Z5 Tweak Thread - Page 3

I just discovered that you can store Color management info in EIGHT slots. I love that idea! Can't find the setting where you change the color phase even though they're talking about it. Their manual could be improved on, obviously there was a language barrier of some sort. Too bad I can't read Japanese, I bet everything is perfect in that language.

Finally found a DVD that showed natural colors, Stargate Unlimited Ed., looks like my settings are quite good already considering working without my calibration disk.

Does anybody know if the Z5 would accept computer input over HDMI (from DVI) even if the pixels don't match (1280x764)? Or should I use the analog RGB input?

Re the bar codes I called the 800 number on the rebate form and it is the bar code on the cardboard.

Thank you very much!

Do you have any of the Star Wars DVDs? The THX optimizer is a decent basic contrast/brightness calibration tool, and if you have a blue filter you can do color, too.


I'd think the Z5 would just scale to its native res. How that might look, I don't know.

My DVE is on the way but they send it with MEDIA post service...takes forever!

No star wars here. I never got the hang of it.


Did anybody else notice that the Z5 is sucking air in around the front lens? That shouldn't happen, no filter there!

And what is that opening in the back for, that shows the little pad lock...security devices? (on plastic, yeah right!)

Many THX certified DVDs have the THX optimizer on them...if you get bored, check out any titles you may have.

I purchased the Sanyo PLV-Z5 to replace my Z3 on Jan 22. It is a definate improvement over the Z3 in contrast, black levels and on a 106 inch Carada brilliant white screen from
11 feet I have not seen any SDE as I did with the Z3. I contacted a local HT dealer that does ISF calibrations and I am gettiing it calibrated tomorrow evening. The ISF calibration technician called me last week and said that after getting service information from Sanyo on the projector, he claims that he should be able to calibrate it without getting into the service manual. That statement has me a little concerned because I was under the impression that ISF calibration required access to the service menu. At any rate he is ISF certified (10 years experience) and uses sencore equipment. If he is able to calibrate without using the service menu, I will post my settings after he finishes.

I got the Z5 recently and it being my first pj I am quite overwhelmed by the amount of settings and adjustments. I use mine on a 105", gain 1 Projecta screen mainly with a Pio 696 dvd via HDMI. From out of the box settings Creative Cinema probably looks best in my case. Pure cinema seems to be the most accurate one but my room isnt 100% light controlled so it looks a little dim. Has anyone played around with the creative cinema settings? I would love to try other peoples' settings and see how they look in my case.

I tried the Z4 settings of this guy called Rone I found on another forum. He had two one for Living and one for Creative Cinema but did not find either to be appropriate to mu eyes.

aaroen -- I don't have a Z5 (but contemplating getting one). From reading Art's review of it (http://www.projectorreviews.com/Manu...LVZ5/index.asp), the majority, if not all, of the Z5 adjustments are in the User Menus (go to the "General Performance" page). There are also a number of user memory areas for saving the settings for each input or viewing conditions. These are detailed in your manual.

You should get a calibration DVD anyway (for your own use (see my following discussion).

sapkan -- Art found that the Creative Cinema was the best for DVD movie viewing (http://www.projectorreviews.com/Manu...agequality.asp). he also stated that the color control needs to be turned down a bit. It is recommended that you get a calibration DVD like AVIA "Guide to Home Theater". The GetGray calibration Caldisc (www.calibrate.tv) is better, but it requires some experience and you need to get a blue filter, (see the free ReadMe file on his web site - if you understand what needs to be done, you should be able to use it).

NOTE: Each PJ, screen and viewing environment is different, so using someone elses setting is usually not right for you.

That is interesting since I lost my patience today and bought another DVE calibration disk; after cycling through the menu to find the easiest start for Contrast and black levels, Creative Cinema showed all three reference bars already clearly, the other settings did not so well. Which meant that I didn't have to change every setting and saved a lot of time.

Even after half a hour of tweaking with DVE I see already huge improvements. The DVE comes with three color filters to make it easier to align color levels and gamma values.
It's quite different from AVIA and the menu structure is a huge pain, but it was way cheaper also at $20.

The gray levels on the Z5 are in great shape out of the box, so everything else is just a matter of patience. Flesh tones are great at most levels already. I fiddled a bit with the sharpness control on the Z5 and at -5 or so any appearance of SDE is even more diminished and film looks again more film-like. Movies on big screens are never totally "sharp" either due to the grain emulsion. So far my contrast is still at "0", but I'm sure that will change again later.

The more I watch, the better I like the Z5, it's an incredible bargain at its price. Today I, got my blackout curtains, so tomorrow I can really "go to town" with the PJ.

more results tomorrow...

I've tried a short DVI to HDMI cable, no problem. Plugged in the cable to the computer with the projector off, then turned on the projector. Computer recognised "Sanyo PLV-Z5" and set the output rez to 1280x720. No problem under Win XP Pro or Apple OS X.

No offense, but I can't understand why anyone would want to display anything other than an accurate image. For me, the goal of calibration should be to get a video display that most closely resembles the intent of the original film maker, etc. But hey, if you're happy with your setup then that's all that really matters.

A related question question here: How long do stay any settings that are based on Factory seeings e.g. Creative Image? We have frequent power outages in my neighborhood, does a "reboot" delete my old settings that only refer to factory settings? I'm sure my user settings are save.

Quick question about lamp modes:

Do you all just keep the lamp in Eco mode? I switched from Eco to regular (I forget what it's called) and the image brightness did not seem to go up any. Is that correct?


A ranting aside:
I just set my Z5 up last night. I ran it through the Digital Video Essentials for a calibration. What an annoying DVD. It takes ages to get through all the history of the video standards. And then the actual calibration explanations are less than obvious. You can't skip to a section of just the test patterns. And it doesn't seem to explain how to make all the adjustments that I'd want. (e.g., There was a section for blue, but not for red and green.) OK, maybe I'm getting old, grumpy, I was tired, and in a hurry. Rant over.

At any rate, I calibrated it to what I think DVE recommended and the image was totally flat. I liked the image quality and colors of the Pure Cinema mode but the light level was too dim for my room, cloth screen, etc. So I'm just running it in Dynamic mode. The colors look a little crazy (e.g., flesh tones too orange) but it's bright and, overall, not too bad. I'm sure it could be better. But I'm not sure how to make the colors, etc. better. I don't think DVE will do it for me.

The manual iris might be preventing you from seeing the increased brightness...



You can navigate using the TITLE button on your remote. Title 12 has most of the display patterns you need.


It all comes down to if you want an accurate image or an artificial image. Just like there are people who like Bose speakers, even though they're awful at accurately reproducing sound, there are people who prefer a blown out/crushed picture with borked colors because it looks pleasing to their eyes. In the end, what's right or wrong doesn't really matter if you are happy with the results.

I think the factory image presets are stored in ROM, so you shouldn't have to worry about them going away from a power outage. Any settings you change from a preset need to be saved under the USER settings so I'm not sure I get your question.

Maybe he's asking how to make changes to one of the presets (e.g., Dynamic) and then save it as a user preset?

Come to think of it, I'd like to know that, too.

Jim-

Thanks for the help. I was getting a little annoyed with DVE because my new toys had just arrived, but I got stuck late at work and didn't get home with much time to play before it was already really late. And the disc kept talking on and on about the history of various technologies...


Good to know. I'll take a look there.


OK. So there is increased brightness. I didn't touch the iris settings. I'll look in there and see what I can change. I'm willing to take the hit on lamp life for a brighter image because it's needed in my particular setup.


Exactly. And I thought a calibration would get me to accurate. But it didn't look accurate, near as I could tell. Although the Pure Cinema mode looked pretty decent, for what I might expect. Of course, I'll never know what the filmmakers really intended it to look like. But I'm pretty sure it wasn't supposed to look as flat as it did last night. I'll have to play around with it some more.

I gotta learn to ask better , more detailed questions obviously.

My point was, that sometimes we fiddle with standard settings in e.g. Pure Cinema to improve on it and than leave it like that without saving into one of the 4 user slots. This happened to me yesterday, had a nice setting, kept watching movie.. and next morning it was gone, back to factory setting due to power loss over night.

Yeah, I'd say that's because the presets are in ROM (read only memory). So when you adjust something based off of a preset, it only stays active as long as there's power to the unit. To avoid loss of these settings you'd probably have to store your changes to one of the four user settings.

Select a preset mode and tweak it to your liking. Then at the bottom of the "image adjustment" menu there is a option that says "store". Select it and it will bring up the four user settings and allow you to choose which one you'd like to save your settings to. That's it.

ISF calibration of my PLV-Z5 took about 2 hours last night. Afterwards calibrator commented that the grey scale tracking was one of the best he had seen. Less than 2% error from IRE 10 to 100. He started with "creative cinema" preset and with the pattern generators connected directly to the Z5 via HDMI at both 720p and 1080i, these are the reference numbers:

Brightness +3
Color +6
Contrast -2
Tint 0
Color temp user
Red 0
Green 0
Blue 0
Sharpness +1
Lamp control economy(low)
Gamma 0
Progressive off
Lens Iris -42
Advanced Menu values (these are the values adjusted using Sencore for grey scale tracking)

Lamp Iris Auto 1
Auto Black Stretch off
Contrast Enhancement off
Transient Improvement off
Color List List 0
Dynamic Gamma off

Gain R +1
Gain G +2
Gain B -8

Offset R +13
Offset G -12
Offset B -6

Gamma R -3
Gamma G 0
Gamma B 0

When we connected the Direct TV HD DVR the picture was beautiful, flesh tones the best
I have seen on the Z5. But the overall brightness seemed too high and so he reduced the
brightness to -11 and color to +1. I stored these values under user 2 and kept user 3 at
the reference values above. Then I viewed some HD DVDs on my Toshiba XA1 and I was
very pleased.

aaroen-

Thanks very much for posting your numbers! I'll punch them in and see how they look in my setup. Should be interesting to see. Could be nice or totally different.

Just curious: Roughly what does it cost to have a calibration like that done? Just a ballpark figure.



Thanks, Jim. Obviously, I haven't spent much time with the projector yet (3 hours total), so I haven't poked around enough to even try that. I must be getting old- no paper manual bugs me. Got to pull out the computer and CD to look these things up. Maybe this weekend I'll get a chance to play with things in depth.

I have a 106 inch 16x9 Carada brilliant white screen with gain 1.4. The projector is shelf mounted at 11 feet from the screen. I have about 50 hours on the lamp. Now that it is calibrated, it is so close to my BenQ PE-7700. And the first Sanyo LCD I have had that I see no SDE from 11 ft viewing. Technician that calibrated it last night commented that it was the best LCD projector he had seen.

Cost will depend on your area but I was quoted anywhere from $350 - $500. in Chicago western suburbs. I paid $400. and now that it's done, I think it was worth it. I learned a lot just watching him and he explained everything he was doing. Basic equipment he used was a laptop, test pattern generators and Sencore light measuring sensor mounted on a tripod in front of the screen.

Thanks aaroen for posting your settings. I tried them this morning and they look great. I originally used DVE and it was an improvement IMO over the standard settings but after reading others posts I was thinking about getting spydertvpro or having an ISF calibration as you did. After trying your settings I'm content.

Thanks again,

Greg

Wow, just like me...I should consider getting paid for calibration...



Yes, the grays are incredibly neutral, they contain most video info and are an important step towards a great picture.


Thank you VERY much for the data, this will be very useful for most of us with white screens at least. My bulb is approaching 50 hours also right now.


"Technician that calibrated it last night commented that it was the best LCD projector he had seen."...

I have a feeling he tells that everybody...looking for a tip... , but yes, I believe we got a great PJ in the Z5.

thanks for your data aaroen, I'll give it a go and report back. Was HDMI at L1 or L2?