CurtPalme.com Home Theater Forum

[perisoft]

Yeah, that's right.

So, I figured the thing up tonight and spent a couple of hours messing around. I got RGBHV input working fine, though the menu system is... obscure, to say the least. In some ways Sony's menus are great, and in some ways they're a massive WTF (popping all channels back on when you go to adjust a different item, for example, or letting you adjust a channel that's muted. Christ, I remember that one biting me in the ass with the 1271...).

Stig on green is very good; red focus needs to be pulled pretty hard electronically and R and B stig might want correcting in hardware. Not sure yet.

My input was a too-long VGA cable rather than a real RGBHV cable, so I think it was pretty bad. Lots of ghosting, etc. And I wasn't able to get powerstrip doing custom resolutions on my hacker computer I'm running this with in my office.

So, first official screenshot of the G70, on a 60" wide "screen" consisting of somewhat rumply big paper on the wall:



1080i60. Scanliney as all hell; never had a similar look with the Barco even when it was almost as sharp. But this is *already* sharper than I got the Barco.

Damn. This ought to be fun.

Oh, and electronic stig? My god! I mean, I love my Barco, don't get me wrong, but this is a freaking Jeep-to-Land Rover kinda move here. Yikes!

[ecrabb]

[perisoft]

[CIR Engineering]

[CIR Engineering]

[perisoft]

So, I only had a few minutes today before my two-year-old took priority, but I did notice some odd behavior. First, the green seemed to be cutting in and out a bit; I tried some different output freqs and that seemed to alter things a bit. I can't rule out the source, though, since it's kind of a beater computer and it's been through the wars.

The second odd thing was that it seemed to suddenly drop contrast by 30%-40% or so; full output on each channel dropped by that much vs. the test patterns. Changing the contrast changed both; gain on each channel was already fairly high.

The only thing that used to do something similar on other display devices was switching whether they expected different voltages, but I don't see why that would have changed suddenly...

The third odd thing is that some modes resulted in a lack of sync; v-sync was fine but h-sync was all over the map. 1080i60 was whacky but 1080i59 worked fine...

These things combined with the history of input flakiness worry me - that said, it's never acted like it was going to fail to get ANY signal.

Ideas for things to check?

[AnalogRocks]

Which input card do you have?

[AnalogRocks]

Which input card do you have?

[perisoft]

Uh... It's rgbhv/component, or video or s-video. Are there different types of card that do rgbhv?

[CIR Engineering]

Well if your source could be flaky I would start by making sure it isn't (obviously).

I forget, is the G70 like the G90 in that you need to set the clamp in the service menu? On the G90 if you don't set the clamp to HC you will get weird behavior like that... but not on 1080i.

Is ABG on or off?

craigr

[CIR Engineering]

[perisoft]

[CIR Engineering]

Everything DVI/HDMI is easily customizable just like analog. The HDF1 and Moome won't have any problems running anything with a pixel clock below 148.5 MHz. So anything with a pixel clock below 1080p 60Hz will work with those DVI transcoders.

Post a photo of your Moome board and I can tell you which will be better, that or the HDF1. Most likley the HDF1 will be a better choice.

You could probably sell the Moome on eBay easy. I listed one for $98 a few months ago at a fixed price listing. It sold in less than three hours. I would do that and use the money to get one of John's DVI IFB cards as that will be the best option besides the newest Moome FULLHD card that costs around $350.

craigr

[perisoft]

The moome is the older DVI one (1.3 on the board).

Well, it's not looking good for this thing. I tried the Moome, and it looks great - except there's only the red channel.

HD Fury and RGBHV suffer the same issues (well, HDF goes through RGB so...). Now there're more things going wonky; the levels aren't correct as before, and...

- It often takes the G70 a long time to lock to a signal. In one test it lost sync whenever the image got very bright.

- The input *and the menu* started losing green almost entirely, at random intervals. This suggests something beyond the input board, which would be Very Bad.

- There's a constant kind of very high frequency horizontal interference going on; the same regardless of signal and source.

All of this was tested with two different sources.

The Barco may not be ideal, but at least the thing has turned on and worked without a hitch every moment since I got it... given that I can't just spit out a couple hundred to have a board fixed whenever, if I can't find out *FOR SURE* exactly what's going on here, this'll probably get parted and dumped.

[CIR Engineering]

That's sad, but don't give up so easy.

I am not enough of an expert on G70 repair to say what to try other than the basics of reseating broads and what not.

I can't remember so maybe one of the G70 owners can chime in, does the G70 have the clam setting in the service menu like the G90 does. If so, be sure to set it to HC and make sure that it is on RGBHV and not RGB, or RGB-HD, or RGB-SD, or any of the other options that Sony has in there. On the G90 the clamp must be set correctly or you will see behavior similar to what you are describing.

craigr

[CIR Engineering]

Also, pull the Moome out and leave it out. I have heard of defective Moome boards causing input havoc on G's at least twice in the past. The previous owner had trouble with the Moome already so it's not a bad bet. Just take out the Moome and work with the stock BNC's for now with the HDF1.

Also, that Moome version is not nearly as good as the HDF1, so with the hardware you have you should use the HDF1 anyway.

craigr

[perisoft]

OK, so, here's a shot of the assumedly-bad levels thing. Background is full white output; obviously the menus are quite a bit brighter.

Is this by design so you can see what's going on, or is something messed up?

[CIR Engineering]

[ecrabb]

I'll check mine, but I think that's right, Perisoft... IIRC, the menus are independent of brightness/contrast settings. It makes sense if you think about it... Like you pointed out, otherwise you could inadvertently make the menus impossible to see.

SC

[CIR Engineering]

Do you have the install manual? You should look at pages 48 EN through pages 49 EN.

http://www.curtpalme.com/docs/SonyG70_Install.pdf

craigr

[perisoft]

Contrast definitely affects menus.

I just tried going in and cranking gain/bias/contrast all the way up; if I do all of them then the outputs match the menus. Anything less and the menus are brighter; seems like the menus are brighter by some ratio until they start to saturate and the 'normal' output catches up.

So, it could be that a previous memory had much higher gain/bias, and it wasn't noticeable until I triggered another memory without such characteristics.

That still doesn't explain the slight jitteriness, or, more worryingly, the random times when green drops by 80% or so.

Right now I'm using direct VGA->RGBHV, but I've seen the same behavior with the HDF.

When the Moome was in there, the red was rock solid; no jitteriness at all. Looked great. Too bad it was only the red channel.