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I’m going to be doing my first Elite next week. Anybody using CalMAN’s Sharp Elite Direct Display Control feature? Is it worth using for calibrations or will results be the same as using the Sharp remote control to change settings.

There were some mentions in this thread of lobster-like fleshtones being an issue… has this improved since those posts (newer firmware helped maybe?)?

Any other tips or procedural preferences that help with calibrating these?

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The Darbee box is NOT a video processor. It has no controls at all except for 3 modes (HD, Game, and Full Pop) and an “amount of effect” from 0% to 100%. It doesn’t do ANYTHING to make the picture more accurate. It tweaks contrast and saturation (increases both a little bit) and it sharpens the image and produces the same sharpness artifacts you can see in any sharpness evaluation target that we use to determine the position for the Sharpness control so that it DOES NOT “sharpen” the image. I have to set the HD mode to about 40% (0-100 range) in order to not have it degrade cable/satellite images. It can be set a little higher for Blu-ray before negative effects set in. What I don’t understand is… why do people feel the need to PAY for this box when they can achieve the same result by setting gamma a little higher (numerically) to bump contrast, add a click or two to the Color control setting, and raise the Sharpness control slightly… to the point where you are barely seeing Sharnening artifacts. You can do that for FREE. Why pay $250-$350 for an external box that does the same thing and has a single input and output and is loaded with handshake bugs that may make it annoying to use in your particular system. There are tons of complaints online about the handshake issues. I have handshake issues with the older system we have, but no problems with the newer system YMMV.

Then there’s the whole philosophical argument… we spend 3 or 4 or more hours calibrating a video display to make it as accurate as it can be. When we are done, what we see on the calibrated video display is very very close to what the director and cinematographer saw when they were checking the mastering of the Blu-ray version of their movie. If we then insert the Darbee box, the images now look different and by definition, they are LESS ACCURATE than the calibrated display without the Darbee box. Because the most accurate the video display can be is the calibrated result without the Darbee box. Anything you do to that calibrated display makes it less perfectly calibrated… period.

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The biggest hurdle for the eeColor box is that you can get a Lumagen Radiance Mini for a little less than the MSRP of the eeColor box. I believe it is a comfort and potentially a big benefit to have all the Lumagen’s adjustability and customization capabilties compared to the eeColor box that lacks everything the Radiance Mini has except the LUT calibration capability. The Radiance LUT calibration capability instantly extends the useful life of those products by many years.

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I haven’t worked on a “40” but have spent a lot of time with the 50/60 (have a 60 here now). So this applies to the 50/60… not sure if it also applies to the 40.

There is a problem with 3D mode that causes “electric” reds and oranges that don’t appear in grayscale or CMS measurements. If you view content after the calibration that doesn’t have the right shades of red or orange so that you can SEE the problem, you could easily miss it. It might be fixable with an adjustment (and measurements) at 95% stimulus, but you may not be able to fix it with the controls in the 50/60. To get around the problem, I used Cinema mode for 3D, setting it to High lamp mode. High lamp mode is absolutely needed for the 50/60 in 3D mode… with a brand new lamp you may think 3D is bright enough that High is not needed, but after the lamp gets to 300-400 hours, you DEFINITELY begin to feel like 3D is too dark in Normal lamp mode. You may or may not need High lamp with the 40… the 40 makes more light than the 50/60 by quite a bit.

I think the lesson here is to measure 20 or 21 points when you think you are done to make sure you haven’t missed a narrow-band problem that is EASILY visible in the final images. I’ve already seen another RS60 that was calibrated (by someone else) for 3D using 3D mode and it had the SAME “electric” red & orange problem mine had (firmware is 1.5 I think) for 3D content. This shows up really well in some of the costumes in the 3D Cirque du Soleil disc that came out recently. Properly calibrated, the “electric” reds and oranges appear “normal” which is bright in these costumes, but not so bright that they appear impossible without their own power source!

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Actually, on the forums, people are abandoning the RS50 and 60 in favor of the 40 because the 40 is considerably brighter. I got 45 fL from an RS60 (same as the 50, but it uses only the best of the subassemblies used to make the 50… and it costs an additional $4000). But the only way to get that much light is to set Color Pallet to OFF which gives you completely uncorrected light from the projector… which gave a HUGE plus-cyan error. Any mode that’s reasonably close to Rec 709 would produce about 17 fL with a new lamp and 13 fL with 600 hours on a 1.0 gain screen that’s only 6 feet wide. I can’t even imagine how weak it would be on a 9 or 10 foot screen. You’d need a lot of gain (and all the problems that go with that) for any fairly large screen.

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Just a point of clarification (this is something I’m trying to get more people to understand)… the original post referred to “10 point IRE”… there is no such thing as IRE in digital video. IRE is an analog video concept that describes the relationship between input voltage and output level of each primary or the white level depending on the context. When we are dealing with digital video we cannot (and are not) dealing with IRE in any way. There are some old timers who refust to stop using it, and it even shows up in places where the software or hardware manufacturer should know better than to keep using IRE when it has a specific meaning that does not apply in the world of digital video. What we deal with in digital video is % white and digital levels 0-255 or 16-235.

I understand the original post was made at 3am and am not criticizing the original poster in ANY way – especially when IRE shows up in some of the software we use and even in the Lumagen Radiance processors (Jim P agreed that it should probably be changed but I’m sure it’s not very high on the priority list). The problem is that some day, someone may actually be referring to REAL IRE issues/questions and it will get all messed up if whoever he is communicating with thinks IRE and % white are the same thing. They MIGHT be the same thing, but not necessarily.

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You don’t have to have a TV with DLNA if you have the Denon AVR. Just send video with sound to the Denon and the Denon will process the sound and send video to the video display.

That said, I find DLNA is either benign or annoying depending on what you are trying to do. I don’t have a lot of trouble getting DLNA devices to connect themselves to the network. But there are LOTS of problems…

– playing music, especially lossless music (either FLAC, AIFF, ALAC, or WAV), there are momentary dropouts, even if there’s nothing on the network besides the server and the destination component

– managing large libraries is damn near impossible as DLNA is being implemented today; I have about 1.2 TB of music on a library drive, probably more than 3500 albums and 900+ artists. Most navigation choices will let you pick by artist name but with 900 choices, if you want to listen to ZZ Top you have to scroll from the top of the list to the end of the list… through all 900 artists. And the scrolling is NOT particularly fast. I’ve never seen a simple thing like being able to scroll backwards from A so that you can jump right from As to Zs. What is needed is simply replicating the hard disk folder structure which has about 30 directories (alphabetic with some letters having to be split into 2 folders to keep the list from being inconveniently long) and another 30-60 artists inside each alphabetic folder, then albums sorted by year in the sub-folders. You can navigate to any album in the entire hard disk in less than 10 seconds that way… but not with the navigation choices available so far in DLNA devices.

– I thought “pushing” content from the server to the DLNA device might be the solution for the momentary drop-out problem (these are very short… maybe half-a-second, but they cause an interruption that takes you out of the listening experience), but I can’t figure out how to push content reliably from my server… I like J. River Media Center 16 quite a lot, very sophisticated and flexible for a $50 program, in fact, there is 1 user interface option that looks so much like Kaliedescapes user interface ($10,000+ server systems, usually WAY WAY more than $10,000 systems) you’d think that J. River might be getting complaints from Kaliedescape. And Media Center 16 and previous versions seem to have the ability to push content, but I can’t get DLNA devices to reliably “get” the pushed content… or if the music does start playing, there’s no cover art or track names or artist name, etc. It has been frustrating.

My video library is much smaller… maybe 150 hour or half-hour TV series episodes primarily (ripping Blu-rays takes too much time and space at this point – it’s awfully easy to put a disc in a disc player vs. all the work to put Blu-ray discs on a server (and that’s probably not technically legal anyway). But even if you were playing discs on the HTPC, you’d still have the same issue with trying to get the content to play “smoothly” without stutters – and that means gigabit LAN and pretty much rules out WiFi unless there’s a Super-N of some kind that’s fast enough. Anyway, the larger the library, the more useless DLNA gets. I’m sure it will EVENTUALLY get better, but I don’t think it’s ready for SERIOUS entertainment with high-quality music and video as it stands today.

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The yellows aren’t the main problem of the Quattron displays… it’s fairly easy with the user menu controls to get Yellows accurate, color-wise. They do end up slightly oversaturated, but that doesn’t really look too bad. The biggest problems I had with the Quattron I reviewed (LE925 series) was that there wasn’t enough adjustment range in the color brightness controls to get green and cyan as bright as they should be… they started out around 70% to 80% too dim (referenced 75% white with 75% colors used for measurements) and after using all the adjustment range, they ended up still being about 40% too dim. There’s also a problem that afflicts Caucasian fleshtones… some narrow luminance range (guessing around 95%) goes green-ish gray and you see those patches of greenish-gray mixed with nearby fleshtones that look normal. So people look like they may be turning into zombies. The only way I could fix that was with the 20-point grayscale calibration in the Lumagen Radiance.

Having lived with a Quattron for a couple of months, if I got a call to calibrate one, I would seriously consider declining to do the calibration because there were just too many problems that couldn’t be fixed with the limited grayscale controls and the funky CMS controls.

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Well… I don’t get the glossy part at all. I have two Black Diamond 1.4 screens here (1.78 and 2.40) hoping to use them for 3D to make the image brigher than the Studiotek 100 I will use most of the time. Neither of the Black Diamond screens is anywhere NEAR “glossy”. They were “glossy” before I removed the clear plastic protective layer that has to be peeled-off carefully after the screen is mounted. That glossy layer protects the non-glossy screen surface from fingerprints while you are installing the screen in the frame. You install the “corner” bungees last and peel back the glossy coating before you attach the corner bungees so you have something to pull on from the other side of the screen. With the screen mounted or on stands, you then push back on the screen near one of the corners to get a little space between the screen and the frame so you can pull the protective layer off without tearing it which makes the removal process much more difficult. You press on the glossy protective layer to create the space you need to pull off the protective layer – no chance of fingerprints that way unless you forget where your hands are. I notice in the Black Diamon assembly video on the Screen Innovations web site that the employee installing the screen doesn’t use the latex gloves… whatcha call your basic “setting a bad example” scenario.

There is also a Black Diamond 0.8 gain screen that is much darker than the 1.4 gain screen (the 1.4 Black Diamonds are gray, not too dark). I also find the prismatic sparklies from this screen to be annoying. It reminds me of the silk-screen effect you get from rear projection screens. You can train yourself to ignore the sparkly prismatic effects by focusing on the image rather than the screen, but it’s hard to do that if you’ve been spoiled by an Affinity or Studiotek 100 screen. I don’t find the 1.4 Black Diamond screens to be particularly good when there’s some light on in the room. They don’t wash out QUITE as much as the Studiotek 100, but it’s not a huge/revolutionary difference as indicated above. Perhaps the 0.8 and 1.4 screens have very different properties (likely given the big difference in gain and color of the screen, the 0.8 gain Black Diamond screen is MUCH darker than the 1.4 gain from what I see on Screen Innovations’ web site. Perhaps the 0.8 gain screen is glossy even after the clear protective layer is removed? It would be pretty difficult to ignore the clear plastic layer needing to be removed on the 1.4 screens, there’s a label on it telling you it needs to be removed before using the screen.

Aside from the gain, I do see a difference between the Studiotek 100 and the 1.4 Black Diamond… both screens are PERFECT on Blu-ray 3D from a JVC RS-60. No ghosting at all. Best 3D I’ve ever seen… even better than in ANY movie theater I’ve seen 3D in. But when I view side-by-side 3D from DirecTV, the Studiotek 100 has SLIGHT ghosting at times while the 1.4 Black Diamond remains completely ghost-free on the same (recorded) 3D programs. I’m not sure exactly why that would be, but it’s repeatable.

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I just got a message from him today saying he was pretty close to having a profile for the non-Elite monitors. From what he said in the message, it sounds like he’s probably days to maybe 2 weeks away from releasing the first version.

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I worked on a Hitachi 50P410 plasma (circa 2006) and found that neither one of the Hitachi s.m. access methods already listed worked for this panel. I just got lucky finding the method to get into the service menu – and save the changes. (Note: The other 2 access methods both called for pressing the Menu button on the TV – this panel will not access the service menu at all if you try to use the Menu button on the TV)

Start with the TV turned on.

On the Remote Control:
1) Press Menu – wait for the first (short) menu to appear
2) Press Menu – 8 – Select (in sequence, not at the same time)

In the service menu, you will find a setting for each color temp setting.

Select the temp you want to adjust with the up/down arrow keys on the remote. Press Select.

There are only RGB Drive controls – no Cuts – in the service menu.

Change Drive values (which are in hex) with < > keys on the remote.

After changing a Drive value to a new value you want to keep, press Select. Remember the new value you set so you can check again in a minute to see if it was saved.

Press Exit to return to the previous “page” in the menu system.

Select Memory Init. Press Select. Return to the color temp setting you were adjusting and look at the RGB Drives again to make sure your new value was saved. If it wasn’t saved, repeat the sequence above again (change the setting, press Select, Exit, Memory Init, Select). This sequence WILL save the new value you set but it doesn’t always work on the first attempt for some reason.

When you have confirned that your change was saved, use Exit to return to User mode.

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Tom Norton’s review of a Lucidium in Home Theater magazine made them look terrible – it got worse and worse as the screen got brigher and he said there was no control anywhere that made the panel better. And by worse, I mean WAY out of control. No experience with them personally, but if they really are as described and measured by TN, they are among the worst displays out there. The MSRPs are pretty steep — you’d expect much better than TN measured.

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Did THX ever get a Blu-ray demo disc finalized? When we were in class, it was supposed to be “close” but wasn’t finished by the end of the class. Did it ever get “finished”? Are we still going to get a copy when it is available?

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I’m going to burn the AVS HD for Blu-ray playback “soon” – today or tomorrow probably. If it works OK, I’ll make a copy for you. But there are some players it’s not compatible with. You write the HD patterns on a DVD – all the Blu-ray players will read DVDs, but some choke when there’s HD content on the DVD instead of standard def content. So unless you have a Blu-ray burner, the AVS HD pattern disc won’t be a “universal” solution.

I figured there was a “timing” issue with the HD Basics discs — otherwise he wouldn’t have issued an HD DVD version. It was disappointing that there weren’t any color windows when there were gray scale windows (if I remember right).

In retrospect, it might have made more sense to port the original HD DVD to Blu-ray, though I can’t say I’m wowed by the user interface on either HD or Blu-ray. Unless you have a PS3, none of the HD versions of DVE navigate very quickly.

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Did I miss something on the DVE HD Basics disc or is it really missing the 75% (and 100%) primary and secondary window patterns? I ended up measuring them off the SMPTE color bars – a PITA when you have your meter on tripod.

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