Below is a letter I sent to Support at Digital Video Essentials regarding a problem I am having with the Hd DVE calibration disk and Joes Kane's response. It is self explanatory.

Has anyone run into this? Will whatever causes this problem pose a problem with a professional calibration?

Thanks,

To Digital Video Essentials Support:

> I previously owned your SD DVE disk for calibration of my monitor and found it very helplful and easy to use.
>
> I have a problem, however, with the HD DVD edition and had hopes you could assist me.
>
> I Have a Toshiba A2 HD DVD player with a HDMI>DVI connection to a Hitachi 55HDM71 plasma monitor. I attempted to calibrate the display for Brightness.
>
> With the Brightness test I could see no Pluge to each side of the four gradient blocks and none appeared through the entire range of the brightness scale.
>
> The A2 has a "Black Enhancer" setting, but I have that turned off.
>
> I can find nothing on the A2 setup menu other than the "Black Enhancer" that might cause this lack of response. I called Toshiba support and they could not help.
>
> I called Hitachi and the support there did not know of any settings on the display that might cause the problem. I asked the Email Group at AVS forum and no one there had any ideas.
>
> As I mentioned, I had no trouble with seeing the Pluge when calibrating my SD DVD player.
>
> Have you run into this problem with anyone else? Help!!!
>
> Thanks, Bill

3 June

Hi Bill,

Sorry for the delay in answering this. We've been out of touch with the help line while producing and arranging for the distribution of the HD DVD of DVE.

Not being able to see the two steps above black is probably not the fault of the Toshiba player, at least it isn't a problem here. We've seen this situation with several other brands of display devices. In most cases we've been able to improve upon the condition in the service menu of the display, but in several cases fixing the dark end of te picture destroyed the light end of the picture. There was no point in the adjustment range where we were able to display the full dynamic range of the video signals between black and white let alone from just below black to well above white.

We would suggest getting a hold of a well qualified calibration peson as a starting point. They often know much more about properly adjusting the sets than consumer hot line people representing manufacturers.

If the set is truly defefective by design someone on the forums has probably written about it.

Joe Kane

Thanks for using the help desk, if you have any further difficulties or are required to respond to your request, please login to the help desk

_______________________________________________

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Has there been anyone with the hitachi plasma you have, having the same issue?

Has there been anyone with the hitachi plasma you have, having the same issue?

I don't know. To restate I have a Hitachi 55HDM71. Anyone out there have this 55 inch plasma? If you haven't tried the High Def DVE AND if you have a Hitachi 55HDM71 I will let you use my DVE disk to see if it works. That would narrow down the cause. :)

Bill

Is your DVI setting set to STB and not PC? I see a lot of displays set for PC that won't display the proper levels. The other thing to try is using a component hookup and see if that works using DVE.

Bob

I have both the A2 and XA2 connected to 2 Pioneer Elite 1130s thru HDMI. I too cannot see the BTB bars on the pluge test with my A2. However, I can see them with the XA2 if I increase the brightness within the player to +2 (increasing the brightness on the display does not work). So in my case it is the player and not my displays.

I thought all the Tosh's still convert to PC RGB when connected to a DVI display (and some connected to a HDMI display with recent firmware).

larry

Keep the pluge pattern up and toggle through any gamma choices or picture choices your display has, work with the brightness control on each choice.

I had crushed blacks on the HD-DVD pattern and HDA1 with my Mits HC2000 projector. I found the black enchancment (gammas) moved up 1 click brought back the pluge bars. Maybe you can find something similar on your display.

Should I be using HDMI from my Satellite receiver or is component decent enough?

Is your DVI setting set to STB and not PC? I see a lot of displays set for PC that won't display the proper levels. The other thing to try is using a component hookup and see if that works using DVE.

Bob

Thanks, Bob

It is correctly input to STB. I will set up the Component Video connection to see if the pluge is visable. I didn't think of that.

Bsaxon,
I have a prediction that component will work fine (show pluge). You need to adjust the levels, as suggested above, to get pluge over dvi (actually hdmi->dvi).

Also it might be worth checking with other hitachi plasma owners for similar problems.

jeff

Changing the player to make the BTB to appears means that the BTB is no longer BTB. :) With HDMI->DVI and the Tosh's you are getting PC RGB. Unless your display can handle PC RGB correctly you are going to have a hard time correctly calibrating. Your going to wind up with flat spots somewhere in the grayscale.

larry

Should I be using HDMI from my Satellite receiver or is component decent enough?This is "off topic". However, I have DirecTV satellite service and I get the same quality picture using either the HDMI or component outputs (they both do 720p and 1080i on my H20 STB, at least for now).

In fact, I'm using the component connections because my H20 STB exhibits signal dropouts with the HDMI connections (at random intervals and very disturbing).

Is the 360 with HDDVD add on able to run this HD DVE disk?

Is the 360 with HDDVD add on able to run this HD DVE disk?

Yes it can....

..
which brings me to my input on this subject.

I have a Vizio 47" HDTV. A XBOX-360 w/ ADDON.

I have it them hooked up using VGA @ 1920x1080.

With the recent update to the HDDVD from Microsoft...they added a Black Level setting....3 options Standard, Intermediate and Expanded....no clue what those really mean.
I also have the HD-DVE.

Everthing ive read says I should be using Expanded with VGA...so

With the XBOX set to Standard I CAN see the pluge patterns. With the XBOX set to expanded I CANNOT

However, the PQ at least to me for both DVD and HDDVD is much better with it set to Expanded.


I am new to all this so I have no clue what to make of it.

I have a similar problem with my Xbox 360 HD DVD player. I am outputing 1080i to a Sony HD CRT through component and cannot see the BTB bars when using the HD side of the disk. I can however see the BTB bars using the SD side of the disk when the 360 outputs at 480p.

Not sure what the reason for this is....

I have a similar problem with my Xbox 360 HD DVD player. I am outputing 1080i to a Sony HD CRT through component and cannot see the BTB bars when using the HD side of the disk. I can however see the BTB bars using the SD side of the disk when the 360 outputs at 480p.

Not sure what the reason for this is....


Does your XBOX 360 give you the new Black Level settings? not sure if this is VGA only thing.