Video EQ pro or Internal CMS, which?

Although I use a VideoEQ Pro myself with a HD350, if I was in the market for a new projector I would seriously consider a projector with either a built in CMS or even on that simplay has an accurate setting to start with. Having an external box is another complication and something that can go wrong or have handshake issues with.


I'd also say to consider the DLA-RS40 rather than the older HD950 unless the later is considerably cheaper as it will devalue much quicker IMHO. The RS40 has the same on/off CR, possibly higher ANSI CR and other improvements to the 2D picture before you even brign 3D into the arguement. Even though the RS40 doesn't have a CMS, you may well find that it's close enough anyway: I recently did a whole batch of calibrations while I rented an i1Pro for a week. One of my TVs ended up with delta Es under 2 for the colour gamut (after the greyscale was corrected), just by adjusting the colour and tint. In other words, it was close enough to start with and saved the considerable time and effort of fiddling with a CMS to get it right. A HD950 has to be very cheap compared to a new RS40 IMHO to make it worth buying now (I'd hate to be trying to sell one myself).


Re banding; I feed my VideoEQ Pro via a DVDO Edge which outputs in 30 bit 'deepcolour' into the VideoEQ. Although this 'upscaling' to 30 bit is probably just padded by the Edge, it allows for finer graduations in the LUT process and I've not been aware of any banding. Note that the VEQ does require the input signal to be correctly setup as too high a contrast setting can lead to extreme peak white pixels kind of 'flipping over' into another colour. Apart from this caveat, I'm quite pleased with my results with the VEQ as posted on the Chromapure thread if you want to see how close I got the results.