JVC RS60 bad calibration results

[Anonymous]

I did an RS60 yesterday, with worse results than expected seeing as how I was very happy with the previous models.
Out of the box THX performance was somewhat poor, with undersaturated color points, poor gamma, and poor grayscale tracking.
The THX software allowed me to ajust the gamma like always, and would have probably allowed grayscale flattening if I’d have spent more time with it. But it started out with undersaturated colors, and would not allow me to either expand the color points through adjustments or switch the color preset to a more saturated one.
ISF software allowed VERY buggy gamut/saturation adjustment, but the gamma adjustment didn’t work!
Ended up using the ISF program since I felt the orangish red was more serious than the poor gamma.
Is JVC going to fix these issues? Any advice?

Topic

[Gregg Loewen]

Hi Chad
I will send this over to the JVC guys for their comments. thank you.

[Anonymous]

Chad,
Last week we were using an RS60 at the HPA Event in Palm Springs. We had extremely good results in THX mode. Gamut we dead on Rec. 709 and gray scale tracking was very good. Is there a chance to send some pre cal reports so we can see what out of the box looks like in THX mode. To get more into this would require many questions so I am not sure we can solve the issues on the forum. I know your experience is not what I would expect for the RS60. Please send some contact information to myself and Ken Bylsma so we can coordinate a phone call.

[Anonymous]

Hi Gary,

Thank you! I am going to attach a before/after calibration report.
I had both an i1Pro meter and a Chroma5 meter set up pointed at the screen, about a foot or so away. At times I profiled the C5 off the i1Pro to take advantage of the C5’s better low light stability, and at other times I just used the i1Pro.
I used a Quantum Data 802BT generator sending out 1080i and 1080P/24 HDMI, at both RGB and YCbCr colorspace.
My cell number is 937-267-6073.

[Anonymous]

Greetings

What color were the walls and ceiling in this ht?

regards

[Anonymous]

Hmmm, I can’t remember for sure. I do know I used small windows to minimize light spill and bounceback, which seemed minimal. I remember once I did an Epson in a room with white ceilings and walls; looked like I turned on a lamp when I threw up a pattern.

[Anonymous]

Reason I mentioned this is that if the room has a lot of white walls … the color gamut will be reduced in size due to the wash out effect. This is not the projector’s fault but rather the room. And more an indication that the room needs to be addressed … 🙂

regards

[Anonymous]

The ceiling is black, the walls slate gray.
Wash out was minimal. Also, I could see the red looked orangish in THX mode. In some of the other color modes I could see and measure the opposite- too deep a red (oversaturated).

[Anonymous]

Hey there,

I had a chance to spend 4+ hours alone with the rs60 at a client’s home. I’ve been there twice before for other displays so he has already been well educated on the process. He leaves me completely alone now to do what I do.

He has addressed some elements to darkening his room since I worked on his previous projector … rs 20 … black ceiling tiles .. but floor is still hardwood and lighter color. The client is a paraplegic and moves around only in a powered wheelchair.

The precal was the THX mode and the cms was pretty much dead on with an average dE of 2.6 and really nothing above 3 here. The grayscale was worse off but very fixable just with the projector controls. Had to tweek done in the 0 to 10-20 range with the custom gamma part as that part was green-blue . So pumped up the red there to fix the really low end of things. After this normal cal … the cms dE was 1.3 average. Did not see anything really wrong with this unit.

Got a chance to use the thx interface for the first time .. and activated thx bright and thx dark modes for him. Then turned the thx dark into the 3D mode specific setting.

There are some quirks on the thx software relating to how it reads stuff from the projector initially. So one has to be careful.

I left the orange component in cms alone and did not really know what to do with the axis position control for the color either so i left that alone too. The blank out of the screen with every click of the cms elements was annoying.

Regards

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the info. I wish my cal would have gone as smooth as yours.
Looks like my customer’s unit was worse possibly due to sample to sample variation, which wouldn’t be a big deal if it was correctable. My biggest problem with the THX interface was that the primaries were undersaturated, with red looking noticeably orange. Blue was unusually undersaturated also, and I realize the i1Pro isn’t perfect with blue; but I’ve done enough FP’s to know that this was unusual. I felt the red primary in particular was robbing flesh tones of vibrancy and ruddiness, judging by the DVE restaurant scene. Interestingly red’s measured dE was still under 3, but I clearly saw it looking too orange.
In the THX software, there was a selection to choose a different color preset to start with, but it was grayed out. That would have allowed me to choose a wider color gamut to work with.
The ISF interface allowed me to select a more saturated starting point, but as I mentioned the CMS was very buggy and erratic and the gamma adjustment didn’t work.
I think now I should have tried to do more just in the user 1 preset instead of the ISF or THX modes.
BTW, the screen was a Studiotec 130, if I remember right. It had the Joe Kane logo on it, but it wasn’t the Affinity.

[Anonymous]

I did user 1 first … just to get a set of numbers to plug into the thx stuff as a starting point to see if they were the same … they were not (even close) It eases me into the flow of the tv … maybe a zen thing. Go with what works first … he he … then the thx stuff was an experiment to learn the interface and see how it much range it gave me.

For others that will use the thx interface … do a data refresh first to see what the tv is actually using as numbers … because once you get into it … you might have a situation where thx bright and dark seemingly have the same values but look different. I didn’t think to refresh it so i jiggled each parameter i wanted to us and that forced the real value to show up on screen …

I was using two laptops. One running the calman and the other doing the interface. The layout of the room made if difficult to run the cable to both the projector and the meter.

regards

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the head’s up on this one. I’ll be doing one this week. I haven’t installed the software for the projector yet. First call.

[Anonymous]

Just thought I’d post the results I had yesterday. I’m copying this from my post on AVS.

I updated the RS60 last night with the latest 1.2 FW, and it made absolutely no difference in the calibration problems I found before.

Using the ISF calibrator program, the gamma adjustment still does not work.

Using the THX calibrator program, it reverts to a narrow color gamut and won’t let me either widen it or choose a more saturated starting point. The reds looked orangey.

I ended up calibrating User 1. I experimented with all the color profiles, and found Stage gave the most workable combination of color saturation and luminance. Tried Video and Cinema, etc, but each one either had undersaturated color points or uneven and uncorrectable primary/secondary luminance.

The multipoint gamma adjustment works in the user menu, but boy is it a pain! I took the 1st pass which got it in the ballpark, and thought I’d do another pass or 2 to tighten things up. Well, it seems to be more quirky than what I remember from the previous JVC PJ’s I’ve done. I wasted a lot of time taking more passes and trying to spot-adjust. It’s problem is that let’s say I had a run that looked OK except for a big red dip at 50%. Gamma tracking around 2.22, RGB tracking within a few percent except for that spot. So I would go into the menu, bump red up by 1 click at 50%, and re measure. Now the whole thing is changed. Gamma is now at 2.15, and the RGB tracking is more like +-5% instead of +-2%. Frustrating! I was using a C5 profiled off an i1Pro, and it was giving super stable readings. I also rechecked it against the i1Pro at several points to make sure they were still agreeing. Repeatability on a full 11 step reading with the C5 was excellent; that is, unless I went in and made a tiny change like that which shouldn’t have caused all that change.

The one positive thing I can say about the calibration adjustments is that they fixed the displacement in the custom gamma adjustment. So 50% blue actually controls 50% blue. In past models things have been displaced somewhat, making calibration more difficult.

I finally got a result I was satisfied with. Light output was around 14 fL. I could tell during the cal process the blacks were exceptional, and when I put demo material on I thought “Wow!” Maybe a little grainy, but otherwise a fantastic image.

[Gregg Loewen]

hi guys
Im doing my first official rs60 right now.
It is almost perfect in THX out of the box (when THX is tweeked).
Ill post more over the next couple of days (with some charts etc).

[Anonymous]

Hi Chad and Michael

I calibrated RS50 today and can confirm almost everything Chad wrote here.
I didn’t try THX software (I was invited to calibrate RS40 but it is RS50) just user controls.
It was big surprise for me when I found that THX gamut is smaller that target. So I switched to USER1.
I calibrated USER mode and color profile STD. I used custom Color temp and Custom Gamma. After calibration grayscale was perfect but when I went to color gamut page, I found that color gamut is also inside of target and RED is annoyingly orange.
Axis position didn’t do anything. Saturation and HUE didn’t move color either. Only brightness worked as expected and let me do some adjustments.
I couldn’t leave picture like this so I checked other options:
Video – terrible gamut
Cinema 1 – bad
Cinema 2 – Perfect! I would expect such gamut from THX
Only small adjustment in colors brightness was necessary.

I didn’t finish calibration, I will go back tomorrow to calibrate for 3D. If I have a time I will try to play with CMS again to find out what AXIS really does. Today I moved AXIS for RED from -30+30 and RED didn’t move at all.

Michael, the blank out of the screen with every click of the cms elements is not only annoying but time consuming as well. What is a purpose of this?

Best Regards

[Anonymous]

I just went back and tried the new CalMAN auto calibration on the RS60. Ugh. What a frustrating experience.
I had used the auto cal feature with CalMAN’s CalPC and liked it, and I had used the interactive (semi-auto) calibration on an Iscan Duo, which worked great.
However, on the RS60, all the bugs remained which severely confused CalMAN’s auto cal logic.
First I again tried the ISF modes, but the multipoint GS/gamma controls in CM were grayed out. I tried THX, but it only gave the option of the undersaturated THX color profile. So I used one of the user modes.
For some reason, when I would change a control with CM it would register in the PJ except for the color profile selection. I kept selecting Stage in CM, but the PJ kept showing it was in the 3D color profile. I just manually changed it to stage in the PJ.
Then came what I expected to be the fun part. I let it loose with the 10 point GS/gamma automatic adjustment. Things seemed to progress fairly well, and I was happy with how CM started at the top and worked it’s way down the luminance range, adjusting GS and gamma and moving on to the next step when it got a good result. However, after CM was done and it thought it had a good result, I manually ran the measurements and found GS/gamma were maybe only a little better and still pretty much all over the place. Taking a second pass didn’t seem to help much, probably because of the funky interaction of the RS60. I then decided maybe I didn’t help it out enough, since I didn’t use the 2 pt GS sliders before running auto cal. Did that and it seemed to help just a bit. After running auto cal again, I tried to spot tweak as best as I could, having CM auto cal only the worst areas. Like if 60% had a big red spike and a large gamma deviation, I’d just pull CM’s gamma slider at 60% and have it re do that band. That worked a little, but each spot tweak would mess up the adjacent bands. I finally, after much frustration and repeating, got a decent result. I moved on to CMS.
That’s where things really fell apart and the auto cal was totally and utterly worthless. Due to the RS60’s flickering when CMS is updated, sometimes CM didn’t get good readings. Observing the action scroll indicator in CM, sometimes CM seemed like it waited until the flicker stopped before taking the reading, but sometimes it didn’t and it tried to read a blank screen as a result. I tried turning on the LLH and upping the LLH trigger so every reading used it, but that just made things agonizingly sluggish and didn’t improve things. Possibly because there was still the majorly buggy CMS adjustment behavior of the RS60, where a large adjustment would seem to have no impact, then a small adjustment to a different control suddenly made the previous large adjustment take effect. Or so it seemed. Round and round I went. Letting CM do it automatically resulted in a white pinkish/extremely pale red among other things, and it couldn’t get hardly anything right before it gave up and moved to the next color. No amount or technique of spot tweaking was successful. I had to do the CMS manually, which was still plenty frustrating thanks to the super buggy controls.
I then remeasured the GS and surprise, it was now off and needed retweaking. And it was verified with both my master i1Pro meter and my profiled C5E meter, so it wasn’t the CMS work messing up the meter profile. So, I redid the GS, and many passes and many, many spot tweaks later, had a result that was about as good as what I came up with doing everything manually in the user menu.
I think the problems were much more JVC’s fault than CalMAN’s, though I can’t see how CM released this without seeing all the problems.

[Author]

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