| WOW!!
Gregg
was at our place yesterday to calibrate our Runco 947 CRT
FP thrown to a 110".
We've had it ~ 2 years and I've always thought it provided
a great picture, but I knew there were areas that could be
improved. I was aware that the geometry was off in spots
and that the convergence needing touching up. After seeing
Mike's Mits in the Spring, we decided to give Gregg a call
and get him to our place.
Gregg got there somewhere
between 12:30 and 1:00. I had turned the projector on about
11:00 or so, so it had been warming up for a good while,
which I know is important for these to get a good calibration
out of them.
Gregg starts with the
DVD input by running through the test patterns and notices
that our gemoetry is off by quite a bit in areas. We had
bows here and bends there and the entire image was shifted
off axis a little bit. Gregg broke out some tape and string
and measured to get the screen to be acurate. He succeeded
in getting all of the bends and bows out of it and now the
lines are perfectly straight. He attempted to center it on
the screen exactly, but due to the fact that it had not been
centered for almost 2 years, he was worried about showing
the burn in on the tubes if he raster shifted the image.
So the image is shifted to the right about .5 cm which I
can live with (you'd never notice it, even if you KNEW it
was there.)
Then he fixed the grey
scale. We were pretty close in the middle of the spectrum,
but the edges were WAY off. I'll post the actual graphs that
he printed out later, after I get them from him in electronic
form. It's pretty dead on now. He then ran through the convergance
and fixed everything there.
Next he took on the HD
input. This has never been setup correctly, and in truth,
it's been so bad lately we haven't really watched much HD
on that TV. The images were ALL over the place and convergence
was shot to hell. He had to basically start from scratch
to fix this image, and I have to say, it looks amazing now.
After Gregg was done
the HD input, we broke out the Superbit 5th Element disc
and he started walking us through many of the shots. He was
showing us detail in the blacks that I would have never seen
or even think to look for, but it was showing us how great
the projector could really look. YOu could see wrinkles in
Willis's Tux Tie during the Opera scene and the flesh tones
were great. Just absolutly stunning.
After Gregg left we were
watching some HD of HBO (Captian Ron, if you'd like to know)
and it looked awesome. We then compared the HD feed to the
DVD my Dad had and it was hard to tell the difference. The
DVD looked so incredible that while the HD input was a tad
better and a tad less grainy, I knew that we were missing
on our DVD input for a long time. We watched The Core later
that night and it just looked incredible. Little things that
I used to notice (a slight blue or red ting to a white word
or a slight bow to a straight line) were gone. And the detail
that you could now see was amazing.
If you have a big screen
projection TV, you owe it to yourself and your TV to get
it calibrated. And I can't recommend Gregg enough. |
