaults, which is nice to see. I did change from Theater Black 1 (default) to Theater Black 2. Switching the input connection from SVideo 480i to component 480p seemed to help the black level. I also enabled the dynamic iris which appears to be off by default. I did not bother to calibrate even the basic brightness/contrast – which will again improve things.

With the CRT projector, an all black screen (which often happen at the start of a film) would plunge the room into total darkness. As configured above, the 1080UB gives me a full screen gray rectangle for all black. It will take me a little time to get used to this, and I’m sure further tweaking will help improve this.

During movie playback of a 2.35:1 film, the black bars above and below are pretty good. You do get a shadow if you hold your hand up to block the light – but it is faint. Not as good as my CRT was, but close enough that I’m pretty happy with the performance.

Near black detail is better than my CRT was. This is certainly due to some of the black crush issues I was having with the CRT video chain.

General initial viewing impressions

The colours are quite different than my CRT, I look forward to measuring and calibrating this projector. The 1920×1080 resolution is awesome, I can see pixel structure from ~4feet but nothing from my closest seating distance. The panel convergence seems pretty good – less than 1pixel I believe – blue is the most off, and humans can’t see blue very well anyways. I think I spotted a very small dust blob (less than a pixel in size) – might just be something to learn to live with, I could only see it inches from the screen.

The resulting picture has plenty of wow.

Summary

I spent less than an hour watching the new projector – it still needs a bit of a break in period to burn off that new electronic component smell. Overall, I’m very pleased with the purchase – and I’m really glad that I don’t have the CRT to A/B compare since I certain that I’d have some buyers regret if I started down that path. The UB doesn’t provide CRT like black level – but it does not disappoint. Its a nice shiny new toy, and I’ve got lots to do before it is fully tweaked – so call me a happy camper.