CurtPalme.com Home Theater Forum

[nathan]

It's taken over 3 years since moving to finally get back to my theater. The relatives are out of the basement, the recent flood damage is cleaned up and the room is available. Woohoo!

I've got a Runco 1101 (rebranded 1209s with no porch adjustment) which I bought from Curt back in 2006 that we used mostly for movies for 4 years or so. It had a new green tube and was in pretty good shape. At this point I've had it on the ceiling for a few weeks and have probably done a better job with the initial alignment than I ever had before. The picture looks sharp.

Having always run it using a PS3 and a HDFury I, I've got wrap-around issues. I've purchased a VP50 during the interim would would probably work ok for me, except I used it for a while, left it plugged in and the PSU is now dead.

Additionally, I'm not happy about the color/picture/punch/???. I think I might have been spoiled the last 3 years because we bought our first flatscreen (plasma) while we had no theater. I don't know if my last setup was like this, but the picture seems kind of flat/washed out. Daylight scenes look like old movie filtered nighttime shots that were actually shot during the day. Dark scenes are just a little too dark. I'm pretty sure it isn't a brightness/contrast thing or tube burn or cabling. I am assuming this is a gamma thing perhaps based on the pictures here:

http://www.curtpalme.com/RTC2200.shtm

I'm not as bad as the bad side, but not near the boosted side either. Does gamma boost help with colors in general?

Thank you for staying with me so far. What I want to do is explore my options to get the best picture. I had kind of been considering an HDFury III, but I'm not sure that would help.

Theater source material: Streamed content from local network storage. No TV, no Satellite. Currently running PS3 Media Server on a PC elsewhere in the house.

Current Hardware:
PS3 - old, noisy, likely to die in a few years if that. Would like to keep using for kids on the plasma.
VP50 - dead PSU, $30 to get it back running.
HDFury I - seems ok.


Goals:
Fix wrap around, porch setting issues.
Gamma boost?
Better dedicated source (optional) - for streaming files.


Options:

A. Fix VP50 add something for gamma.
pros: have most of it.
cons: gamma solution?, lots of hot noisy hardware.

B. Bag the HDMI chain, go back to an HTPC with powerstrip, etc.
pros: all in one solution?
cons: not sure about gamma, would prefer a smaller solution like a raspberry pi, windows only?

C. Other dedicaded scaler/source option??!?


I'm really up for anything at this point. To justify a new HTPC it would probably have to double as other stuff or be pretty cheap. It's also been 5 years since I was really paying attention to home theater options (I stopped tweaking and just watched for a few years!), so there may be things I'm not even aware of.

[gjaky]

With a HTPC you can adjust the gamma without problem, the nVidia cards have custom resolution tool built in the driver, you don't even need powerstrip to customize your resolution, though with a HTPC the blu-ray playback is somewhat problematic (especially with analog output) but with using "AnyDVD HD" it can be done too.

As for the HDMI thing, you have the HDFury I, which is probably the weakest link in your whole digital chain, a HDF I allows users to use their 7"-8" machines with digital sources, but I wouldn't use it with a 9" machine, there are more recent converters than that, a HTPC will be superior in this regard too.

[gnnash]

I feed my DTV-1100 through a Lumagen HDQ. However, with that combo, I am not able to run at full 1080p/60, as the Lumagen will not allow the timings required to completely get rid of the foldover. I do a slight downscale for 1080p content (to around 1000p).

For 2.40:1 content, I run through the Lumagen at 800p/72Hz. The Runco displays this just fine, and the 72Hz is really gorgeous - I didn't know what I was missing before pulling everything down to 60Hz, but at 72Hz, there are some subtle differences that really bring that film-like quality out of Blu-Rays.

1.85:1 content I am able to run at 1037p, 60Hz, just fine as well.

A Radiance or more powerful processor could probably allow you to run at a full 1080p/60, but you won't be able to ever do 1080p/72 on the projector, as it is scan rate limited to just barely above 1080p timings.

An HTPC would allow you to remove the wraparound at 1080p as well, I had that going temporarily from a laptop when setting things up.

[nathan]

Thanks for the input gentlemen.

The Lumagen HDQ is something that would be in the price range I am looking at. Some of the newer stuff at well over $1000 US is more than I want to spend at this point. However, if there are newer models that don't have the 1080p limitation you have. (Not that 1000p would really be a problem).

I need to dig into the HTPC option more. I'd love to hear from someone running a dedicated HTPC to something like this. I switched out the extron box I used with my original Marquee 8000 for HDMI with the HDFury thinking that would be a better picture (shorter analog leg), but that might have been a poor assumption. Would switching between resolutions for different movie ratio content using an HTPC be as easy as a dedicated device like what gnnash is doing?

Not that easy is a requirement. As I have had to explain to many a curious party, CRT is definitely a hobby level enterprise at a minimum. What is an example of an NVIDIA card that would have the control I need and would it replace the need for something like the GammaX: http://www.curtpalme.com/GammaX.shtm

Thx

[gnnash]

Given your source material, I'd probably go for an HTPC. I watch mostly Blu-Ray and Laserdisc media myself, and there is no good option for running Laserdiscs through an HTPC, so I just opted for a standalone Blu-Ray player and scaler, rather than an HTPC.

I'm starting to second-guess my decision though, because some stuff that I do have archived on another PC upstairs is proving to be quite a hassle streaming through my Blu-Ray player. I might end up opting for a small, low-cost HTPC solution in the long term to stream material from a Plex server running on my computer upstairs.

[nathan]

I got a new power supply for the VP50. It has some advantages over what I had been doing. Plugged a chrome cast into the back and it worked no problem. A little gamma boost too that helped some.

Question ... How do you actually fix the porch setting issue using the vp50? I changed some setting called underscan which made it fit, but I'm not sure that was the right approach or not. It shrunk the picture vertically as well.