Author: DOuG pRATt

After all of the eye procedures I’ve had over the past 13 years I truly appreciate the gift of sight, and I’m using that as my excuse for justifying the purchase of a new, formerly state-of-the-art video projector. It was discontinued three years ago, and I’d decided then that it was exactly what I wanted, because it doesn’t have motion smoothing or 3-D, two features that I have no interest in, that were added in later models.

I came up with an impossibly low price that I’d be willing to pay for the projector — 75% off. “It’ll never happen,” I said to myself. For many months I kept watch on Amazon, with the assumption that the projector would disappear without the price falling low enough to tempt me. Well, it didn’t disappear, and then a month ago the impossible price became reality. I bought one of two available units, and the other one sold two days later.

What makes this particular projector worthy of special consideration is that it can, after a firmware update, be calibrated to have a nearly perfect HDTV picture. Obtaining that performance requires more than the update, however. Specialized equipment and software are needed, along with a lot of know-how, and patience, and hours of tweaking and testing. This video from c|net explains something about the process of TV calibration.

Deciding on which consumer-grade colorimeter to get took a long time. The choice was between the Datacolor Spyder 4 and the X-Rite i1Display Pro, and I decided on the Spyder 4.

So I took the next step and downloaded a free calibration program called HCFR (Home Cinema France). I didn’t buy Datacolor’s HDTV test software because it doesn’t check for anything beyond the most basic controls (brightness, contrast, color, tint). The test patterns I needed for HCFR were also free and they came from the web site AVS (Audio Video Science). It’s an HD video that I burned onto a DVD. HD on DVD doesn’t work on all Blu-ray players, but it does on mine. Using a portable Targus tripod I bought for five bucks a few years ago, I mounted the Spyder in front of the projector screen and plugged its USB connector into the Acer netbook.

The procedure I followed is Greyscale and Colour Calibration for Dummies, by Curt Palme. The instructions aren’t perfect, but I figured it all out, and after hours of going through the learning curve, and many practice runs, I finally achieved a proper calibration on the projector. Cyan was a particularly difficult color to adjust, and after getting everything else right I devoted almost an entire evening just to getting cyan nailed down.

The end result is shown in this chart, with the dotted lines intersecting as closely as possible to the X/Y “perfection point,” while keeping the white triangle from skewing very much off of the black triangle. The results when watching TV instead of test patterns are truly impressive!

Now the question is, what’s to become of the Panasonic projector I bought in 2007? I’d like to use it outdoors at night this summer, assuming the bugs aren’t biting too much this year.