Pioneer 434/504 HDE calibration etc

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

 

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

 

RGBlevels Before:

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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