Best HDMI to RGBHV converters for analog displays.

My modded moome Marquee v3 does 207mhz pixel clock with no problems above that the moome breaks up on red channel and neck cards blow at 1080p 72hz
 
Its kind of hard to recommend something not knowing what its for, so it would be a great help if you list your videochain from source to display, every step, and even better with pictures.
Analog displays is not perfect, and some will look better with a dac that is not to high bandwidth, most analog displays are not made for high bandwidth use, not that some of them cant display, but thats far from the same as resolving, or working well with it.

Also you mention the moome, there is like 20 moome products, so if you tell what specifik moome product you have, ill be able to see if i have it to.
As i mentioned in the last post, most/ all the converters i have will support any resolution inside the bandwidth they can handle, so if you have a moome that dont, ill guess its defect, or you have something else in your videochain that dont like the specifik resolution.

I have a number of CRT projectors at my disposal and I don't want to be limited in the d/a conversion before the projector that I happen to use as otherwise I would have to get the internal cards for Barco, Sony, NEC and Ehomes. So I would want an external box with the least rolloff at 200 MHz, if it goes up to 300 MHz even better as there are claims for Modded barcos and Marquees that supposedly go that high.

Sorry about the Moome Box, I left out that I have the V2 version that syncs very well to for example 1080p 72 but not to custom resolutions that I often like to use so it is only of limited use. Just for fun I tried for example a resolution of 2400 by 1000 with the Moome V2 external box and a Moome IFB Full HD - no problem with the IFB but no joy with the external box, both signals were under 165 MHz bandwidth by the way and the IFB card even syncs happily to signals that have a bit more than 200 MHz bandwidth.
 
I have a number of CRT projectors at my disposal and I don't want to be limited in the d/a conversion before the projector that I happen to use as otherwise I would have to get the internal cards for Barco, Sony, NEC and Ehomes. So I would want an external box with the least rolloff at 200 MHz, if it goes up to 300 MHz even better as there are claims for Modded barcos and Marquees that supposedly go that high.

Sorry about the Moome Box, I left out that I have the V2 version that syncs very well to for example 1080p 72 but not to custom resolutions that I often like to use so it is only of limited use. Just for fun I tried for example a resolution of 2400 by 1000 with the Moome V2 external box and a Moome IFB Full HD - no problem with the IFB but no joy with the external box, both signals were under 165 MHz bandwidth by the way and the IFB card even syncs happily to signals that have a bit more than 200 MHz bandwidth.
I think you might have a defect, or picky moome, if they work right they will work with anything balow 165Mhz you can trow at it, and its not uncommon to see defect moome cards.

There is no such thing as a 300Mhz Barco or Electrohome projector, i have tested with a test generator to 320MHZ on the Marquee, and it looked decent, but its impossible to get decent linear bandwidth and gain tracking at that high bandwidth, no matter how you mod or tweak.

200Mhz is doable with a few Marquee projectors, with good performance, linear gain and bandwidth, the problem is you cant buy these mods, so what you need is something that have decent bandwidth, and check your gain and bandwidth tracking.

Ill be interested to see your reference projector and videochain, so if you can snap a few screenshots like the ones i posted of the SMPTE pattern.

Please also let me know the name and model of the 10 converters you have, or have tested, and
see if we can find some common references.

And to comment on your complaint about this thread missing further information about mods, and links, you can help create that, we just need to find some common ground, or references, so ill still like to know your complete videochain from source to display, and if you have more than 1 just shoot away, or lets have your best one, and i might come up with a few surgestions what to try, or change.
 
Lots of equipment here but the video chain always is OPPO BD to Lumagen Radiance to D/A converter to 8 or 9" CRT.

Currently I use a G90 that I found to have excellent light output, focus and convergence stability out of the box, plus it was extremely easy to give it a proper dark green c-element.

converters off the top of my head:

external:
HDFury 1 to 4
old dongle style converter from digital connection, Ophit DVI
two Spatz boxes, a black and a silver one, both DVI
a no-name China box
Moome EXT V2

internal:
Moome DVI for NEC XG and NEC switchers
Moome IFB Full HD for Sony
John HWman DVI card for Sony projectors

I found most of them to be good with custom resolutions (I especially like odd vertical resolutions to complement 1920 like 800, 810, 820, 872 or 880). I only used 48 Hz most of the time and for that most converters were good and I preferred the pure D/A converters that did not have gamma and contrast adjustment like the Moome products - I use my scaler for that.

From what I hear the new Moome cards all should have the highest bandwidth in their V3 incarnations. if the small China box basically looks almost as good then I figure it would be a great tool to compare the different projector on a level playing field and without the converter already making the bandwidth comparison impossible.

As you say CRT projectors seem to be able to handle up to 200 Mhz and I also always found the claims for even more bandwidth to be dubious so that Chinese box you found may be all that is needed to get the best out of a CRT projector if we also factor in limitations in light output and spot size. Spot size from what I have seen is not really that good that any 9" projector could do much more than 2500 horizontal pixel regardless of bandwidth limitation. For a 16:9 screen and 48 Hz that I prefer I would therefore be able to go to up to 2560 by 1440 pixels if needed with 48 Hz.
 
The G90 has quite a lot of peaking, and i find it to work best with the last internal moome cards with original filters, its filtered quite some, but if you modify the moome to a more agressive/ flat bandwidth response, the G90 peaking will go nuts, and add a lot of noise.

So for the G90 ill recommend the last internal moome, and stay below 150Mhz, the G90 has a bandwidth below 100Mhz, but as the G90 dont have much raster ringing, its possible to run 1080P 60hz with standard timings, 2200x1125x60, for 72hz is best to crop it to 800P, and stay below 150Mhz.

I dont like using the Radiance, it reduce the bit dept, and have some croma issues, the general experience is a more flat and lifeless image, so ill recommend you to do 60hz direct from player to moome card, if your into best image quality.

I never use the moome gamma, i actually remove it, and never do digital gamma in a player or processor, stick to the projectors analog controles, and ill recommend to run component 4:2:2 to the moome, and set the moome to 0-255, it will make for full dynamic range and perfect clipping, with no bit convertion/ degradation.
If you have 2 HDMI out oppo, use the HDMI 2 out, where you bypass the enhancement processor.

Please post a shot of your smpte pattern as is right now.

Edit.
The Radiance recived a firmware update removing some unwanted processing in the pipeline, and is not the prefered processor for 1080P72hz at around 200Mhz used with a moome int card.
 
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It is rather hard to do pics of the smpte pattern, I can remember that from a long time ago when I made them with my 10 PG when I still had a decent camera - now I only have a smartphone that is hard to hold still and focus in a low light situation.

I will never come from the player directly, too many limitations and I need multiples of 24 so it has to be a video processor. Regarding the Moome card as I mentioned I may also want to try and use a 1209s, Marquee or Barco so I would definitely prefer a high bandwidth external solution - if I only feed the G90 1080p 48 most of the time or even less than it won't be an issue anyway.

Can you elaborate on the reduced bit depth and chroma issues of the Radiance?
Surely they will show up in test patterns?
I need it in any case for setting the gamma curve the way I prefer and also for custom resolutions and a few other things that are important to me but I would like to know about these limitations you mention.
 
you can run a croma multiburst, with and without the radiance, bit resolution you can see looking into the lens when displaying a gray ramp, but that can be compromised many places, also in the player.
48hz is not a option to me, its drive me nuts, its flickering like crazy, 60hz is a minimum, and ill much prefer the odd framerate over 48hz flicker.

Any digital gamma corection will in my mind destroy the image, if going that route ill prefer a digital projector.

I think the G90 is the best standard crt projector, it has a decent bandwidt, around 100Mhz, pretty much the same as the Marquee, the Barco cant keep up there, the difference in the Marquee is the shorter, simpler videochain, where the G90 is very advanced and passes a lot of stages, wich i suspect is what make it look kind of washed out, wich most CRT projectors do.

Anyway if your running 48hz, most converter will do, and the projectors will be the weak link, and there should be no need for special porch timings as raster ringing shoul not be a issu at thos scanrates.

Just snap a pic of the smpte pattern with your phone.. we do that all the time, its not needet to be a high quality image to tell a story.

Edit.
The Radiance recived a firmware update removing some unwanted processing in the pipeline, and is not the prefered processor for 1080P72hz at around 200Mhz used with a moome int card.
 
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As for HDMI converter I'd prefer the Chinese $10 white HDMI converter. I have the more expensive one ($18) in nice black aluminium box as well, and both use the same chip for conversion, so why pay more for the same thing? Although they are said to work only up to 165MHz pixel clock I've tested it to 220MHz, and did not find any problem with it while I did my short test.

PS.: Some modification might needed in the filter network on the output, but a Moome or HD Furry is not different in this regardr either.
 
The chinese converters are filtered to much, but concidering price/ performance they are fantastic, they far outperform the Hdfury 3 and 4 as converters, but they dont have any features other than converting, wich is why the choice is still up to the needs to make the setup work.

The chinese converter i tested had different filters installed, and it was not perfect at 172Mhz, and thats where the moome card comes in, to me its the best i seen, if treated right, but the gamma and level settings confuses people more than they do good, thats a point where the cheap converters shine, you cant do it wrong.
If feeding the china converter HDMI 4:2:2 16-235, you will see its clipping black and white perfect, not displaying BTB and WTW, where if you use the moome and set it to 16-235 on the input it will display BTB and WTW, and thats why it needs to be set to 0-255.
the analog signal has to be 0-0,7v to the projector, meaning full dynamic range is 0-0,7v, if running 16-335 out of the moome, you will feed the projector something like 0,04-0,66v wich might be usefull to help clipping low level noise out of the projector, but if possible to run full dynamic range 0-0,7v you get a more vivid image, and depending the display, a better out of black performance.
 
It is rather hard to do pics of the smpte pattern, I can remember that from a long time ago when I made them with my 10 PG when I still had a decent camera - now I only have a smartphone that is hard to hold still and focus in a low light situation.

I will never come from the player directly, too many limitations and I need multiples of 24 so it has to be a video processor. Regarding the Moome card as I mentioned I may also want to try and use a 1209s, Marquee or Barco so I would definitely prefer a high bandwidth external solution - if I only feed the G90 1080p 48 most of the time or even less than it won't be an issue anyway.

Can you elaborate on the reduced bit depth and chroma issues of the Radiance?
Surely they will show up in test patterns?
I need it in any case for setting the gamma curve the way I prefer and also for custom resolutions and a few other things that are important to me but I would like to know about these limitations you mention.

Did you ever take some pics to show us..?
 
The other day i was testing 1080P 60hz 422 12 bit out of my Panasonic UB900 UHD player, and tested true the Hdfury4, wich is listed as deap color capable.. It do accept it, and output it, but somewhere in between something is not so lucky.

The moome card deals with whatever 1080P i trow at it without messing it up.
WP_20170422_14_45_54_Pro.jpg
 
I just checked up on the Hdfury forum, and they deleted the post they addet 15 fed. 2016 where they promised a formware upgrade, and reported no further support, but ill not expect them to edit the Hdfury 4 specs to match the actual capabilities and performance, even they have been aware of troublesome specs and features for years now, and up to now pushed it forward promising a firmware update, wich is now deleted, as it has never hapened.

Good thing i made a screen cap.

IMG_10042017_210159_0.png


And now it looks like this.

latest..png
 
The other day i was testing 1080P 60hz 422 12 bit out of my Panasonic UB900 UHD player, and tested true the Hdfury4, wich is listed as deap color capable.. It do accept it, and output it, but somewhere in between something is not so lucky.

The moome card deals with whatever 1080P i trow at it without messing it up.
View attachment 853533

Hi Stridsvognen

Any updates on converters since last year?

I have Sony GDM-FW900, it's a 24" CRT monitor. I need converter that would transparently resolve 1920x1080p at 120Hz, that would strip HDCP and could display 24FPS with triple flash or more (96Hz, 120Hz).

I would like to run 5 year old PC games at super sampled 3840x2160 Nvidia DSR at 120FPS from latest flagship Nvidia GPU.

Besides PC I would like to connect it to Apple TV 4K and Oppo UDP-205.


Could you recommend me some options?
 
Hi Stridsvognen

Any updates on converters since last year?

I have Sony GDM-FW900, it's a 24" CRT monitor. I need converter that would transparently resolve 1920x1080p at 120Hz, that would strip HDCP and could display 24FPS with triple flash or more (96Hz, 120Hz).

I would like to run 5 year old PC games at super sampled 3840x2160 Nvidia DSR at 120FPS from latest flagship Nvidia GPU.

Besides PC I would like to connect it to Apple TV 4K and Oppo UDP-205.


Could you recommend me some options?

Thats way above the bandwidth of any of the converters i been dealing with.. Above 200Mhz pixel clock is a tough one to crack, and i very much doubt your monitor will resolve a 300Mhz pixelclock, as your surgesting 1080P 120hz.

There might be some graphic cards with VGA out that can do 300Mhz

What would be interesting is to see how your monitor deals with the SMPTE pattern as you run it now.

As you see all the converters i tested here strugels to do 1080P 60hz, and the best ones will do 1080P 72hz.
 
Thats way above the bandwidth of any of the converters i been dealing with.. Above 200Mhz pixel clock is a tough one to crack, and i very much doubt your monitor will resolve a 300Mhz pixelclock, as your surgesting 1080P 120hz.

There might be some graphic cards with VGA out that can do 300Mhz

What would be interesting is to see how your monitor deals with the SMPTE pattern as you run it now.

As you see all the converters i tested here strugels to do 1080P 60hz, and the best ones will do 1080P 72hz.

Thank you for your reply Stridsvognen.

"What would be interesting is to see how your monitor deals with the SMPTE pattern as you run it now."

This monitor is THE sharpest CRT that I have ever seen, it looks like LCD but as far as I understand I'm limited here by 165MHz of my GPU's DVI-I.

But I didn't have a way to connect Apple TV 4K nor Oppo UDP-205 to it.

In it's primary mode it's pushing 282.744 MHz. I assume it could resolve that.

http://www.omgwallhack.org/home/jrayhawk/doc/GDM-FW900.pdf

Page number 4 if you curious Stridsvognen.

1) Have you measured this Belkin or Moome Ext V3?

Universal HDMI to VGA Adapter with Audio/#
Moome let CRT PJ with 3D HDMI: EXT-FULLHD v3 3D: Universal HDMI 1.4

"As you see all the converters i tested here strugels to do 1080P 60hz, and the best ones will do 1080P 72hz."

2) To my non trained eyes, I don't see that much difference between HDFury X4 and the best converter that you showed. Could you please, explain the differences? : ) You and me are the 2 people on Earth that do care for something like this.

My CRT should resolve 1080p 72Hz - it's below it's prime mode bandwith.


3) Do analog (DVI-I) outputs of last AMD and last Nvidia GPUs that had RAMDACs, were lower quality than this 1080p 72Hz converter that you mentioned?

4) You were criticizing HDFury for weak price to performance ratio. Do you think used 3DFury or HDFury X4 at $165 with shipping are worth it? There is no hassle of modifying $20 Chinese converter.
 
Try display this pattern on your monitor and take a picture of it, dont worry to much about sharpness, or capturing every little detail, and ill try explain how i look at it.
ecrabb_multi_step_crosshatch_09_146 - Kopi.png
 
4) You were criticizing HDFury for weak price to performance ratio. Do you think used 3DFury or HDFury X4 at $165 with shipping are worth it? There is no hassle of modifying $20 Chinese converter.

The Hdfury product simply dont work with any of the resolution you surgested, and they have the worst handeling of 1080P 60hz of any newer converters i have seen, and at 1080P 72 they create heavy distortion, as ilustrated in this thread, it dont mean you cant use them, and make out whats on your monitor, so if image quality is not a important factor, they will all display a image at 165Mhz, and most likely also at 180Mhz.

The Hdfury 4 can be used as a hdmi in hdmi out unit to frame tripple to 72hz, up to 200Mhz, the timings are not working perfectly, but you can get decent results, the 96hz spec is a advertising stunt, it should say 1920x820 96hz, as it cant operate above 200Mhz, Hdfury deny to correct the specs, and make them transparent to end users.
 
looking at the specs of your monitor, and i think you would be best off trying to get 1920x1080 72hz running, but as your porch timings are high, it ends at 216Mhz, and thats not any standard timing, so ull need a processor or HTPC of some sort to make that happen, ill think as i mentioned earlier that a video card with VGA out that can do 300Mhz will be your best option, the other is a Lumagen Radiance Pro, and then custum timings to do your 1080P 72 timings, and see if you can make a moome converter deal with the 216Mhz, its a close race, ill say its a fairly slim chance of getting that to work well.
4K is way off limit as you would push 600Mhz, and as you cant deal with WCG and HDR, there is no need to bother dealing with 4K content at all.
 
looking at the specs of your monitor, and i think you would be best off trying to get 1920x1080 72hz running, but as your porch timings are high, it ends at 216Mhz, and thats not any standard timing, so ull need a processor or HTPC of some sort to make that happen, ill think as i mentioned earlier that a video card with VGA out that can do 300Mhz will be your best option, the other is a Lumagen Radiance Pro, and then custum timings to do your 1080P 72 timings, and see if you can make a moome converter deal with the 216Mhz, its a close race, ill say its a fairly slim chance of getting that to work well.
4K is way off limit as you would push 600Mhz, and as you cant deal with WCG and HDR, there is no need to bother dealing with 4K content at all.

Sorry for the delay, I was trying to make photo of this test pattern in an environment with less than 0.1 cd / m². But neither my iPhone nor my Android smartphone had enough dynamic range, they added so much noise that it was useless. The next day I borrowed a DSLR but it had so much settings, that the photos that I took of my Sony had blowed out highlights, and I didn't know how to set it up properly. It's harder to make photo of glass screen than projection screen.

I could tell you that in light controled room with about 30* FOV I could see everything (also at 2 IRE) without any noise.

I'm thinking about external converter because I would like to connect my Apple TV 4K to it - it's SoC is so efficient that It should decode AV1 codec in software. AV1 streaming on my Sony would look better than bluray.

Also I need faster GPU for supersampling at 120Hz - but both manufacturers removed analog from their GPUs, and I need faster GPU that I have for that, and I have the fastest already with analog output.

I was talking about 3840 x 2160p in context of video games, GPU is rendering them at that resolution but send them to monitor at supersampled 1920 x 1080p. Also dot pitch of my monitor limits me to 1920 x 1200.

DSR | Technology | GeForce

What do you mean by "216Mhz, and thats not any standard timing" - my friend would reprogram EPROM of this monitor for me with custom resolution and refresh rate - that's why I'm even thinking about 1080p at 120Hz.

I talked with Moome via email and he said that by the end of this year he expects to release HDMI2.0 converter.

Until then, do you think this Moome (you are happy with yours as far as I understand?) - they claim 230MHz; would be enough for 1920x1080 at 72Hz to avoid flicker and 24FPS pulldown.

Moome let CRT PJ with 3D HDMI: EXT-FULLHD v3 3D: Universal HDMI 1.4

Moome said it's their best ever.

P.S Do you think this Moome V3 EXT would have clearer RAMDAC than the ones used in last GPUs with VGA? I think when VGA wasn't mainstream even back then, they would start to cut cost - and keeping analog signal clean is expensive, so cuting cost at VGA output would be one of the first things to cut cost at.

Thank You for your help.
 
Moome say 230Mhz dacs, but he dont say max pixel clock at the output.
So im pretty sure it will max out around 200Mhz, and thats not fully resolved.
Im not sure what benefits a moome HDMI 2.0 has no crt will deal with WCG and HDR, and HDMI 1.4 supports 300Mhz, but untill now there has been no dac and analog stage supporting that high pixel clock.
HDMI 2.0 supports 600Mhz if im not mistaken, so lets see how that goes on the dac and buffer stage.

Try post the pics you made here, dont worry about clipping, thats normal, you will never be able to fully capture that pattern with a camera, and its not important, whatever you can capture will give me some hint of bandwidth performance.

Why 120hz.? whats the specifik need for that high refresh rate? above 72hz ill doubt you see any benefit as the phosfor decay time will work well with 72hz, if 120hz is a must have you will need to lower your resolution, all that matters is your pixel clock, and keeping it at a level so that the hole videochain can resolve it, one thing is resolving it, another thing is to be able to see what its surposed to look like.
 
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Moome is working on a HDMI 2.0 EXT card, and told me he would target a 300Mhz pixel clock true the analog output.
 
Interesting thread!
Picked up a Sony G70 some time ago which is in pretty decent condition, no tube burn and all.
New to CRT projectors but sure will be fun to mess around with!

The projector came with a HDFuryIII but haven't used it yet.
Just put the projector on front of the screen an used the internal test patterns, adjusted the horizontal alignment roughly by tilting the tubes, but somehow I was not able to adjust the R and B tube vertically to match the G at all!
This was the closest I got via the buttons on the remote, any suggestions?
 

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Did you do the mecanical setup of the magnetics.
I never had a G70 so cant explain in detail, but you should start by resetting all the electric troniccontrols, and then get the mecanical setup in place, you might be out of range on the electronic controles.
 
thanks, will check again!
When I was messing with it and looking through the manual I didn't find anything to mechanically adjust vertically other than the controls on the remote.

Guess I will have to look better and start over ;)
 
can you move the vertical lines by remote in the oposit direction?
The flare magnets will influence the image placement on the tube face, its the magnets on the back of the tube neck, right in front of the neckboards.
 

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