Ruby vs CRT - Actual Comparisons

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I spent a couple of hours setting things up with ColorFacts Saturday for the different inputs. I basically just went to where the colors were within a reasonable percentage (if red said 106 to 97 and 97 for some IRE lower than 100 I didn't worry about it), but I didn't measure the gammas and didn't use any custom gamma. I also had set the color space to normal (from wide) and hadn't changed anything permanently in the service or factory menus. But the G70 hadn't had a color calibration in a while and we'll probably look at doing that with my sensor and Colorfacts at some point. I was trying to keep that in mind somewhat and was concentrating on some other things more than just the color calibrations.
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I'm not trying to tease you. I would just prefer that some others get a chance to say some things without getting drowned out. Basically Steve since he owns the G70 and others who didn't have either horse in the race (if they want to). I will repost basically what I put in another thread here though:
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--Darin

I was fortunate to be at last nights viewing and see the Ruby/G70 match-up with Darin and Steve. (Thanks guys!!!)


Image quality from both these machines is obviously fantastic. The main thing I walked away from the viewing with is that the extra brightness from the Ruby (albeit with a new lamp) provides it more flexibility for displaying different sources and ultimately just more opportunity to make the images pop compared to the G70, while retaining the same amount of detail.


On some of the brighter material I found myself straining more to watch the Ruby…the ND filter solved this, but most of us thought the ND filter might have hurt perceived contrast somewhat. On the other hand, the CRT provides such a smooth picture I could sit and watch it for hours and hours (but would probably be craving the WoW+ of the RUBY while doing so). For the majority of the Ruby viewing the ND filter was off (always off on the Firehawk).


In terms of screen’s I thought the Firehawk provided a much better viewing experience for the Ruby…especially with the white-walled room. I don’t want to imagine what the Ruby on a hi-power would do…probably too bright for my own tastes. The black-floor on the Ruby didn’t meet my (stratospheric) expectations, but still…I don’t think I’d complain too much, as scenes with any amount of contrast showed the black area’s extremely well and with as much detail. The Ruby's brightness uniformity is a bit disturbing, but I didn’t notice it while watching…only on frozen frames.


We did a lot of A/B frame flipping between the Ruby and the G70 watching Gladiator in HD on Steve’s 1.5 gain screen. The total capability of each projector to resolve detail is fairly close IMO. Overlooking a couple of the G70’s focus bands near the bottom of the screen, the detail displayed is surprisingly similar. If anything, I give a slight edge to the ruby, maybe 5% at most though.


In the beginning of Gladiator, when Maximus is riding through the muddy clear-cut areas prior to the battle, the amount of detail and depth shown by the Ruby is fantastic. The 3D appearance of details such as the soldiers marching and the detail in the background clear-cut looked significantly better to me on the Ruby than the CRT. When watching the same scene on the CRT, you can tell the soldiers are there…but you have to look for them; whereas, with the Ruby they just stand-out effortlessly. In the execution scene following the first battle, the perspective of the tree’s in the foreground and background stood out better than on any projector I’ve seen this material on. These were probably the most noticeable improvements I saw on this source.


Overall, with its resolution, brightness, and dynamic range…the new Sony is the first projector that I think surpasses the quality of the old Sony. Absolute black is still a win for the CRT, but for everything else it's hard to argue with that bright, detailed HD image.


-Derek S.

Darin as you know, I have a G70 with new tubes and have been following Digital advancement so when my tubes are toast i'll probably switch over at that time. With that said, I am interested in this thread because I was thinking about picking up a Ruby for a second PJ but I have changed my mind, maybe this thread will change it back. But a couple of quick questions. Not that I doubt Steve's set-up skills but does he setup to crush blacks thus losing shadow detail or does he use gamma correction of some sort? And how much visible wear(if any) are his 4000 hour tubes showing.


One thing that I think might be hurting the G70's punch is his screen size. IMO 119" diagnol 16:9 is a little big for 8" CRT's.


EDIT: One more thing I forgot to ask...Darin could you give a brief discription on the HTPC's...As we all know that has a huge impact on the images.

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You didn't think me starting a thread was just in order to toot my own horn as I notice you didn't say anything about that. Okay, just kidding.


Steve has done some stuff about the gamma down low and we've talked about it a fair amount and looked at different scenes (like the one from "The Two Towers" with Wormtongue). This is one reason we compared with the HTPC. In the past we had looked at an HD version of "Gladiator" through the 30k, but it just seems to look a fair amount better with the HTPC to the G70. He doesn't have anything like this for gamma for non-HTPC, but that might change when there are more options available there.


On the punch issue Steve can comment on the tubes. The screen was 110" diagonal and that is one reason he went with 1.5 gain. After everybody left we did do some measurements and my memory is that from the HTPC the center of the screen was about 6 ft-lamberts with both full screen white and a window pattern, but through the component input I believe it was closer to 7.5 (with the corners being less than half that in each case from memory).


On the HTPCs, we were both running a version of TheaterTek. Mine is the latest with renderless VMR9 and I know Steve has been playing with the latest, but I don't remember if he was using it here. I was running 1080p48 and it seemed to do okay for lock with HD transport streams, but with DVDs I was getting more judder at times. I need to look into that as I thought it was working well at home, although I don't watch many DVDs. I have an NVIDIA 6600GT in there, but I don't recall what card Steve is using now.


--Darin

First of all I want to thank Darin for hauling all of his equipment down and giving us an opportunity to see the latest projector technology from Sony.


We started off by looking at some DVD's that didn't have the greatest image quality. Darin wanted to see if they looked worse on the Ruby than the G70. Both projectors handled the grainy and noisy DVD's pretty well. I preferred the G70 on this material. I thought the CRT looked smoother and less noisy. One of the discs we looked at was the original Terminator. The opening scenes are fairly dark and grainy. The elevated black floor of the Ruby was apparant which made the image look a bit hazy below a certain APL. Also visible on some dark scenes were the lit up corners. With this material the higher resolution of the Ruby didn't seem to make the image look any more detailed. There was a scene when Arnold first appears where there's a sheen on his forehead. On the G70 you could see some picture detail in the area of the sheen. On the Ruby it looked smeared with little or no detail, almost like the whites were blown out. I preferred the Firehawk on the Ruby but there was some visible screen texture which was noticeable in bright areas.


Next we switched to HD material. Here I felt the higher resolution gave the Ruby a more detailed and 3D look. On the Gladiator scene Derek mentioned above the image had a depth of field I had not seen before. The G70 looked slightly more soft in comparison. On another scene in Gladiator where Maximus is wearing a coat with a white fur collar I noticed what looked like brightness compression on the Ruby. Here again there were some dark scenes where the big difference in on/off contrast was noticeable and favored the G70. On direct A/B comparison color reproduction was slightly different, mainly the reds. The Ruby had deeper reds which made G70's red look slightly orange. Shadow detail on both projectors was excellent.


The last thing we did was some back to back comparisons using my screen. We used the high bit rate HD Gladiator and watched short segments on each projector. We also paused some scenes and did an analysis on them. Knowing it would be tough to get them both on the same frame we looked for scenes where characters and backgrounds were static. This confirmed that the Ruby did indeed have a more detailed image, quite noticeable on most scenes. It was at this point that Darin reminded me I had the G70's source set to 720p instead of 1080i. I had switched it earlier when someone was complaining about seeing scan lines at 1080i. Normally this isn't a big problem for most people but we were sitting at 1.2 screen widths. Once I switched the G70 back to 1080i the difference between the two was less apparant. I would still give the Ruby the edge in detail but was surprised it was even close. We looked at 1 scene for at least 5 minutes before we found something that was noticeably less detailed on the G70.


The Ruby is definitely the best digital projector I've seen. Its performance surpasses the G70's in most areas. Unfortunately, like most things it's not perfect. Hopefully a solution for the brightness uniformity and brightness compression problems can be found.


Steve

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I use Theatertek and have some gamma correction. With my HD-Tivo, Roku, and D-Theater sources I have it optimized to see shadow detail and not crush blacks.


There is a very slight amount of wear on the green tube.


My screen is 110" diagonal 16:9. Darin measured 7.5fl with a D-theater DVE 100ire full screen pattern and his Minolta light meter. The measurement from the HTPC was a little over 6fl. When I last calibrated it both inputs were the same. Looks like I need to recalibrate the HTPC input.


HTPC has a Radeon 9800pro with Theatertek for DVD's and a MyHD card for HD content.


Steve

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With all due respect to CRT owners, is this really a fair comparison? As a former 9" Marquee 9500 LC owner, I feel that the lack of brightness alone makes for a bad comparison to a high end digital such as the Ruby (just my opinion of course). To make valid observations regarding black level (or anything else for that matter), wouldn't you need to reduce the Ruby's brightness down to that of the G70?


Is there any chance of having comparisons made between the Ruby and a more appropriate competitor like the Sim2 C3X or the DC3 version of the InFocus 777, even though those units are only 720p? Again, just to be clear, I am not knocking CRTs, just claiming that they are not appropriate competitors to the Ruby.

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How big is your screen? Where's your contrast set at? I have mine set at 60. In the past I have used a Sencore with the sensor pointed back at the screen and calibrated to 10-11fl without pushing the contrast too much. Several other G70's that I've set up have measured close to the same. I have seen major differences depending on what instrumentation was used so I don't think we can accurately compare the measurements from the CA-1 to Darin's Minolta.

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He did. But I've learned some things since I asked William if he could measure a G90 for us and gone through different phases. I first came to the conclusion that most people on the CRT forum were calibrating their projectors to go much darker than the settings William used (even if they lost shadow detail). Then I found that some of them were doing gamma adjustments down low with PCs to try to get better on/off CRs with as much shadow detail. Then some people on the CRT forum decided to start working on circuits to give them the same kind of results with non-HTPC and some of those are currently in the works. I also modified an H79 to do about 9k:1 on/off CR. I no longer think that the 8k:1 to 9k:1 is the goal for digitals to match CRTs in on/off CR given these developments. With the gamma adjustments I would say that more like 30k:1 is a pretty good goal for the digitals to try to match.
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Definitely. Brightness is just one aspect of images and people have different preferences. Honestly, for the group of people who attended this, I would expect either of the projectors you mentioned to do worse against the G70 than the Ruby did.

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I measured from his main seating position pointed at the screen. Do you know the number for a full screen white with your's? I don't put a lot of faith in colorimeters for measuring light intensity. I think even a reasonably cheap dedicated lightmeter can do better than many colorimeters for measuring ft-lamberts and the Minolta LS110 I used is pretty expensive and gets professionally calibrated periodically. Colorimeters main job is to emulate the eyes response for getting color balance.


I earlier ran the numbers for 7.5 ft-lamberts off Steve's screen and if I did the numbers right it looks like it exactly matches the spec for ANSI lumens (if we ignore uniformity issues and just count the center). Basically, a 1.5 gain screen, so that gives 5 ft-lamberts if it were 1.0. His screen is 36 square feet, so that gives us 180 lumens. But this is 16:9 out of 4:3, so the full 4:3 should give 240 lumens. Which is the spec for ANSI lumens for the G70.


--Darin