"High Definition Benchmark" BD Edition by Stacey Spears and Don Munsil - Page 6

good suggestion, but no, my PS3 is updated to the newest firmware. Like I said, everything on my PS3 (blu-ray movies and games) looked beautiful until my problems/service last month.

This sounds like an issue for Samsung customer service.

-Bill

The offical AVS thread on your series is here: http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showt...ight=lnt+4061f

Some comments:

1. Not all displays can be set correctly.
2. Were you able to see this information before the TV repair? You mention AVIA, but AVIA does not have patterns that contain below black or above white information. Its possible your TV never reproduced all of it.
3. Don and I liked at a current gen Samsung a couple of week ago and we were able to dial it in with the user controls. I have had two Samsung front projectors and rear project DLPs that could also be dialed in, so there is hope.
4. There may be a master contrast control in the service menu that has a larger range. I can't advice on this one because going into the service menu is dangerous. The thread posted above would probably have that type of info.

It might be worth having someone, like MichaelTLV or David Abrams, come out and perform a full calibration. They have the service menu level experience.

Some very interesting points. You're right abaout the Avia, I had completely forgotten about that. The only thing that gives me concern still is how horrible the image looks... detail, lighting, and image quality have all taken a huge hit since the service call/motherboard replacement, and this is after multiple calibrations using various setting changes. It just does not look right. Why would a motherboard replacement do this? I put in a call to Samsung... we'll see what happens. i would love to get MichaelTLV or David Abrams to come out to my apartment and professionally calibrate the set, but I live all the way out in West Virginia... not exactly a haven for electronics. There's not even any professional calibrators in my area to do anything like that, or even anywhere near me. I'm going to keep plugging away for solutions until I hear back from Samsung... hopefully a solution presents itself.

Thanks again for all your help! Wish me luck...if you guys think of anything else, feel free to let me know via this forum or pm. I hate what's going on with my tv, but I've really enjoyed this back-and-forth experience with knowledgeable tech people. Take care!

Speculation: There are several internal adjustments in a service menu. These are usually made with a motherboard installed. Its possible that these have all been reset to some value or that each mother board needs its own adjustments. With analog, this occurs more often. It should be less of a problem with digital, but who knows.

Have you gone back and looked at older DVDs that you remember and see if they look worse?

Some of the calibrators go on tour. I know the two of them do, but I don't know their schedule or routes.

Hmm. May have to contact them via pm and see about the schedules, if that's the route I need to end up going on. Anyway, called Samsung...told me to contact GE, who ended up buying my Circuit City warranty plan when CC went belly up. They describd a list of problems it could be (samsung), al of which correspond with everything I've heard here on these forums.

Contacted GE... they set up another service call for the set. Technician from local service center called about 20 minutes ago, told me h'ell contact Samsung to see how to tackle this problem. He says if he can't fix it, or if it's going to be expensive, he'll try and get GE to authorize a warranty buy-back. So we'll see what happens; I'm going to wait to take any action until he comes out again, and I'll go from there.

And yes, as for old DVD's and blu-rays that always looked great before on my tv, I've tried my "reference" titles... and all of them look...strange. Not horrible, just very weird. Colors/lighting all look very off...and the picture does not look "crisp" at all. Way overly subdued; I'm not sure how else to describe it.

Thanks again for your help, and regardless of my problems, you have produced a great calibration disc! I used it on my other samsung lcd oday, and everything worked great! Bravo!

Guys, I had a question about the RGB filters. I was reading its instructions last night and saw that it mentions using the filters for adjusting the color. At work I deal with machine vision cameras and have a set of different optical filters for the lenses (CS mount) to experiment with.

They're all bandpass filters, similar to what a previous poster linked to on Edmund Optics. Mine are from Midwest Optical Systems and they include a Blue (470nm), Light Green (525nm), and Light and Dark Red (635nm & 660nm) filters. Here are some links to the filters, including transmission graphs:

Blue 470nm
Light Green 525nm
Light Red 635nm
Dark Red 660nm

I'd like to use these for my adjustments - would these wavelengths work to block out the unneeded colors? Any idea which of the two red filters would work better? These would be used on a direct view CRT tube TV, if that matters.

Thanks for any help!

Try them and see. My guess is that the dark red is the most likely to work, but it all depends on the specific spectral curve of the phosphors on your TV.

Put up a standard SMPTE color bar pattern (the "Color Bars" on our disc) and look through the filter at it. Look only at the upper row of large bars and the second row of small bars just under it. Some of the bars should turn solid red, green, or blue, (depending on which filter you're using) and the rest should turn black. If the "black" bars aren't fully black, but have tints of color or are brighter than other "black" bars, then your filter is no good for calibrating that TV.

Take a look at this guide, with pictures:

http://www.spearsandmunsil.com/artic...ionfilter.html

This technique doesn't just apply to our filter, it applies to any filter. The task of the filter is to remove all the light coming from two of the three color primaries of the display. If it is letting through any of the light from the other primaries, it won't work for calibration.

For those of us that are getting this disc included with the BDP-83, will there be a way for us to purchase the blue filter along with the red and green, since I assume getting this disc from Oppo does not count as purchasing it?

Dave,

We will offer filters for sale. This will be the only way to get the red or green filters.

I believe OPPO will be providing Blue filters with the player as well, but not 100% certain at this time. We are hoping the filters will be in house after memorial day. Once the filters arrive, and we have more details, we will post the information here.

OK, thanks. My BDP-83 has already been shipped, and I rather doubt that filters have been included with the current crop of discs, though I suppose it's possible. I could, of course, use the blue filter included with Video Essentials, but since you have made it clear on this thread that the user should have the exact filter, I would be hesitant to do so.

The filters are not finished yet. You can go ahead and use the DVE filter. It should be about the same as the 2x filter window on ours.

You can follow our instructions with any filter. If it blocks the red and green enough that those bars are indistinguishable from black, then you can use it. If it doesn't, it isn't usable. Go ahead and try the VE filter.

In fact, if you have anything blue in the house you can look through, you can try it. Seriously. The lovely thing about using a filter to calibrate hue and saturation is that if the blue, cyan, and magenta bars turn blue and the red, green, and yellow bars turn black, then the filter is good. It doesn't matter where it came from.

Thanks! I'll try it when it arrives.

You can read the instructions here: http://www.spearsandmunsil.com/artic...ionfilter.html

With the Dynamic Range High pattern, I can only see bars up to 235. Isn't this correct for 4:2:2 YCbCr video? For the low pattern, I see all the way down to bar 18 (barely!). I can only see bars 236-255 underneath the OPPO's menu/setup pattern.

I'm using the BDP-83 and Pioneer 151FD plasma, calibrated.

No, it is not correct. You should be able to see all the way up to 254. The background of the pattern is 254 with the last bar being 253. Reference white it as 235, but peak white is at 254. Something is clipping the pattern. Have you tried turning contrast down to see if the bars return?

What input are you sending to the display? Be sure to try 4:2:2, 4:4:4 and RGB video. You might also try the different modes on the display. They usually have modes like dynamic, movie, etc...

We recently looked at a Kuro and it was capable of reproducing the full dynamic range up to 254. (and down to 1)

Stacey,

I hooked up the OPPO directly to the Pioneer, and am using ISF-Day and ISF-Night settings. Turns out these two ISFccc modes are clipping 235 IRE+. It doesn't matter what I set the contrast to in these modes, they both clip the signal about equally. I can see the remaining pattern when I cycle through Pure or Performance, etc. modes.

Strange. So how often will 235+ IRE be encoded on DVD/BD?

I forget how these work. Are thse enabled once they are actually setup or were they enabled by default? I know you have to use a PC w/ specific software to adjust the ISF modes.


You can have pixel values that only fall between 16-235 in the Y channel, but end up with lots of pixels above 235, once converted to RGB. I would say this applies to 100% of the content on DVD and BD. OK, its crazy to claim 100%. 99% then. Here is an exaple, Y 140, Cb 161 and Cb 202 would convert to R 254, G 100, B 200

If you look at the clipping pattern, only the white has Y values above 235. The red, green and blue all fall between 16 and 235 in YCbCr. They are only above 235 once converted to RGB. You should look at this pattern when switching between the modes.

They are not enabled from the factory. You must install ControlCAL software on a laptop and connect via RC-232 connection to enable and input parameters for these ISF modes.



Very informative, thanks.

Here is an example. This is from the BD of Cars.

Original Frame:


Green is below 16. Pink is above 235:


YCbCr Histogram:


RGB Histogram:

The histogram background has a light and dark gray. For YCbCr, the dark is 1-15 and 236-254 for Y and 1-15 and 241-254 for Cb/Cr. For RGB, it is 1-15 and 236-254.

Interesting. I'm still researching a method to correct.

BTW, can you share with us why the RED cameras used to film the opening montage have an aspect ratio of ~2:1? I don't know much about the cameras, just curious as to your decision for the presentation.

At the time I started shooting the footage, 2:1 was the most reliable mode in the camera.

I tried to read this entire thread but it was just taking too long. What exactly can I do with this disc without any specialized calibration equipment? Also does it make a big difference if I play the disc from a laptop vs. a dedicated BR player? I don't really have a need to purchase a separate player since my laptop came with HDMI and VGA output capabilities. I'm assuming I wouldn't be able to adjust the laptop screen itself since the BR would be playing while I would try to make video adjustments. Sorry for the silly questions. Thanks in advance.

You can set brightness, contrast, and sharpness correctly on your display. You can evaluate the deinterlacer in your display and compare to the deinterlacing built into the software on the laptop (if the laptop offers an interlaced output format). You can find out what output options produce the best picture. Will using VGA work better in some respects than HDMI? With this disc you can find out.

You can evaluate a whole lot of specific quality measurements for each different option you have. If the video driver gives you the option to output 4:2:2 or 4:4:4 or RGB from the laptop over HDMI, which one gives you the best results? With this disc you can find out.

What happens when you turn on or off different display options? With this disc you can find out.


No, not really. You'll have some options that a dedicated player wouldn't have, and will be missing some options that a dedicated player would have. And if you want to borrow a player and see if the picture is any better than what you're getting from your laptop, this disc will be useful in figuring that out.


Most laptop screens don't really have the controls you'd need to adjust things like brightness and contrast. Typically the "brightness" control on a laptop just changes the backlight brightness, which is a completely different thing than the video "brightness" control.

But if there are different options in your player software, you can certainly use the disc to see what (if any) difference they make. You might need to change the setting, then restart playback, but that's OK.

The montage uses the full peak bitrate Blu-ray allows. The peaks are hit during some of the cross fades. Standalone Blu-ray players should have no problem playing it back. A PC, on the otherhand, may have trouble because of processing limitations. You can use the montage to see if your PC has enough horse power.

I went into my laptop video card settings and looked at the NVIDIA control panel. The settings I could adjust are: brightness, contrast, hue, saturation, gamma on the red green and blue channels, and dynamic range. So all of these settings just adjust the backlight in different ways? Also, the laptop and tv's I hook up to are all 1080p so there is no use for me to display at an interlaced resolution. Does the disc come with directions to explain what to adjust for a particular picture? I've used the THX calibration chapters from Star Wars DVD's and they weren't exactly clear in explaining what I was supposed to do (eg. Adjust the color until the red bar on the screen is magenta. How am I supposed to know what color magenta is supposed to look like?!?!?!?) What exactly is a montage?

Speaking of gamma, the AE3000 has advanced gamma and contrast settings in the regular user menu. Can these be set using test patterns or do they require sensors or other specialized calibration equipment?

Those are usually coarse controls. I would not use them.


If you watch SD DVD or 1080i content, something has to convert to progressive. Either the PC or the display. One may be better than the other. In general you would want to let the one that does a better job convert.

Some standalone BD player offer a native, or source direct mode. If the display does a better jobe, this is often the best mode to use. For 1080p content, the player would output 1080p, for interlace content, it would output interlaced and the display would convert to progressive.


There is an included booklet. The same text is also available on-screen as pop-up help. You can read the text here: http://www.spearsandmunsil.com/pdf/U..._Benchmark.pdf

We are publishing articles that go into more detail here: http://www.spearsandmunsil.com/articles.html