JVC X3 projector, new bulb and ChromaPure with i1 Display Pro 3 meter Calibration [added Lumagen]

Rob.Screene

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I thought I would post up some experience I gained over the last few months at calibrating my JVC X3 in a dedicated room, cocoa brown walls and a Black Widow high contrast DIY screen.

I hope this helps others with half-life bulbs in such JVC's and shows what the models missing ISF colour correction features can achieve. Your comments and questions appreciated.

The projector is around 2 years old and 798 hours on the original bulb. I had noticed a little loss of brightness and punch and that skin tones looked a little unhealthy.

I bought an i1 Display Pro 3 meter, with the pro corrections option and ChromaPure software from Kalibrate, as well as ordering a genuine replacement bulb from Alan at Ideal AV. I believe it's the same bulb used from the X3 through to the X90.

Let's say I am delighted with the results, black levels, contrast and colours now look fantastic...

1. I set about practicing measuring and correcting the original 798 hours bulb:
JVC X3 0001 783 hours.jpg


The Before graph shows Red low and losing brightness, with blue too high. I dropped the Blue and Green gains to align around 50% stimulus and the Cuts. Although better greyscale by far, the After picture just was not right. And the new bulb had arrived!

2. With a new bulb in for 17 hours, I did a factory reset and got here, using the gains but not yet realising the potential of the 10-point RGB gamma correction on the X3:
JVC X3 0002 17 hours.jpg


3. Here is 70 hours, where I did a second go, Aiming for just under a delta E of 3 using the gains/cuts, focussing keeping green good and not worrying about gamma or 100% stimulus being too blue. I also used the JVC 10-point white gamma correction to get a solid 2.2. gamma curve, then using the 10-point red and blue adjustments to finely correct the colour balance at both the ends:
JVC X3 0003 70 hours.jpg


Here is the greyscale delta E's all under 3, most points under 2:
JVC X3 0004 70 hours greyscale.jpg


Finally here is the Chromaticity, of which I have only colour and tint to be able to adjust and otherwise no control of with an X3 itself. Red and Blue and the Magenta, Cyan and Yellow secondaries are all pretty bang on the reference squares, with Green slightly toward yellow:
JVC X3 0005 70 hours chomaticity.jpg
 
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Rob,

Pretty good go on what you can achieve but really, these charts do not give enough information as to what is really going on....and the cie CHART doesn't look like things are correct at all....

First off, forget the "under 3" delta error target. Try to get everything as low as possible. You can easily see errors under 3 with delta error 2000 formula. Also, if you are going to have errors above 1 try to not have them in the 25-75% stimulus and saturation area as that is where most of the content is that we view. So on your Advanced Colour Management measurements look at doing sweeps at 50 and 75% stimulus rather than 100 percent.

Lastly, i'd suggest you do the greyscale and gamma (be careful with that multi point gamma control as it can cause banding) then do a colour checker measurement in chromapure. Then do some adjustments to saturation and hue and remeasure colourchecker to see if you've actually made things better or worse.

You know i'm going to say it but....if you can find a s/h or new Radiance you'll make a massive improvement to what's possible with one of these devices and with Chromapure already you just need the auto add on and you're laughing.
 
I have to agree with Gordon...I use a Lumagen myself and it gave a noticeable difference when I used it with my old X35 which is similar to your X3. The Chromapure/Lumagen autocal is really good with the latest improvements, though you do get the best out of it if you know the basics of calibration (though you should be OK, seeing your previous post).

The biggest difference you will notice is being able to properly correct the colour gamut which even using 'standard' colour profile is probably more than 3dE out. IIRC the standard colour profile isn't as linear as it might be either, so even if you preference 75% it could be a fair way out at 25 & 50%. Using a Lumagen will correct over the whole range (plus you would typically start using the 'wide' or 'OFF' colour profiles which are larger than rec709, but are at least reasonably linear and the Lumagen can reduce the saturation anyway).

I've now got an X500 which has built in CMS, but I still get much better results using a Lumagen VP (ignoring some teething troubles as I've recently changed from a Radiance Mini3D to a Radiance 2041).
 
I have an X3 and agree with both of the above, there's not doubt that calibrating using the built in controls can give v good results but the difference made by a LUT is larger still.
 
Thanks for the advice.

I actually have a lumagen Vision Pro HD, but have assumed it will only sync to 1080i/1080p24 inputs, and think I read the correction is limited compared to the Radiance and I assume not auto-correctable via ChromaPure where the Radiance is.
 
I used to have a HDQ myself, which gave some improvement to the greyscale and gamma calibration of my (then) JVC HD350. It did have some rudimentary gamut controls, but nothing like the level of the Radiance models and obviously not capable of being used with the autocalibration function.

You might find a used Mini3D for under £500 if you are lucky, so it's worth keeping your eyes on the classifieds.
 
I finally got round to hooking up a Radiance XD last night. Just did a factory reset and checked it runs through my darblet ok, which it does.

I think it added a second or two to hdmi syncing when the oppo blu-ray changes from 50p to 23.976p when playing a movie and back. Is the XS board any faster at syncing?

I have yet to add the ChromaPure auto-cal license, or enable the option 3D feature, so any advice on the best way to buy these is welcome.

Thanks and regards,
Rob.
 
XS will likely not be any faster. Lumagen have an Oppo and have done much testing. It is due to the way Oppo alters its output when format changes. This forces re-negotiation through the lumagen and consequently on to the display. Oppos' are particularly troublesome in this regard compared to other players. Lumagen have, i believe, spoken with Oppo to try to see if they can do something about how they handle these transitions.
 
i got the pc linked to the Radiance tonight. i thought i would try the free calman 5 colorchecker using the Lumagen to provide the test signal full frames. Interesting to see how the X3 is now it has 206h on the new bulb:

ImageUploadedByTapatalk1442278002.472316.jpg
 
Small but significant progress last night, i got calman5 on my media htpc to finally recognise the meter and lumagen radeon.

Calman5 was crashing on the win7 htpc, but fine on my win8.1 acer tablet. My solution was to copy the ccx settings file on to the htpc.

This is significant because i could remote on and trigger a colourcheck whilst not having to be in the room.

This will be how i use chromapure, once i bring myself to pay the £125 auto call option license fee.
Rob.
 
And Ricky turned round the auto-cal Chromapure licence in an afternoon. Just got to find some more time.
 
Trying to determine why red is drooping off with this new bulb. I've tried a factory reset and firmware upgrade from v1.2 to v1.8 in the X3.

Here's the results of Natural, setting a Wide 2 gammut and using only the blue and green gains and cuts on the X3 to leave red a little hot, Gamma on the X3 at Normal and not touching the X3 gamma ramps. Wide 2 definitely oversaturates things but seems to allow the auto-cal to get better retuls. I then left the room and remotely started off the Chromapure/Lumagen/i1 2-pass 125 point auto calibration:
(notice how the 100% red could not be corrected, but 90% and 10% was, I guess that was part of the Lumagen gamma adjustment, hence the levels under 100% are not what they were)
JVC X3 263h factory reset Natural Custom 1 6500K Normal Wide2 colour autocal 11  White Balance.PNG


Here is the Chromaticity, the resulting are so in the square targets it is hard to see them, for all 6 primaries and secondaries. I think this is the main reason to get an external CMS like the Radiance, as well as correcting at other 5 x 5 x 5 points:
JVC X3 263h factory reset Natural Custom 1 6500K Normal Wide2 colour autocal 11 CIE.PNG

Here is the chart form with saturation and luminance:
JVC X3 263h factory reset Natural Custom 1 6500K Normal Wide2 colour autocal 11  Chromaticity.PNG


I think my the next step is to work out for to set the Lumagen so that I can do a separate 3D calibration for when a 3D blu-ray is playing, the PJ is in 3D mode and glasses are used.

I am using Sky HD over cat5 in to the Oppo BDP-105 HDMI input. Oppo HDMI in to the Lumagen. Lumagen in to Darbee Darblet, then on to the JVC X3. Audio is 5.1 analogue out the Oppo.

I checked blu-ray greyscale and 100% colours via the AVS 709 test blu-ray (free download) in the Oppo and the gamma and 100% saturation colour measured pretty much identical to using the built in Lumagen test patterns, so that was good.

Comment appreciated.
cheers,
Rob.
 
Oh and blu-ray is stunning. Contrast looks better, I guess due to exact 2.2. gamma slope. Sky channels are good, but sometimes people look a little sunburnt compared to the Panasonic GT30 THX plasma screen in the lounge.
 
Why don't you pre calibrate the 100% greyscale using the projector's gains as recommended by Lumagen? That way the Lumagen will correct the other points below this down to (usually) very small dE in my experience. The other thing is that Gordon Fraser recommended that I just used colour profile 'OFF' in my X500 rather than any of the reduced gamut options, due to the poor linearity of the JVC. I don't know what the option is on the X3 (perhaps the same as my old X35 which had 'Standard/wide/off' so I used 'off' on the X35).

The red point on the pre calibration colour gamut looks odd as it has gone off the scale. I didn't know that it could do this, but I've never got beyond it with either my HD350, X35 or X500, so it's something I would double check on.


If you aren't already, I would select 75% at the colour gamut calibration point in Chromapure as there is little content at 100% and it's possible that this chart isn't showing all that we need to know*. Of course you should have a nice list of dE ranges for the colours at the bottom of the Chromapure report: Initially I had problems minimising the number of >3dE post calibration results, but once I followed Gordon's advice, my last autocal (729 points in the 2041 I use now) I think there were non above 3dE and the vast majority >80% were under 1.5dE and of those >60% were under 1.0dE (going from memory, but certainly along those lines).

* I wonder if this might explain the sunburnt faces you mention as this shouldn't be the case with a multi point calibration.

PS: The red dropping off isn't surprising as red is usually lower (has been on all my JVCs). It may appear to be 'dropping off' because the red at the low end is a little high. If it were reduced then the red line would be flatter, just lower than the blue and green. However, it's usually recommended not to adjust the low end RGB controls on JVCs as this tends to either raise the black level or clip the shadow detail, best to leave the Lumagen to adjust.
 
I haven't seen an off gamut setting on the X3. When i precalibrated greyscale, I left red a little low over 90% as i felt more brightness and a little blueness at 100% was probably a good compromise.

The deltaE summary looked amazing with nothing over 1.6 and an average of 0.5:
ImageUploadedByTapatalk1443898168.746302.jpg
 
I see your point about setting the greyscale gains for 100% and not worrying about the cuts. I guess i can backup the lumagen setup to pc and retry Cinema mode with Custom 2 with just the gains. The auto cal at 75% saturation.
Cheers.
 
Thanks for the good advice.

I bit the bullet and set only the blue and green gains for 100% white.

It dawned on my that the cuts are not analog and are just more jvc processing, nothing like my first analog crt projector with real cuts and gains!

I ran auto cal with 100% white perfect, but all the other white points way out with red all over the place. The Lumagen sorted it all.

A brief test and it looks much clearer, like a veil lifted as they say. I suspect it was the jvc r cut digital processing adding the mucky noise, especially on red, which had the largest cut setting. Hence people looking sunburnt:
ImageUploadedByTapatalk1444048616.740370.jpg
 
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Glad it worked out better, interesting about the sunburn people, as I'd expect something to show up in the reports to indicate (people looking sunburnt, assuming they aren't, ought to mean that errors are higher than 3.0dE).

Now you're all set for the autumn/winter viewing season ahead. I hope you've got a nice pile of discs ready to watch and enjoy now. :)
 
Watched American Sniper last night. Picture awesome, but noticed some 105ms of sound delay required now Lumagen in the video chain, but analog sound still out the oppo bdp-105.

Result was really enjoyable.
 

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