CI adjustments to match DTC-100  

I've got my DVD player going through the CI which is connected to the VGA pass-through on my DTC-100. That way, all inputs go into the RGBHV HD inputs of my wide-screen Mits.

Previously I had been setting up color by using Avia through the CI. The problem with this is that the color, brightness and contrast of HDTV transmissions seemed a little off compared to the DVD player.

Last night I had Pat Bradley, an ISF technician who's in town for a few days, do an ISF calibration on my Mits.

He started out with VE through my VHS recorder into the antenna input of the DTC-100. He adjusted brightness, contrast, color decoder and gray scale tracking on my Mits using this set up.

Then he went back to using the DVD player through the Mits to adjust everything. We tweaked the settings on the CI to get them to match the DTC-100's settings. Here is what we ended up with:

Crystal Image Parameters:
Contrast: 46
Brightness: 7 (!)
H Detail: 5
V Detail: 3
Saturation: 42
Tint: 25

Note, that only Tint needed no adjustment to get it to match.

On the whole, I'm quite happy with the adjustments. The gray scale corrections he performed got rid of the greenish tint I was seeing in the blacks, and now I'm seeing a lot more detail in the dark areas of DVD movies. The picture really sparkles! I was watching a portion of "The Big Blue" afterwards, and the picture was much improved.

I routed the output of my DVD player into the VHS machine to get the VE through. I was a little concerned about signal quality, but Pat seemed quite confident that the levels would come through ok. He did a good job, so I guess that works ok. I did not have him adjust any geometry on the set, as I've been going back and forth with the HDTV input from the DTC-100 and the DVD player to finally get pretty good geometry: 4% overscan all around on the Avia Overscan test pattern, and a little centering on the DTC-100, but things look darn good.

Mike,

You're right. I mis-spoke. There is no VGA pass-through on the DTC-100. I've got it all programmed on my Marantz remote and I forgot which one had the pass-through. Same final effect, though: either the DTC-100 or the CI VGA output is connected to the RGBHV inputs of my Mits. VHS in this set up goes through DTC-100 as an RF signal to allow calibration of the Mits with the DTC-100. I don't watch the VHS machine this way --in fact I hardly ever watch VHS tapes at all anymore --but route the video output into the CI for scaling.