Looks like we needed a good, centralized thread to share helpful tips, tricks, and settings related to calibrating the Ruby. I'll start by posting some of my findings and some questions.
[Mods - please leave this thread in this forum rather than moving it to the calibration forum - as most Ruby owners will not find it there (a previous thread on calibrating Ruby dynamic iris got no action there and quickly sank despite many attempts to keep it going...)]
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I've calibrated two different Ruby's at this point (using ColorFacts 6.0 and the EyeOne sensor) - one was a demo unit and the other was mine. The pjs were connected via DVI to a Bravo D1 outputting 1080i using patterns from both VE and DVE.
I thought you may find it interesting to know that out of the box both were quite warm on the color temp from 20-100 IRE, particuarly below 50 IRE. For example both units ranged from 5800 - 6250, generally starting around 5800 and moving up toward 6250 as the IRE increased. The demo unit had about 125 hours; mine had just a couple at the time.
I did all my calibration in the auto iris mode. I found it worked best to calibrate using window patterns. If you calibrated for the windows and then later tried with the full fields, it was pretty close at the full field. However the same was not true in reverse (calibrated to full fields resulted in widely off #s when measuing against windows).
One thing I did not try that I'm interested in would have been calibrating at the window, then going to full fields and tweaking at the full fields, then checking again on the windows. Basically the full fields were close enough, and I didn't want to spend hours on this as I know I'll need to recalibrate it soon as I only had a few hours on the bulb.
Nonetheless, if anyone knows of the best approach to find the right balance between APLs when it comes to calibrating auto iris please post it here, as I am still a bit unclear on the process despite pretty good results from my attempts.
If anyone is interseted in my calibration #s from the Ruby with just a couple hours on it, let me know and I'll post them here. Assuming some similarity between units/lamps, using these numbers may be a good starting point for those without calibration equipment.
On another note, I was quite surprised that I had to set my Color control to 57 and Tint to 48 to get the Split Color Bars pattern to look correct. Anyone else notice this? I find that the grayscale I set via the Bravo works great on my Comcast STB as well. However I wonder if the same color/tint setting is applicable on there as sometimes colors may look over saturated.
I set my Contrast at 69 based solely on how 10 step IRE bars looked. At the default of 80 the 100 IRE bar looked kinda "mushed" into the 90 IRE bar. As I stepped it down toward 69 the seperation between the 100 and 90 IRE bars became much more defined. I stopped at 69 which was the point at which there was no more definition between the 100 IRE and 90 IRE bar compared to higher settings. Was this the result of brightness compression?
Normally you have to back the contrast down on these projectors because you run out of the limiting color at the default contrast setting. With the Ruby however I had plenty of blue (limiting color in its Xenon lamp) to spare at 100 IRE. So it was a shame to back the Contrast down to 69 but seeing the 10 step pattern made it pretty clear that this was a necessity. Perhaps when the bulb ages and light output drops, I may opt to bring the contrast back up to get the increased brightness at the expense of the upper end. So in a way it is good this flexibility is there.
One tough spot for me as usual is that unfortunately the EyeOne will not generate a valid CIE graph. I had this same issue with the Sharp 10K. It shows Red right on but blue and green are way short of their rec 709 coords so I know this is wrong. Therefore I cannot use the RCP to gauge how to dial in proper rec 709 coords.
I have my Ruby in Nomal color space. Can someone please recommend any tweaks/settings to the RCP to dial in the colors a bit more accurately as Greg mentioned doing in his review?
Please chime in with your questions, tips and tricks related to calibrating your Ruby.
[Mods - please leave this thread in this forum rather than moving it to the calibration forum - as most Ruby owners will not find it there (a previous thread on calibrating Ruby dynamic iris got no action there and quickly sank despite many attempts to keep it going...)]
=====
I've calibrated two different Ruby's at this point (using ColorFacts 6.0 and the EyeOne sensor) - one was a demo unit and the other was mine. The pjs were connected via DVI to a Bravo D1 outputting 1080i using patterns from both VE and DVE.
I thought you may find it interesting to know that out of the box both were quite warm on the color temp from 20-100 IRE, particuarly below 50 IRE. For example both units ranged from 5800 - 6250, generally starting around 5800 and moving up toward 6250 as the IRE increased. The demo unit had about 125 hours; mine had just a couple at the time.
I did all my calibration in the auto iris mode. I found it worked best to calibrate using window patterns. If you calibrated for the windows and then later tried with the full fields, it was pretty close at the full field. However the same was not true in reverse (calibrated to full fields resulted in widely off #s when measuing against windows).
One thing I did not try that I'm interested in would have been calibrating at the window, then going to full fields and tweaking at the full fields, then checking again on the windows. Basically the full fields were close enough, and I didn't want to spend hours on this as I know I'll need to recalibrate it soon as I only had a few hours on the bulb.
Nonetheless, if anyone knows of the best approach to find the right balance between APLs when it comes to calibrating auto iris please post it here, as I am still a bit unclear on the process despite pretty good results from my attempts.
If anyone is interseted in my calibration #s from the Ruby with just a couple hours on it, let me know and I'll post them here. Assuming some similarity between units/lamps, using these numbers may be a good starting point for those without calibration equipment.
On another note, I was quite surprised that I had to set my Color control to 57 and Tint to 48 to get the Split Color Bars pattern to look correct. Anyone else notice this? I find that the grayscale I set via the Bravo works great on my Comcast STB as well. However I wonder if the same color/tint setting is applicable on there as sometimes colors may look over saturated.
I set my Contrast at 69 based solely on how 10 step IRE bars looked. At the default of 80 the 100 IRE bar looked kinda "mushed" into the 90 IRE bar. As I stepped it down toward 69 the seperation between the 100 and 90 IRE bars became much more defined. I stopped at 69 which was the point at which there was no more definition between the 100 IRE and 90 IRE bar compared to higher settings. Was this the result of brightness compression?
Normally you have to back the contrast down on these projectors because you run out of the limiting color at the default contrast setting. With the Ruby however I had plenty of blue (limiting color in its Xenon lamp) to spare at 100 IRE. So it was a shame to back the Contrast down to 69 but seeing the 10 step pattern made it pretty clear that this was a necessity. Perhaps when the bulb ages and light output drops, I may opt to bring the contrast back up to get the increased brightness at the expense of the upper end. So in a way it is good this flexibility is there.
One tough spot for me as usual is that unfortunately the EyeOne will not generate a valid CIE graph. I had this same issue with the Sharp 10K. It shows Red right on but blue and green are way short of their rec 709 coords so I know this is wrong. Therefore I cannot use the RCP to gauge how to dial in proper rec 709 coords.
I have my Ruby in Nomal color space. Can someone please recommend any tweaks/settings to the RCP to dial in the colors a bit more accurately as Greg mentioned doing in his review?
Please chime in with your questions, tips and tricks related to calibrating your Ruby.