whee! finally joined the crt enthusiasts :)

'it's 106 miles to chicago, we've got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it's dark and we're wearing sunglasses'
'hit it'

As of thursday I am now the very happy owner of a second hand Barco 1208 with about 1300 hours on the clock. It's absolutely excellent.

The first shock of the day was Roland turning up at my door sans moustache the second was seeing just how huge the 1208 looked in his car.

However once in and up on the ceiling it looked pretty much exactly how large I thought it would. Everything went smoothly, with only a few little niggles.

Colours are great - blue is fine. I'm running it at 1440x720 and thoroughly enjoying myself. I'm seeing detail in films that I've simply not seen before - I'm going to have to rewatch everything!

Blues Brothers was a joy to watch, as was Iron Monkey and a bit of Shrek tonight.

What really stood out though was the opening section to Mystery Men (it's a black cityscape with lots of stars etc, similar to a clean cut version of bladerunner). When I tried this on an LCD projector it was absolutely awful - horribly washed out, with detail that just couldnt be made out. It's wonderful on CRT - real 3D effect, great blacks etc

The BG1208 is lovely and quiet too, although this is admittedly offset by the HTPC I'm using to drive it - temporarily using my dual Slot 1 system with inbuilt fans - very noisy.

I've not sorted out proper blackouts, but it turns out this is less important than you'd expect because the reflections from the magnolia walls are quite significant. I think until I've repainted, blackouts are fairly useless.

So, what's still to do? Well, couple of little black spots (probably black paint) on the screen which I need to see if I can remove, should just be a matter of finding the right solvent.

The output from the BG1208 sometimes overhangs the screen to the left by a little bit; I was also getting a blue line to the right of the screen but just changed the right hand blanking to mask it out. May need to change the geometry slightly.

The greyscale test pattern shown by AVIA when Roland set the system up doesnt show quite enough differentiation between the two end blacks. This seems, however, to be something related to the G400 card in my HTPC. I'm sure this is fixable, but seeing as I'm going to build a new system with a different graphics card..

I'm having a fair number of issues with the aspect ratio in WinDVD 3. Probably going to buy TheatreTek anyway.

The great picture from the BG1208 now unfortunately highlights the inadequacy of my sound system, so that must be next!

I think I'm going to have a lot of fun rewatching my films

Pictures to follow, once I finish and develop the film.

PK

 

Yes!, we have converted another one. Welcome to the club

 

Welcome aboard PK,

The curse of CRT

You should try Dark City and U571 then.

Yes that magnolia has to go. I can personally recommend dark terracotta as being CRT/Wife friendly.

Yes, had the same problem back in the early days. You need to get the output sorted then do the projector. G400 is a problem. Switch to a Radeon.

Very wise. You'll have to redo Avia then!

Curse 2 of CRT and something I am still suffering from!

Jenz

 

As Del boy would say (changing to CRT) "you know it makes sense!"

You will be suprised how much more there still to come from your CRT. You will soon get the hang of tweaking it to the max!.

Getting a Radeon VGA is a must, as i found they give a true "video" type image, where as my previous Geforce card looked a little "cartoony" etc.
I now use a ATI8500 and since the "gamma" fixed driver came out i have had no problems. I also use Theatertek and have been very happy with it. Although TT still has some bugs in it, ie still no hardware assist with the latest Ati driver, plus it hangs when trying to use AVIA.

One of the best tips i can give you when it comes to big CRTs is keep the room temperature stable. This helps to stop convergece drift and the lens focus from shifting.

ENJOY!!!

 

Thank you both for your points. May well get a radeon. I was hoping to go for a Geforce (because I'd also like to play Jedi Knight 2 on the system, but that will need a wireless keyboard and mouse. ho hum. more to get ), but it looks like no-one has really gone down this route. An 8500 should be good enough, and playing movies *is* the main point of the HTPC.

Heat isnt a big problem at the moment, but I may vent the room into the hall as per Roland's suggestion. Need a very quiet fan for that though.

I must also thank Alex Simon (tryingtimes) muchly, as it was his website and demo that convinced me to go CRT.

A tip for preparing for the install: dont setup your HTPC at 10pm, as 'installing XP will only take a few minutes'. Formatting 27GB of spare NTFS hard drive (swapout caddys) took well over an hour and powerstrip really is a bit fiddly. Finally got it finished at 02:30 (doh). I can install NT4 on the same system in 5 minutes..

PK (thinking of watching Gladiator tonight )

 

A good test of picture sharpness/quality in Gladiator is to see how much detail you can make out on the people stood at the very top of the "Arena" in Rome etc. Low res systems can't display that there are actually people up there!.

good luck!!!

 

Congratulations on your purchase

A good crt really is something special, I'm sure it will continue to amaze you for a long time yet.

John (another happy 1208 owner)

 

Ahhhh, great to know that you went through with it all. It was good to have you round.
Now that summer's nearly over (did it ever arrive!) it's time to start tweaking/upgrading/fetling again. Time to catch up on AVS me thinks

One tip - wait until you've got the PC totally sorted with all the final players/drivers/cards/etc before you get Roland to come around for the second tweak. I didn't and I still think we could do with another try.

Have fun
Alex