OK I managed to spend a few hours at Joe Fernands 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 hadnt had the remote packed up with it. Secondly Joes Lumagen scaler is out on loan and the one in my car had its remote robbed .doh!
As we couldnt 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 Id 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 couldnt 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 Joes).
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 HDEs. 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 HDEs 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. (Id 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 didnt 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 Ill try to compile a little post explaining what theyll do. I wouldnt 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 didnt 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 Ill try to answer.
Gordon
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 hadnt had the remote packed up with it. Secondly Joes Lumagen scaler is out on loan and the one in my car had its remote robbed .doh!
As we couldnt 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 Id 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 couldnt 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 Joes).
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 HDEs. 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 HDEs 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. (Id 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 didnt 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 Ill try to compile a little post explaining what theyll do. I wouldnt 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 didnt 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 Ill try to answer.
Gordon