[RobertWood]

Four words... "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon".


Everything I've seen to this point has looked pretty good. But then my little baby (I've grown quite attached to it) fell on it's face with the dark scenes in this one.


I don't have my uncalibrated DILA set up to compare. But I doubt it would fare much better.

If I'm ever going to use a digital projector for most of my viewing it's going to have to be able to handle dark scenes too. Now more than ever I'm putting my hopes in the calibration and modifications that will be coming available to us.


Bob


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~ The Sultan of Cheap ~

 

[David Mendicino]

The bain of digital projection...


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David Mendicino

 

[3.1415926 pi]

Robert, although you said that your little baby hasn't been calibrated, and you can't compare it to your other unit yet, I'm wondering, could it be the source material?

In one of Grant's recent posts, he mentioned that it seemed to him that each movie at times needed a little tweaking, which he would do during a freeze frame of a dark scene, and procede from there.

Your thoughts?? VB

 

[Frode]

Hmm.. maybe I should check my PAL copy... brb


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/frode

 

[RobertWood]

Hi VB,


That's something that I often do. Especially when trying something new. I froze a couple of scenes (there are a great many) which exhibited precious little shadow detail and worked on them with everything at my disposal (the projector adjustments, overlay adjustments, WinDVD brightness and color adjustments, etc.). I could bring out the detail but always at the expense of losing any semblance of black. Then everything takes on that grayish glow that is so objectionable to someone used to CRT images.

True the material in this case is presenting a difficult test. But Dave Mendicino has stated the case far better than I can. Dark movie scenes in general are indeed the "bain of digital projection".


Bob


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~ The Sultan of Cheap ~





[This message has been edited by RobertWood (edited 08-12-2001).]

 

[Lou Sytsma]

This movie doesn't show that well on my RPTV either. Granted it's only a 4:3 set. I was using component inputs though.


This is one tough movie to see clearly in certain dark scenes.


OTOH - another dark movie - Blade - displayed quite well using the LT150.


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Every man is my superior, in that I may learn from him.


[This message has been edited by Lou Sytsma (edited 08-12-2001).]

 

[Frode]

Not to state the obvious - but have you tried the Natural 2 gamma setting? Natural 1 looked way too dark and almost none of the detail was there. Switched over to Natural 2 and everything was much better - though of course not perfect.


On my disc I would have to agree with your comments about it being a torture test for blacks as there are so many dark scenes. I think the real problem here is that MPEG2 specifically takes advantage of uniform color areas such as dark shadows and then skimp on the details there. It's more of a format limitation than a projector one I'd think in this case. Calibration and tweaking might bring out more detail, but I'm not sure that would really help in this instance as you'd probably just see the compression artifacts more clearly.


These days I wish more and more frequently for HD-DVD...


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/frode

 

[ckolchak]

One of the hardest movies for me to get a consistently decent picture from is THE WARRIORS- which was not only dark, but low budget.

i actually thought Normal brought out the best shadow detail, but unfortunately skewed all the colors to an unnatural greenish cast. adjusting the white balances for each color only improved that incrementaly.

otherwise, going with nat 1 or 2, i could adjust to get a good compromise shadow level, but then when it switched to a daylight setting, everything was far too blown out.

i really wish that you could save your individually calibrated gamma settings.

i was kind of spoiled by my HS10 that way.

there were five different picture modes and with that spectrum it was easy to set up for certain basic movie conditions, and then just toggle between them to find the best fit each time.