I'm having trouble calibrating the brightness (I think, maybe it's contrast) on my DLP projector with AVIA. For those who don't know or remember, the test pattern is a black background with two moving slightly less black bars. You're supposed to adjust the brightness so that one of the bars blends in with the background but the other one is still visible. Well on my projector no matter how high I turn the brightness I can not see the second black bar. Even with it so bright that the black background is a light gray color I still only see one black bar moving. Is this normal?

My projector is in for warranty work at the moment and I'm wondering if I should get this looked at as well. As far as I can tell there's nothing else wrong with the images produced by the projector.

Also, I've noticed that on fast moving scenes or really anything that moves fast on the screen it makes a kind of blurry or strobe effect.

Your Projector or DVD player is crushing blacks, what models are you using and wht are the current settings in each?

I have an old toshiba (2700 I think) dvd player that I've used to calibrate two other tv's running to an arcam avr300 to the projector which is a Studio Experience 50HD. Component cables to the arcam and to the projector.

What settings are you talking about? Both should just be using the default factory settings and I calibrated the color, contrast, sharp etc on the projector with Avia.

DLP is easy to set brightness even if you cant see all the bars. Use the same test pattern. Go close to the screen and set the brightness higher than usual. Then slowly bring it down and there'll be a point when you notice dithering of the DLP panels. It looks like crawling green noise on the black background. Turn the brightness down so the dithering just disappears.

You're meant to be able to see both moving black bars, and it sounds like the source is clipping one of them. The brightness control adjusts the black level, and contrast adjusts the white level.

Does your DVD player have it's own brightness control? If so, adjust the brightness up until you can see both moving black bars, then adjust the brightness on the projector so both bars are visible, but the darkest bar is only just viaible above black.

Is your pj a DLP? If so, when adjusting the black level, you will know if the black is set correctly because there will be no mirror dither in the black area - you can see this if you stand close to the screen so mirror activity is visible. Only teh bars will have mirror activity as they modulate to produce grey.

The strobe effect you mention may be 'rainbow effect' which is the sequential RGB build up of the image becoming partially visible. You maye get used to that after a while and stop noticing it.

Gary

Thanks for advice. I'll try it out when it comes back from the shop.

You're supposed to adjust the brightness so that one of the bars blends in with the background but the other one is still visible.

No, you're supposed to see both bars. All the bars are above black.

I don't remember exactly but I'm pretty sure in the video before the test screen the guy says to adjust the brightness down until one of the bars blends in or at least is barely visible. Anyway, I'll use the dithering to calibrate it.

Is there any other easy tips for calibrating sharpness, contrast, color, tint, etc on a dlp or is Avia good enough.

As Chris said, both bars should be visible as they are 1% and 2% above black. IIRC, the instruction says to reduce the brightness until one bar disappears, then bring it back up until it becomes visible (so both are visible).

Avia should be fine for those things - only use the blue filter for setting color saturation though. Use one of the resolution test images and look at the text and other edges to see the effects of increasing the sharpness. You'll see ringing or halos appear around them as a form of edge enhancement as you increase it (a bad thing IMHO). Usually having it set to zero or midway is the best position depending on how the adjustment works.

Gary