CurtPalme.com Home Theater Forum

perisoft · Joined: 29 Aug 2007 Posts: 2920 Location: Ithaca, NY

After finding that my 'screen' (read: backdrop canvas I hung up because it looked white at the time) is yellower than a men's room full of bug-lites, I decided that if I'm going to do a real evaluation and setup I needed a less thrown-together testbed.

Right now the PJ is set up on a desk in a cleared-out storage room in my business, so I can play around a bit. I grabbed some blackout cloth because the 'real' fabric is a bit translucent, some blackish black fabric to do the ceiling and the background, and an ever-loving crapload of thumbtacks.

Tonight I put the top section of black cloth up, and put the blackout cloth (which is white-ish, but still kind of yellow) up over that. To align the screen, I made measurements and strung high tension red nylon line across the top, middle, bottom, left, and right of the 'screen' (which is centered on the wall horizontally, and positioned so the rasters are centered on the PJ vertically).

So, the image is about 91" wide.

The plan is to put the real screen material up over the grid I made, and then put black cloth on the sides/bottom/top to do the borders. That way if I want to do a resetup I can pull off the screen fabric and have the grid lines there.

After redoing the geometry and a quick convergence, I grabbed some shots. Pretty happy with it so far; just the switch to the blackout cloth has made the whites considerably better, so I'm gaining some hope that despite draganm's proclamation I *will* be able to get white out of that tube. Very Happy

There are still some fairly major geometry problems, so it all needs to get redone again, but it's the best the thing has looked. Woohoo! This is gonna rock when I get it in the HT!

...with room lighting so you can see the setup and the guide lines (no, I did NOT set up the PJ first and then put up the border lines... Wink

):

...and how it looks with the lights off:

You know you're getting close when you start wishing you had better eyesight. And, in other news, I have determined that the fact that I enjoyed tonight's activities enormously is conclusive proof that I suffer from a severe genetic defect of some type. It's the only explanation.

draganm · Joined: 08 Mar 2006 Posts: 8990 Location: Colorado

perisoft · Joined: 29 Aug 2007 Posts: 2920 Location: Ithaca, NY

**AnalogRocks** · Last edited by AnalogRocks on Sun Sep 16, 2007 12:02 pm; edited 1 time in total

perisoft · Joined: 29 Aug 2007 Posts: 2920 Location: Ithaca, NY

dbaisey · Posted: Sun Sep 16, 2007 6:14 am Post subject:

perisoft,
Looks good to me from this angle. Stuff like this makes time fly when you enjoy it. Doug

perisoft · Joined: 29 Aug 2007 Posts: 2920 Location: Ithaca, NY

I tried 1080p the other night. 1080p72 was... well, heh. Yeah, that wasn't happening. The focus hash I derived from one of MP's screenshots (||= kinda thing) was a solid blur.

So I decided to try at 1080p48 - same refresh as film, a bit flickery for me and maybe unwatchable for my dad, so that kinda sucks, but just messing around.

Now, I wouldn't say that my projector in its current state "resolves" 1080p48 so much as "tolerates" it. The optical/electric setup really wasn't great, and I could still get it to fairly easily have OK contrast between the horizontal hashes (not full on/off, but 80%). The verticals were obviously a lot tougher, hampered by the fact that I'm only using 80% of the tube face due to wear. But even so I could get them to resolve at maybe 50% contrast - oddly, it was easier on the right/left edges, which suggests my setup is quite suspect! Smile

I may try 1080i48 for grins... it would seem that at 1080i48 the artifacts would be minimized because you'll get a full 'solid' frame for each real frame of video. It'd be interesting to see if you could somehow prevent any frames with interlace artifacts by running, say, 1080i72 and blanking the screen at the v-sync in certain cases. I know that back in the day guys doing democoding on the PC did some insane stuff with the VGA hardware - getting normal VGA monitors to do 150hz vrefresh and creating 'fakemodes' with 65k colors on 256color hardware. The question is whether it would be worth it.

But that's why all this is so awesome. So many questions! I love it! Very Happy

wkomassa · Joined: 21 Aug 2007 Posts: 101 Location: Brookfield, WI

perisoft · Joined: 29 Aug 2007 Posts: 2920 Location: Ithaca, NY

I fired the rig up in the test room tonight with a buddy, and managed to not touch the PJ the whole time. Mainly I was thinking, "Damn, this RULES!" Very Happy

There was one scene where it's pitch black for a while, admist really dark flashes of movement, and then a huge light blasts on and the whole screen snaps white instantly, and the two of us nearly put our arms up in front of our eyes like the characters in the movie - not because the full white screen was THAT bright, but because when your eyes adjust to the dark the white blast might as well be the sun. CONTRAST! CONTRAST! Fantastic!

In other news, "Yo Yo Girl Cop" is a freaking weird movie. Good, in a bizarre way, but... seriously, WTF, Japan? Can you please include little cheat sheets with your movies? We'd like to watch them, but the stereotypical "oooh, ahhh!" was pretty much just looking at each other going, "What the f*ck just happened?"

Fun anyway. I'll definitely have to see it again, now that I know how it ends I might be able to pick up some more of the plot... Shocked