Official RadianceXD support thread

Just got mine. Works great so far!

I cant remember, was there some talk the URC didn't have the Remote codes?

Dave

Great Thread
can you up-date firmware 062008

Aloha Glen

Good idea for this thread. Glad I thought of it and asked you to post it. Kidding.

071108 is up on Lumagen site

Glen

Hats off to Jim and his staff for doing an incredible job
every company should look at how Lumagen support there customers.
There the best.....

Glen

Does Lumagen have any plans for a DVDO Edge killer? A simple HDMI switcher with color correction and scaling for a grand would be perfect

+1!!!

I think Jim has already stated that's not on their current schedule.

They do already have HDQ and HDP wich have colour management and calibration tools beyond the scope of any other video processors bar the Radiance....

is the RadianceXD the one with the realta processor in it + much more? sorry I'm a newbie

No, it has a Gennum 9450, scaling is done by Lumagen. The design is modular, so the board containing the Gennum can be replaced if something better comes along. They might be looking at the new Reon, but for now they think that Gennum is the best.

I was kind of surprised to not find a blue-only mode (to say nothing of red-only and green-only) in the Radiance. It just seems so wrong to resort to a blue filter when using a product this sophisticated. Can blue-only be implemented as the Radiance is designed? Are there plans for blue-only in an upcoming firmware release?

I find filters to be poor substitutes for a real blue-only mode.

I find blue-only useful for setting the color and tint controls on the display. Using the Radiance, it's not generally necessary to use controls on the video display to set primaries and secondaries. But there's no sense moving on to the Radiance calibration without quickly setting Color and Tint on the display to "good" settings... the same way you do some initial grayscale (or white) calibration on the display before using the Radiance for full calibration. Blue-only will get the color and tint controls to their "nominal" settings without having to measure primaries and secondaries on the display since you're going to make them "perfect" with the Radiance anyway. It's a time-saver more than anything else.

I'm spending a lot of time learning the Radiance, first with a Sony XBR2 SXRD RPTV that benefitted considerably from the Radiance.

Today I switched to a Pioneer Elite Kuro... the new 9th generation model. I really wanted to see what a Gamma in the range of 2.4-2.5 looked like on this display. Lord knows it's dark enough to support a Gamma that high. This display really didn't need any help in the gray scale except there was potential to improve the 10% step a bit.

The Elite Kuro displays have 3 Gamma settings. On this one, the highest setting (post calibration of the panel with internal controls) measured 2.23, the next step was about 2.13, and the 3rd step measured about 2.03. I wanted to see what happened to the dark steps when I changed the Gamma compensation in the Radiance. I set the Kuro to the gamma setting that produced the 2.23 Gamma. I displayed a gray scale pattern (signal generator) with 11 steps from 0% to 10%. When I changed the Gamma compensation to 1.05, I lost the 1% step completely - no amount of increasing the Brightness control on the Kuro would bring it back. Going to 1.10 Gamma compensation killed the 2% step (0%-2% were all the same level... black... the signal generator is sending RGB-Video levels if that matters). At 1.15, the 3% step disappeared into black. And so it went... each step higher in Gamma compensation lost me a step in the 0%-10% pattern. I then viewed a movie I use for reference all the time (Casino Royale, Blu-ray) and found I could see the loss of steps in dark scenes as I moved the Gamma control up and down. Only the 1.00 setting made shadow detail appear normal.

The Kuro's Point Gamma measures a fairly straight line at 2.23 +/- after calibration of the panel (not using the Radiance). The gamma compensation adjustment did raise the measured gamma to around 2.48 (I can't remember now if that was the 1.10 or 1.15 setting). But the loss of shadow detail was fairly obvious to me.

So I guess the question is... am I missing something re. using the Radiance's Gamma control? Is what I'm seeing normal/typical of how the gamma compensation works? Is there no way to control Gamma in digital video without giving up gray scale steps?

Additional info: software is 090208 - Input from signal generator was RGB-v, input from disc player reads YCbCr 444 while playing Casino Royale. Output from Radiance reads RGB, 1080p in from generator and disc player, 1080p out from Radiance.

2 more questions:
-- How do you use the parametric feature for the grayscale (color temp) menu? If I want to move the default 10% step to 5% and move 20% to 15%... I'm not finding instructions in the manual nor by trial and error. I may have missed something though.

-- With both the Sony RPTV and the Pioneer Elite Kuro, the 10% step in the Color Temp (Grayscale) adjustments did either nothing or very little. Is this normal or am I missing something? Other steps seemed to work fine... only 10% seemed to have minimal adjustability. You could make adjustments, but they seemed to do little to the actual measurements of the 10% window pattern. Is this a function of limited number of digital values for red, green, and blue at this low luminance level?

Doug: This is one for Jim to answer more fully but..

In the multi point greyscale if you want to move the adjustment range for the 10% down to 5% you just highlight 10% and use the down cursor to change it to 5 (all the other figures will drop to 5......for 20 to 15 you do the same thing....then, if you want to alter the gamma more selectively you could say...select your first point as 5....then alter the end liminance of it to be 9 or somethign like that. Changing the gamma value at low ire's but possibly bringing back out that dark detail. I prefer to create custom gamma curves using the 11 point adjustment rather than the method you have tried.


In my experience adjustments in dark parts of image have usually been obvious to see. In the previous Vision range they would report what the actual signal they were receiving was. Often I would find that I would be looking at a window that the source said was 50% but the scaler woudl report as something different...so if you made adjustments at the 50% level there would be little or no effect dependant on how far away the actual pattern going in was....so you'd alter the % point to where the actual pattern was and carry on adjusting.

Obviously you are using a quality generator but I thought I'd just mention that useful feature from the past.

Jim should definitely answer about Lumagen's specific algorithms and implementation, but let me offer a numeric example that may help explain what you are seeing.

If you want to raise the gamma on a 20% signal from 2.2 to 2.5, you are essentially wanting to lower the lightoutput at that level from 2.90% of white to 1.79% of white. This corresponds to a re-mapping of the source signal from RGB(60, 60, 60) to RGB(51, 51, 51), using 8-bit video. The shift is less dramatic if you want to expand 8-bits into 10-bits, but the implications should be clear (and consistent with your perception). If you manipulate the source signal too much, you end-up with visible issues.

The question is really whether the parametric gamma math works similar to my example, above, and what the range of control really is.

Bill

First a little history. The "blue only" mode, originally, was a calibration control on some color CRT displays that allowed you to turn off the red and green guns and leave the blue gun on. This was convenient and slightly more accurate than using a blue filter to set the color and tint controls. I just want to establish that "blue only" is a display control and it needs to be placed right at the drivers for the panel.

We could add a "blue only" control to the Radiance but it would cause inaccurate color and tint calibrations on most modern displays. If the display has a red push error, an inaccurate color decoder or any other color error you will get a bad calibration if you only output the blue color channel from the Radiance. Most modern displays have at least some small color errors so we decided to not include a "blue only" control on the Radiance.

The "Blue only" mode is listed on the Radiance feature request list as "Blank two color channels for calibration". The description says to give users a choice if they want to do this.

This is really only a useful feature for calibrating a display that never converts the signal to YCbCr color space. A CRT projector driven by a DAC could be accurately calibrated this way. Using a blue only mode could give you calibration errors on the majority of modern displays because they always convert the signal to YCbCr color space. Any display that has a color and tint controls converts the signal to YCbCr color space.

We are always trying to help our customers get the most accurate calibrations by using Lumagen video processors.

Best regards,
Randy Freeman

I hadn't tried the Kuro with a lower Gamma setting before, so I just tried it... set Gamma to the #3 setting which measures about 2.03. Then I turned Brightness up a bit to get unambiguous viewing of what happens with the steps. With the Gamma factor set to 1.05, I could still see all the steps and 1% was definitely lighter than 0%. At 1.10, the 1% step became the same level as 0%. At 1.15, the 0, 1, and 2% steps were all at the same level as black and each additional increment of the Gamma Factor above that brought 1 more step to the same level as black. At the 1.30 G.F. setting, the 6% step was SLIGHTLY above black and 7-10% were distinct.

What I'm looking for re. Gamma is to get the midtones to not look too bright. Once you have seen midtones with a 2.4-2.5 Gamma, movies look more "artful" - even in flicks that aren't realy artsy pics... like Casino Royale, when the Gamma is in the 2.4-2.5 range, the lighting looks more "real" or "realisic" faces have more depth and details like shadows on faces are more dramatic. With the Gamma at 2.2 or 2.25, the same scene looks too brightly lit and faces become flatter... you don't notice facial contours as much and shots with a lot of depth (like the square in Venice from Bond's hotel room) seem flatter and not as interesting. Of course in getting the midtones to look right, I don't want to lose steps in the grayscale. I haven't had time to give the Kuro a second shot at 2.45 gamma using the 11-step controls... which brings me to another question...

With "IRE 10" selected, I can raise and lower that number with the up/down arrows and the ranges for red, green, blue, and luma also change. So that does appear to work OK. I thought I'd tried that before, but I guess not. In this case, it doesn't seem like IRE is being used correctly. Point 0 should say IRE 7.5, not 0 (everything is set to video levels). So the "IRE" control seems to be a % control, not really an IRE control? It certainly is easier to use as a % control than it would be if it was really using IRE units - most (all?) signal generators are using %. And among test/setup discs, I think only Avia is using IRE (I wish they'd give up on that to, it would make their discs easier to use for everybody). I'm in the camp that thinks it's time to let go of the IRE concept for digital displays. Having % and bits is ENOUGH!