Joel Noble
05-17-09, 11:18 AM
I recently got my RS-10 from AVS, calibrated by Jason. Colors look great on User1 (where his calibrations are, along with a custom color temp), and things seemed well. I'm in a basement "cave", and have the iris set to 1 and the lamp set to normal, with the gamma also set to normal. The RS-10 is connected via HDMI to a Denon 3808ci, which in turn is connected via HDMI to a Toshiba XD-E500 DVD player. (The Blu-ray player is backordered -- I selected the Toshiba because of its good reputation for upsampling DVDs with HDMI output, since I have a large DVD collection).
Having watched a couple films and TV shows on DVD, it's become very apparent that I'm missing a lot of black levels -- that is, below a certain point, things go to pure black. I think people call this "crushing" the blacks. I believe that the black levels are really missing somehow -- opening the iris and/or increasing the brightness on the RS-10 has no effect. The one thing that certainly does help is to tell the RS-10's HDMI setup to use "Enhanced" rather than "Normal" HDMI input (except then everything looks washed out, but the black levels are there finally).
With the DVD player on, the RS-10 color space MUST be YCbCr 4:4:4 -- anything else looks bizarre. There is no color space setting on the DVD player. Changing the output resolution on the DVD player from 480p to 1080p or 1080p/24 makes no difference to this situation. All the color enhancement modes on the DVD player are off.
On the 3808, I've got the i/p scaler off. Once the DVD player is on, changing the 3808's color space on the HDMI options between RGB and YCbCr does not affect things (It appears to be ignored if HDMI with a different color space is coming in to pass through). Similarly, changing the "RGB Range" on the 3808 between Normal and Enhanced makes no difference when the DVD player output is coming through.
I put in Avia II and found good confirmation of what I'm seeing -- with the RS-10's HDMI range set to Normal, the moving faint black bars are absent (as are the moving faint white bars in the white patch), regardless of iris setting or lamp output. But when I tell the RS-10's HDMI setup to use "Enhanced", they're clearly there. I don't know how to tell, but I'm pretty sure that some black levels above 16 are also forced to pure-black with "Normal", because of what I see in program content -- black clothes and hair lose all dark detail in "Normal", but it's present in "Enhanced".
From everything I've read, I should be able to have the HDMI set to Normal (16-235) rather than "Enhanced" (0-255) all the way through and have things correct, right? But somehow -- perhaps it's the DVD player's fault? -- doing so seems incorrect if all the information is supposed to be in 16-235. Plus it makes things look washed out, which I could try to address with gamma or brightness fiddling -- both of which also seem like the "wrong" thing to do.
Any suggestions on the "right" thing to do here? Is the DVD player behaving badly vs. HDMI spec? (I haven't found any mention of it in writeups). Is there something else I should be trying? Is this all normal and what I think I've understood about 16-235 Normal vs. 0-255 Enhanced range incorrect?
I sincerely welcome an education!
Having watched a couple films and TV shows on DVD, it's become very apparent that I'm missing a lot of black levels -- that is, below a certain point, things go to pure black. I think people call this "crushing" the blacks. I believe that the black levels are really missing somehow -- opening the iris and/or increasing the brightness on the RS-10 has no effect. The one thing that certainly does help is to tell the RS-10's HDMI setup to use "Enhanced" rather than "Normal" HDMI input (except then everything looks washed out, but the black levels are there finally).
With the DVD player on, the RS-10 color space MUST be YCbCr 4:4:4 -- anything else looks bizarre. There is no color space setting on the DVD player. Changing the output resolution on the DVD player from 480p to 1080p or 1080p/24 makes no difference to this situation. All the color enhancement modes on the DVD player are off.
On the 3808, I've got the i/p scaler off. Once the DVD player is on, changing the 3808's color space on the HDMI options between RGB and YCbCr does not affect things (It appears to be ignored if HDMI with a different color space is coming in to pass through). Similarly, changing the "RGB Range" on the 3808 between Normal and Enhanced makes no difference when the DVD player output is coming through.
I put in Avia II and found good confirmation of what I'm seeing -- with the RS-10's HDMI range set to Normal, the moving faint black bars are absent (as are the moving faint white bars in the white patch), regardless of iris setting or lamp output. But when I tell the RS-10's HDMI setup to use "Enhanced", they're clearly there. I don't know how to tell, but I'm pretty sure that some black levels above 16 are also forced to pure-black with "Normal", because of what I see in program content -- black clothes and hair lose all dark detail in "Normal", but it's present in "Enhanced".
From everything I've read, I should be able to have the HDMI set to Normal (16-235) rather than "Enhanced" (0-255) all the way through and have things correct, right? But somehow -- perhaps it's the DVD player's fault? -- doing so seems incorrect if all the information is supposed to be in 16-235. Plus it makes things look washed out, which I could try to address with gamma or brightness fiddling -- both of which also seem like the "wrong" thing to do.
Any suggestions on the "right" thing to do here? Is the DVD player behaving badly vs. HDMI spec? (I haven't found any mention of it in writeups). Is there something else I should be trying? Is this all normal and what I think I've understood about 16-235 Normal vs. 0-255 Enhanced range incorrect?
I sincerely welcome an education!