Pioneer 434/504 HDE calibration etc

[Gordon @ Convergent AV]

OK I managed to spend a few hours at Joe Fernand’s this afternoon. Joe kindly left me to play with is 504HDE and an 868 DVD player he borrowed from a dealer.

I wanted to get a whole slew of thing done.

1: Compare HDMI against component in to plasma.
2: Compare HDMI against component in to external scaler then on to plasma
3: Measure before calibrated settings
4: Measure after calibrated settings
5: Try to find way to fix massive overscan on RGB input.
6: Measure primaries and secondaries.

A few things got in the way of all this. First off the DVD player hadn’t had the remote packed up with it. Secondly Joe’s Lumagen scaler is out on loan and the one in my car had it’s remote robbed….doh!

As we couldn’t get in to the settings to adjust output of DVD the HDMIvComponent was done using 480P(525P).

The first thing I did was use Avia to adjust contrast, brightness, colour, tint/hue, sharpness. I then checked these with Video Essentials to confirm everything was close to as good as poss. Then I measured what it was doing.

After that I headed in to a super secret (I could tell you but I’d have to kill you) hidden menu system to see what improvements I could make.

This hidden menu is hard to navigate and has many levels. I had NO documentation. This meant I couldn’t work out where to find the overscan adjustments but I am sure they must be there somewhere. The component and HDMI is actually not bad but RGB does seem to be pretty hugely overscanning (at least on Joe’s).

Whereas the previous Pioneers and the current Panasonics allow you to calibrate each input of reach incoming scan rate that is not what appears to happen in the menu I found for the HDE’s. Usually you would calibrate for the sources you have. Ie

Sky box RGBCompsync (576/625P)
DVD YprPb [email protected]/[email protected]
VCR, PAL

Or perhaps with a scaler, [email protected] and [email protected]

Instead with the HDE’s you can use the 5 separate pre-defined colour temperatures as your new presets. This means that you would re-set all of them away from what they are. I re-did MID using a 480P source to create a D65 accurate setting at that scan rate. If the scaler had been working we could have made the HIGH temp setting D65 correct for a [email protected] input. In this way it would/should be possible to have multiple assignable temp settings to allow accurate playback of many input signal types. (I’d hope…)

I never remembered to save the before gamma curve. I did save the before RGB levels and colour temperature. Basically the image had too much green and way too much blue at the mid temp setting when all other front panel controls were set properly. If you want to see a gamma curve for pre-calibration this months HiFi News and Record review has one in it I think.

Some of you are probably wondering what the PRO settings are for in this set and also what the RGBCMY settings are for. Well I didn’t have time to measure all that but I am very confident that they are going to adjust the CIE co-ordinates (rgbcmy). This is a complicated thing to explain without diagrams and charts but if I get a chance I’ll try to compile a little post explaining what they’ll do. I wouldn’t advise touching them though. The Pro adjustments are for greyscale and are a global offset from hidden settings in service menu.

Hopefully the pics will be uploadable….

Other things I can say are that I think the 868 may be a flag reading de-interlacer as some of the stuff I put on had nasty de-interlacing artefacts that I would not have expected to see on a picture info reading solution. I didn’t think the difference between HDMI and component was very big once unit was adjusted. Unfortunately I also forgot to take my SW ep2 disc to check the artefact reported on another thread…….sorry!

Hope you like my work on this. Any questions and I’ll try to answer.

Gordon

 

[Gordon @ Convergent AV]

Having trouble with pics......will post them in a mo
G

 

[Gordon @ Convergent AV]

RGBlevels Before:

 

[Gordon @ Convergent AV]

RGB levels after. In an ideal world you'd get a single white horizontal line

 

[Gordon @ Convergent AV]

Temperature Before: Solid line is measured and dotted is ideal. This is around 8500K plus average.......

 

[Gordon @ Convergent AV]

Temperature After: Running along the 6500K line......nice eh!

 

[Gordon @ Convergent AV]

Gamma: The dotted line under the solid (measured)line is the ideal. 2.2

 

[Senninha]

Gordon, does this mean the 434s are now possible to calibrate?

 

[stormjai]

Gordon,

any chance of just listing the best settings you achieved for 434/504 ( from picture menus), for those of us with just sky+/DVD (no scalers, clever calibration menus etc... . there were threads before, but now from an expert
thanks

 

[Costas]

Gordon

I fully agree with stormjai... additionally if you can give picture menu settings for both HDMI and Component, it will be of great help

 

[Gordon @ Convergent AV]

The settings I used were with the 868 only at 480P output. They would not be relevant for other sources or DVD players I wouldn't think.

It's not my Plamsa and I didn't copy it all down I just wanted to see what was achievable.

From memory Sharpness was at -3 or -4. The difference betweenthose two clicks as large. One had no added ringing but was very soft and the other had added ringing but was nicer to look at.

Colour as at -7 I think.

Brightness was at either -5or6 or +5 or 6 (sorry can't remember whcih side)

Contrast, sorry don't remember

Setting was MOVIE

Colour temp was MID (but I calibrated it to D65 in service menu. Prior to this it was too blue and green....or minus red, low mid might be better compromise)

RGBCMY settings at default.

Yes this means that a calibration could be possible. I still am interested to see what the C3 software for my spectroradiometer and laptop will allow me to do with these. In the meantime it does look like I can get a more accurate image out of these.

Gordon

 

[Costas]

Thanks Gordon. Personally I have Brightness at +5, Colour at -8 with Colour Temp at MID but sharpness at 0. You will find that there is significant difference when you change the HDMI resolution on the 868 from 720 x 480p/576p to 1280 x 720p or even 1920 x 1080i.

I have covered it in a separate thread a few weeks ago and we all believe it has to do with the number of scaling steps up or down from the player and the plasma. The 434's native resolution is 1024 x 768, so I assume that by setting the DVD player at 1280 x 720p the 1280 bit will be downscaled by the plasma. Still, I expect setting the player at 1280 x 720p will offer better picture than setting it at 720 x 480P/576P (I do appreciate that for some non-anamorphic DVDs, you need to change the resolution to allow selection of the correct aspect ratio). It is just that the 1280 x 720p set does not look really any better than the
720 x 480/576P to me. It shows a slightly less well defined image with slight drop on contrast/colour and focus. The 1920 x 1080i setting recommended by a few here is better but still below the 720 x 480p/576p image. All the tests I have done so far have been performed with the Video left at DIRECT mode on the 868.

I have reported this to Pioneer 3 weeks ago and they said they did not had their UK lab equipment set up yet to fully test this and comment. Have not heard anything further yet.

 

[Gordon @ Convergent AV]

Thanks Costas. We seem to have very close settings.

I really wanted to see the 720P output from the DVD so i could get to the bottom of why it looked so bad when I saw it at the Scottish HiFi show. Having spent an afternoon with the devices now I think that something couldn't have been right with the analogue output setting or input setting at that demo as the difference was small between analogue and HDMI.

Gordon

 

[Costas]

adding the Contrast setting at + 30, missed it earlier...

 

[Diapason]

Gordon, thanks for all of this info. I'm really looking forward to hearing your results as time goes on. I know nothing about the technicalities, but your graphs are pretty interesting!

I'm just wondering, I've described on here before a problem that myself and wiped (and maybe others) are having, namely the vertical streaking on horizontal pans. It looks like a "dirty tube" effect, but in regular vertical bands across the screen about half an inch width each. You mentioned that you had seen the same effect before. Was there any sign of it in these tests? I'm awaiting a new screen and box from Pio this week, but I'd love to get some confirmation from a pro that this isn't the norm for these panels.

Cheers,

Si

 

[Gordon @ Convergent AV]

I didn't do tests for that sort of articfact Si. I saw it on a bright scene of HD at that show. They were showing a clip of car racing and the vertical banding was obvious in high IRE sections. I suspect it's a limitation of their video processing. If you let me know particular scene where it is showing then perhaps Joe can check it out. If not the next time I am at his I might.

You have to remember that I don't own an HDE and it's a 1.5-2hr round trip to pop over to Joe's to test his. If someone wants to give me one for a week then I might be able to get some definative answers

Gordon

 

[Diapason]

Hi Gordon,

I'm finding the artifact all over the place, high IRE, low IRE, shake it all about IRE

It's especially bad against sky or grass (football is the most obvious situation). One scene that I notice it is in LOTR:FOTR (region 1) where the fellowship have just left Rivendell and are walking across the mountains (before it starts to snow!) The sky in the background on some of the pans exhibits the problem. I'll see if I can find better examples and give timings, etc. Of course, I'm still hoping that the problem is inherent in the first batch or something, and that the replacement will sort it out. If that's the case, I won't be posting any timings!

As regards overscan, the 434 I have (using RGB) certainly exhibits *very* large amounts of overscan. Another problem I'm having is that whenever I change inputs or turn the screen off and on, the image position shifts and I have to constantly change the settings. Just to be clear, I don't mean that the setting changes, I mean that if a setting of 0 produces a centred image, if I turn the TV off and on again, I may have to change that to -5 to re-centre, next time +5, whatever. Is anybody else experiencing this? I'm pretty sure this didn't happen with my first media box (which was replaced with the current to fix dropout, but the current hasn't fixed that either).

Anyway, I appreciate very much you taking the time to go to Joe and do the research. If you lived in Dublin I'd gladly give you the use of mine for as long as you needed. You can find out more in an hour of playing than I could in 10 years of constant use

Cheers,

Si

 

[Costas]

Diapason
I recall your thread and all the details and my comments to you too. Still I just took my R1 LOTR you suggested and played the scene and looked very carefully again. DEFINITELY 100% NOT A PROBLEM ON MY SCREEN.

Regarding the image position shift, I think you definitely have some memory issue. I thought I had the same for a moment.
In mine it only happens if I change the HDMI resolution from the 868 DVD player. Other than that each plasma input keeps my position settings even when changing between s-video, RGB, Component, HDMI etc...

I could be wrong but I am quite sure your problems will go away with a new screen and media box. We know there have been issues with the very first batch and Pioneer has been attending to this.

 

[Diapason]

Thanks Costas. Having heard reports from yourself and others, I'm pretty confident that all problems will be solved by the replacement. I'll report my results as soon as I get the new screen, which should be any day now.

Thanks for putting my mind at rest again,

Si