Calman v4 autocal for color gamut not working with Mini3D

Last week I bought an autocal package that Spectracal put together for me that consisted of Calman v4, a C6 meter, and a Lumagen Mini3D. I am using it with the following system:

Panasonic AR-100U projector
Onkyo NT 808 receiver (hdmi switcher)
50 foot HDMI cable
03112012 firmware for Mini3D (latest)

Everything works fine (without calibration) with the Mini3D out of the loop. When I try to autocal with the Mini3D the gamma and greyscale seem to calibrate correctly. But when it goes to do the color gamut all hell breaks loose. The Mini3D will put up the correct test pattern for a color or two. Then all the sudden say it is suppose to be working on blue, the Mini3D will be putting up a red pattern! I have seen a case where it was suppose to be working on green and put up a blue pattern which of course messes things up.

For further info I got into the menu system of the Mini and the "Reference" color patters were fine but when I looked at the "Adjustable" color pattern for blue it showed red there too.

One last problem. When all of this happens the Mini will go into an output mode that looks like a negative from the old days of film photography. Changing from RGB to Yxxxxx etc does not fix it; only a factory reset will put it back to working properly..... that is until I try to calibrate color gamut again.

I have contacted both SpectraCal and Lumagen but wanted to see if I could get some ideas for a solution here.


Thanks for any help with this problem you can provide.

Last night I made sure I had the dE set to 2.5 and used the interactive DDC to get through the gamut and actually made it through the whole Radiance workflow. Great I thought, at least this will work with the temporary workaround for gamut until v5 comes out. Wrong! Although I had made it through the workflow with all the charts looking good, the actual picture on the display looks like that negative from film photography I mentioned in the earlier post.

I did find out that display looks wrong for any CMS slot I have used with Calman (say CMS 1 and 2) but I can switch the Mini back to the default CMS 0 and everything goes back to looking correct (except with no calibration of course).

This is getting very disheartening since I have well over $2000 and 20 hours of time, and still have not gotten one single calibration that was usable from "autocal". I expected some learning curve even with the autocal, and I have learned quite a bit, but this is getting ridiculous.!!

Anyone have Calman v4 working correctly with a Mini3D?

The firmware is "Production 031112" which is the latest.

What values on the Mini UI do you mean? The x,y,Y for the different colors?

Here are some numbers from the Mini. Hopefully they are what you asked for.

Color, SubR, SubG, SubB

White, 217,319,309
Red, 0,19,2
Green, 24,0,0
Blue, 0,1,0
Yellow, 0,0,0
Cyan, 0,0,0
Magenta, 0,0,0

Thanks for the heads up on the new fw too.

I am not really sure since I had inadvertently already cleared them out of the Mini. But I do have an update.
With some help from the Calman Support Team I have discovered a couple of things.

First the workarounds. For my situation the autocal is indeed not working correctly with my Mini (looking forward to v5) and using the interactive mode instead of auto mostly works. There is a problem when you "drag" the gamut luminances toward the 0 target line. If there is a high difference say 150+ give or take and try to move it to 0 all at once, the color patterns put up by the Mini may go haywire. For instance say the blue is sitting on 200 and you drag it all the way down to 0 it will likely put up a red test pattern and mess things up. Happened while dragging green a long way too..... it put up a blue pattern. The solution I found was to do it a little at a time (about half) say from 200 down to 100, then to 50, then to 25, then to 0. Doesn't take much longer and it does not mess things up. Again I am very much looking forward to v5.

Secondly I realized some information that most of you already know but me being new to this sadly did not.

You cannot drag color gamut on the CIE chart that is residing within the triangle (color space). This can mess things up.

It is very difficult to get a good calibration for a projector for a condition with lots of ambient light. Just expect to get a good calibration in a dark room and don't expect much with lots of ambient light. I assume flat panels do much better.

Finally I will say that once I got a nice calibration last night with no ambient light the projector screen looked very good. Frozen Planet on Discovery especially.

Sorry for the long post but wanted to help out any other unassuming person new to this calibration thing and maybe save them some trouble.

Thanks for everyone's advice and help.

Actually I am already using a FTDI USB serial adapter.