Official Sony XBR2 (60" & 70") Owner's Thread - Page 17

Yep, there are three modes to choose from to fill the screen with 4:3.

You wanna picture of me? Awwww....

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I bumbled through AVIA and nothing looked amiss, most settings were spot-on (I did note about 10 pixel overscan top and bottom). Blacks are very black, but maybe some crush?? in some feeds like HBO. As I said, ESPN HD is about the best I can imagine. Batman Begins SD on the Tosh HD DVD was excellent. SD really varies--some looks really good. CBS college football was very bad, BUT it (and most if not all bad SD) looks VERY good in the twin view size. The twin view is pretty cool and I think I'll use it alot with crappy feeds, esp. given how close we sit and given the fact that the twin images are 2" larger on diagonal than our previous 27" crt

Now I am no videophile and this is my first hdtv, so ymmv. More experienced folks-- please put it straight.

I just saw your message. but unfortunately I'm on my way out the door. I will check tomorrow and get back to you. What I can tell you is that I just picked up the SA 8300HD from cablevision so I'm assuming that it has the latest and greatest firmware (unless it had been sitting in their inventory for some time). I also know second hand (through my local audio store) that they have other customers using the SA 8300HD and passing HDMI through a receiver to a HDTV that accepts HDMI. Anyone else on this thread with a similar successful setup????

It's finally my turn! Yay, me!

Got it today. Immediately took the ears off and overrode pretty much every factory setting. Now looks fantastic. Here are a few notes to add to those posted by others:

+ Convergence is much better than I expected from a fixed raster multichip projection display. No worse than a pixel anywhere, maybe a pixel and a half in the very corners.
+ Projection seems correctly oriented, no obvious tilt or keystone.
+ Tons of options are A Good Thing(tm).
- Slight hourglass/pincushion for 4:3 is annoying, but ultimately ignorable. Still, I'd expect better for $7k.
- Only one s-video input. Not the end of the world, but slightly annoying with both an SD TiVo and an old VCR that sees some infrequent use. Oh well, screw the VCR.
- Menu operation can be rather slow. What's with that?
- Edit: I used to say here that I thought SD content was not very good because the scaler relied too much on bilinear filtering to upconvert. On default settings, that is true. However, now that I've done basic calibration of the picture and turned on CineMotion for 480i content (WHY is it off by default?!?), I'm finding SD material is looking imuch better. In fact, the the upconversion to 1080p really is very good. Yes, It's still a toonce too fuzzy, but the smoothing of jaggy lines and curves even on very dirty analog SD content is remarkable, indicating to me that it has a really good deinterlacer on board.
- I don't understand why mode changes are so klunky on a non-CRT display. It's not like you have electron guns and electromagnets to re-configure. *shrug*
- Overscan, rrr. The have an option to increase overscan. Why no option to decrease it? Duh. The loss of 1:1 pixels might be okay in some cases.

I'm pretty thrilled, all in all. Worth the hassles I've experienced? Well, maybe not. Worth the purchase? Totally.

Here's a picture of my set on a BDI Icon 9428, in case anyone else is considering that stand. What you can't see is that the pedestal is hanging about 3/4" off the back, but that's not really a problem. Note that the viewing position for this TV is from a fairly tall king size bed, so the tallness of the stand (23") is appropriate. You can actually see the edge of the bed at the very bottom. Sorry, the picture is grainy due to low lighting conditions. I didn't want to use a flash. That's also why the image is blown out, but I'm assuming people have already had their fill of close-ups of the screen anyway.



The TV is pretty far from the wall, so no, it doesn't actually cover up half of the doorways the way it appears to.

Can someone tell me the exact width of the 70" with the speakers removed? Sony shows 68.6" on their website, but the on-line manual says 67.5". Reason I ask is that the wall unit I have is only 68.25" wide.

If it really is 67.5" W, I have a good excuse to buy the 70.

jk

Yay, AikenG! A $7k bedroom tv? Dude, you must be the man, man.


I really liked your great overview. The only thing that I puzzled me was menu operation. All menu operations were instantaneous for me. Changing hdmi inputs and HD channels, however, are ire-risingly slow.

Congrats!

That's about the same divergence I'm seeing, red's bending down one, maybe two pixels at the sides.

Since I feed from an external scaler, I'm not noticing the mode changes, but I'd guess it is the internal scaler circuitry adjusting, I see somewhat the same thing with the external scaler.

How much overscan are you seeing? As I said above, I'm getting 6-8% on the horizontal, 4-5% on vertical. Is that what you are getting? The reason you can't correct it in the settings is I don't think it is digital, I'm pretty sure it's optical. I'm torn right now on whether to kick in some underscan and lose 1:1, or live with some missing picture.

But it really is a great picture, isn't it!?

eric

I had 68", you'll be fine. I did leave off the trim pieces, but the clear plastic pieces stay unless you want to try taking off the bezel. I think with the trim off, it probably comes in about 67"-67.25". I actually had to angle it in and rotate it because of a couple of front pieces on my cabinet, but we made it.

eric

I'm going to drive a couple hundred miles to pick-up the KDS-R70XBR2. Does anyone have the dimensions for the box it comes in? I don't want to get there and find out my vehicle won't work?

This is my first post so if I've messed up, please be understanding.

Thanks for the help.
KT

KTTV- are you going to try this? If so, when? I am very thick headed and need to see it, so if you do this, can you take pictures along the way? thnx!!!

Looked today and the 70 is on BB.com but it shows as a magnolia exclusive which bites as there is no magnoila even remotely close to me I guess I can hope that the 60 will at least be avail in BB

Thanks toofargone, I appreciate the reply. Good to know, now can't say I'm not disappointed though

KT, yes the front access door opens without interference from the trim piece. also, the trim piece is squeezing the front of the pedestal. The pedestal and the bottom of the front shelf is sandwiched tightly within the trim piece, creating a tight fit. The front of the pedestal is at the edge of the shelf under the trim piece. Also it is not locked into place, but pulling it off would take some effort. Dremel's are somewhere in the neighborhood of $80-$100. I suggest buying a kit that has an assortment of tools that you might find useful for other projects if you decide to buy one. The kit usually has a plastic case to store attachments and the dremel. I find uses for the thing all the time. As for cutting, you just screw a little wheel on a shaft the fits in the dremel head. The cutting wheels wear quickly, and you replace it when it gets too small. They come in a little plastic sleeve and run about $6 for 20 of them.

Robbin, I originally intended to remove them and then changed my mind and decided to leave them on. I wired an external speaker attachment to the rear of each speaker enclosure so that I could add some rear speakers using the sets amplifier. But, you're right, the TV would line up just about perfect with the ends of the stand without them. Thanks.

Bought the 60 today delivery tomorrow will post pics once I get it all hooked up . Been researching for about a year was waiting to see if the sharp 46/52 d62 could compete but given that the 52 is 4.5 k and for that you getting fewer inputs, loss of PIP and personally I think the pic on the sony crushes (personal opinion) the sharp I caved today and picked one up.

Anyone know where you can see the 70 in Orange County, CA?

The empty's are sitting in my garage. The main piece is 78x50x28, but it sits in a bottom piece, so I'd add a couple inches to all dimensions to be safe. Lots of warnings on the box not to tip it over on its side.

Thanks for the dimensional info. Looks like I'll have a TV and the kids will have a fort.

Heh, it's acfually because my wife and I basically live in the master bedroom, instead of the family room like normal people do. Otherwise it'd be down there where the cheap TV is. I'm not that rich.


Going in and out of menus is pretty slow, and changing certain options is extremely slow, to the point where you can get two or three moves queued up without realizing it. Since all changes are live, I'm guessing this is just because it takes a moment to process the change before the next menu input can be read. It's not as big a deal now as it was when I had to fix everything (freaking factory defaults).

I agree, though, that most menus actually are quite fast.

Hmm, it really shouldn't take more than one or two vblanks. I've actually written firmware to switch a scaler between rather different modes before. Usually it's only the display device itself that takes a while to sync, and only if it has to reconfigure electron guns. A digital display like LCoS has no reconfiguring to do, it just reads the output from the scaler. Oh well, no point pondering, it is what it is.


I haven't run an actual test pattern yet, but eyeballing it, I'd say something along those lines. I'm assuming manufacturing tolerances on these units are tighter than typical, so we'll probably all see about the same.


Well, the reason for the overscan is surely optical, but it could be (hackishly) fixed digitally. The increase in overscan in the options is certainly digital. There's no reason why they couldn't have provided a downscale instead of an upscale. Again, though, it is what it is. I've seen worse. It just makes me sad that TV manufacturers are forcing a safe region on HDTV content, even though there isn't supposed to be a need for one.


Well, yeah, once you change every single setting in the options.

I especially noticed that several of my 480i/p devices wanted to be on the ITU709 color matrix. Until then, the reds were all rosy/pinky. I guess defaulting to the older color encoding is pragmatic, but you have to know to fix it for newer video signals. I hate to think what clueless people have to live with with these sets.

If you are willing to make the drive, you can see it at the Wilshire Home Theater in Thousand Oaks. The Pacific Sales in Camarillo is going to add it to their floor, so you may check with the Pacific Sales in Irvine or the Tweeter in Newport Beach.

Interesting observation on the 4:3 pincushion/hourglass problem:

Looking sideways at my screen, I can see that it bows in a little in the middle. If you apply gentle pressure to the middle of your screen (use a cloth!), you can easily double the hourglass effect. Not surprising that the screen bows in, and not surprising what the effect is.

I wonder if we all just need to get our screens made non-concave somehow. Beats me how you'd do that without risking damage, though. Get yourself a pops-a-dent and hope for the best?

Football day Sunday on XBR2s!

How is all of this NFL programming looking on your XBR2 sets? I'm wondering how FOX'S 720p, NBC's 1080i, CBS's 1080i and ESPN's 720p all looks upconverted to 1080p?

Thanks!

Okay, I fired up DVE. If you mean left+right and top+bottom, then yes, that's close to what I get. Almost exactly 2.5% on either side, and about 3% each for top and bottom. The variations are probably due to our players more than anything else. Now that I look at the 1.78:1 geometry test, the circle looks a little tall. That's probably why my vertical overscan was greater than yours.

It's probably meant to be 2.5% overscan on every side (5% total), which is not bad for TVs that have overscan. Of course, this TV really shouldn't HAVE overscan, but oh well. I guess they just wanted to avoid returns of XBR2s wherein the light engines weren't aimed quite right.

I'm not a sports guy, but I have to admit that today, after hooking this set up and seeing football, I wish I were.

Mind you, either Comcast or NBC was way overcompressing the college football that was on today. CBS looked better. They both looked fabulous as long as the image was static, but pans were painful to watch.

I actually have watched a few games here and there, and I could swear the quality was a lot better before. Maybe it's a college vs. Superbowl thing.

There was something on Fox, I forget what, but it looked good.

On my Sharp LCD FP all HD Games having been playing perfect especially CBS and ESPN, TNT Sports with CBS being the best but the one channel I am having a similar challenge with is NBC HD Football during normal views it's close to perfect but once NBC pans it has issues that I see on no other HD Channels and I've been viewing mine for 9 months but something is amiss with NBC HD Football - no other stations on my Sharp has panning issues whatsoever yet when I watch their College or Sunday Night the pans present it while I have no other channels replicating the event. My Sharp is slower than new ones at 12ms but I have no motion problems doing X360 or other channels since a very slight issue during the Winter Olympics with downhills but even then were very slight - now I think about it the Winter Olympics were NBC HD I believe.

As an SXRD has great response times I would put the onus on NBC HD and compression - someone's cheating as there is no way that should occur on a new SXRD and the panning issue does not replicate on any other channel with my set and yours is much faster.

Of course. I didn't even consider that it was the TV. I know where big blocky motion artifacts come from.

The only fault in the TV is that the default picture settings are all set to things that highlight the ringing and blocking that are already in the signal.

Last night I watched Tennessee/Georgia (ESPN) DTV and compared with Oregon/Cal OTA on ABC.

Both were fantastic on the 60 XBR2. However, the OTA was clearly superior, vivid and striking.

Can't wait for NFL today.

I havn't tweaked my set yet. The grass on football on some fields seemed a little too green.

No folks, I doubt if this is any concern.

Anyone have any thoughts on this?

Oops! I left out CBS and NBC. I watched Florida on Georgia OTA CBS. Wow!

I also saw some Notre Dame Stanford OTA. Magnificent.