CurtPalme.com Home Theater Forum

[David_Web]

I hope you defocused the tube. Else you burnt scanlines into it.

[ecrabb]

Depends what resolution he's running, David.

I can just ever-so-slightly see scan lines at 1080p on my G70, so there's no way in hell I'd burn scan lines in to it at that res - especially at full-contrast.

SC

[MYoung]

I didn't defocus the tube, though I'm running it at 1024x768p @ 60Hz at 75% to 80% contrast and I don't recall seeing scanlines when right up to the screen. I'd say 768p @ 60Hz at 75% to 80% contrast is a bit beyond what a 7.5" CRT in a 6PG Xtra can fully resolve so there's got to be some slight scanline overlap.

I usually run that 6PG Xtra at 720p @ 60Hz for PS3 games, DVDs, and miscellaneous video content, and 768p @ 48Hz for Blu-rays, scaled using a Lumagen VisionDVI.

[Kiev Savoie]

This is great stuff. Maybe you have a way to earn a little side money from all of us cheapskates on the forum!

[Mark_A_W]

[MYoung]

So does that mean a Xtra with minty tubes and excellent setup could resolve 1080p @ 48Hz?

[MYoung]

Update...

Left pic is at 25 hours and right pic is at 180 hours:



You cannot tell from the pictures as they are low resolution and not in very good focus, but I do see some lines now from overlap. It's not too bad but noticeable if you look carefully for it when projecting full white. Of course, I think that's a fair trade for getting rid of what it looked like before! Right now I'm running a wear pattern to even out the outer phosphor to the outer fullscreen and widescreen patterns (where they didn't overlap). After that it will just be a matter of wearing it to the level of the fullscreen and widescreen overlap!

I took a look at the red and blue and I think I may wear level those out a but. I see wear on them as well, though it wasn't nearly as pronounced as the green. I think for those I will apply a larger gaussian blur as the pattern isn't as sharp. Right now it's getting harder and harder to draw the wear pattern on the green as the shade differences are diminishing. I'm finding it easier to draw the pattern with a wireless mouse while looking through the lenses.

[Kiev Savoie]

This is triumphant! I had no idea you could make so much progress in so few hours!

[MYoung]

I just thought of a cool mod for the Marquees with ACONs. Every thousand hours or so it projects full red, full green, and full blue, analyzes each wear pattern, creates counter wear patterns for each tube, and then wear levels each tube. Now that would be some slick use of computer vision! I can only begin to imagine what the MSRPs of CRT projectors would have been if that capability was built into them back in the 90s!

[Kiev Savoie]

it seems like the leveling process has a curve that gets pretty steep toward the end. would you agree MYoung? I like your Acon idea, but I think even if it came standard on all units only really knowledgeable users would utilize such a feature and the market would still be overflowing with unevenly burnt tubes.

[MYoung]

By curve do you mean it gets harder to level it toward the end? It is harder to draw the counter wear pattern as you get closer to the end of the leveling process. I am finding myself needing to draw the patterns while looking and squinting through the lens with the brightness and contrast turned all the way down. It's kind of hard on the eyes! My particular projector had multiple wear patterns too which also added to the complexity.

I should take off the lens for the green and take a nice macro picture of the tube face. I can see slight lines in some parts that were burned into the tube from overlap of the wear pattern. I'm not sure whether it was the result of drift, a wear pattern not precise enough, or a little of both. I'll have to look at all the wear patterns I drew and saved and see if they drift. Still, I think I'll take those slight burned lines over the nasty wear pattern I had. I'll have to get some better pictures of the result.

[Kiev Savoie]

By the curve i meant the rate the virgin phospher is wearing in as you might see it on a graph. From the pics it kind of looks like the longer the process goes the faster the phospher wears in, so that toward the end, if you were not watching closely you might accidentally put on more wear than you want to because it's taking less and less time.
I'm just looking at a couple of pics and it seems like you gained most of your progress between that 120 hour shot and the 180 hour shot, is that so or am I just seeing things?
I'm betting if you have a couple lines left over it still looks a lot better than it did before. I am wondering if that camera technique Perisoft mentioned would save the trouble of drawing in the wear pattern. What do you say Peri?

[TheyDroppedMe]

any updates on how this worked out? I think I might try this on my 9PG Xtra to try and level-out the green tube, as it looks like it was set up a little too far back before. What settings for contrast/brightness, etc did you use? What advice would you have for someone doing it now that you've done it?

Thanks,
Greg

[Mark_A_W]

Don't go straight to 100% contrast with an odd shaped wear mask, with a cold projector.


A mate of mine cracked the tube with a U shaped pattern.


Warm up the projector first for 10 mins.

[MYoung]

I'm pretty happy with the results. I haven't really been motivated to finish fine-tuning the wear leveling. I also seem to have come across a problem where GIMP isn't drawing the exact path I tell it to! Maybe I'll look into that further. Perhaps my PC just needed a reboot. Of course, one can always just draw 1x1 dots along the wear pattern edge and just play connect the dots, fill it in, and then apply the gaussian blur.

I was running a contrast of 70 to 80 during the whole process. My basement, where I performed this procedure, was probably around 65 degrees Fahrenheit (~18 degrees Celsius). For some odd reason, the brightness control on my 6PG Xtra doesn't seem to have any effect. I set the brightness to 0 anyway, reasoning that I'd want the black parts to really be black so as not to wear the parts of the phosphor that are already worn.

Another thing I did was to add a layer of full white and toggle that layer on and off to check and make sure my wear-leveling pattern was still where it should be and not drifting. If the wear-leveling pattern drifts out of alignment then it's time to redraw the wear-leveling pattern. I checked the alignment of the pattern at least daily and for a while I was redrawing the wear-leveling pattern daily. Then I realized it's not a 9" LC projector and I stopped caring so much.

[Mark_A_W]

[pietnoeck]

hi,

I'm having kind of the same problem on my Runco 1100.
I was thinking of using "wearrelief" ( http://www.isfcalibraties.nl/uploads/burnrelief.zip )
Anyone got any experience with it ?

[perisoft]

[MYoung]