List of all the later produced 600 line PVMs

[andykara2003]

All of that is completely beyond me

I am going to get my best consumer Trinitron professionally calibrated soon though. I'm wondering if it's worth getting the BVM calibrated once it arrives as well....

[Ed Oscuro]

Most of these tubes are thrashed enough that keeping them to accurate colors (in terms of what is originally specified) is going to be somewhat difficult, but none of us are using these for color grading anyways. Unless calibration would help with spotting possible reliability problems, it's probably something we don't need to worry about. But if somebody is offering to calibrate for free, I'd take them up on it. And you can probably do reasonably well eyeballing it with an Avia / pattern test disc via DVD anyways.

[andykara2003]

Ahh OK - maybe I'm being a bit anal in wanting to do this, I don't know. All my CRTs have had very little use though - I've gone to some trouble to ensure that. It's amazing how much difference it makes.

I was just tempted in this direction by CMcK who had a good experience getting a very experienced calibration expert (Lyris on this forum) to do his Loewe Aconda:

http://www.bordersdown.net/threads/1160 ... w%21/page2

The before and after photos are pretty different. Perhaps it's overkill for my Sony KV-25X5U though. I had the thought because I'm stopping collecting CRTs now & I thought as a last move I could get my best consumer Trinitron as perfect as it can be...

[cools]

You can calibrate an RGB set by yourself as long as you've got a means of displaying test signals and colour bars. It is not at all difficult.

I have a couple of 20M2Es myself. They're my "everything's gone wrong and I have to sell my cabs to eat" backup plan monitors. Great picture on them, solid build, enough tweaking options to adjust everything. As good an image as a Toshiba Nanao arcade monitor.

[andykara2003]

Thanks Cools, I think this is going to be something I need to learn. I'll have a google around I see what I can pick up.

I wonder if there's much difference between learning the fundamentals yourself and how the pros do it - or is it would it be a case of gaining relatively little extra (diminishing returns) to take it to a professional?

CMcK had his done by these guys I think:

http://www.hdtvtest.co.uk/news/calibration

Who bring about £10,000 worth of kit to your house & spend 2-4 hours with your TV.

I'm guessing they will know all the tricks of the trade and have much more in depth knowledge but for my purposes it may well be overkill.

[22point8]

That mention on that page about samsung flesh tone setting, if you have a meter its just a matter of trial and error. Have a read of this http://www.curtpalme.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=10457, if you understand it and you're in the UK I can lend you the meter profiled to a more expensive and accurate meter.

In the meantime, read this: http://www.avforums.com/PicturePerfect/

[andykara2003]

Thanks very much for info and offer 22point8. I'm looking through the info now & the descriptions of colour imbalance relate to my display quite a bit. I'll have a proper read & look through my Trinitron's service menu & report back here ASAP....

[cools]

For expensive movie/TV investments it makes sense to calibrate with extra tools other than your eyes - the major production is all standardised.

For old games? Colour bars and your eyes. For a start: the levels vary between systems...

[andykara2003]

That was a great read - So the greyscale first, then colour. The only thing is, this guide & others I've looked at use typical HDTV settings for the callibration. - but my old Sony's settings look like this:




(My iphone camera is making the image look blurred and too bright - it's actually on low brightness/contrast & much sharper than that...)

Cools - if I were to do this by eye (To be honest I think perhaps this approach might suit me better!) would I need colour-matching style cards to compare the colours to? And if so, do you know where to get the ones best suited to us - as I guess just printing them off would be a bit hit or miss as the printer is probably off anyway?

I guess I would then use Artemino's 240p test suite on my Wii for the greyscale/colour bars?

And then there's my Sony's antiquated colour settings - I'm wondering where I would find the info that would show me how to use these settings in correlation with the colour bars?

Sorry, I realise this is probably rudimentary stuff for most of the forum members. It would be good to know how you all do it, though, i.e. without getting bogged down unnecesary stuff. As you say Cools, we're only doing this for games. I'll never watch TV or movies on these displays & once I get a start I can google it from there.

Cheers :)

[gray117]

Use the Artemio test suite - it is more than enough to test/calibrate.... and don't worry about it too much

As for reference sure use something if you're just not used to judging what is red/green/blue. Aside from printing variances you've also got your room's ambient lighting effecting perception of colours - but sure if you're not used to staring at games/photoshop it might seem a bit wierd to just look at the screen without something to judge it against. Tbh if you're used to looking at r,g,b you can get pretty good at just knowing what colours should look like.

There's various methods of using gel cells to look at colour levels/purity but imho they tend to be crap. Cells would tend to be crap to begin with, even if they hadn't gotten funky with age, and often the people who used/had them had very suspect observation/perception skills to begin with...

... As cools alluded to [and admittedly depending on how well or badly the tv might compensate for it] signal levels will vary across a lot of equipment often causing colours to be blown out [more typical with arcade gear] or reduced. You're best thing to fret over would be a little break out box for your rgb line in with potentiometers for each line - maybe even sync too (usually no effect but can sometimes contribute to a very slightly brighter image on some consumer trinitrons I found).

... At the end of the day, if it looks good to you - it's all good.

[andykara2003]

Thanks for that, I like the idea of a breakout box like that Are there commercially available versions of this?

Until I get used to things, though, I would like to use some kind of colour reference as I don't have any experience with this. Are there alternatives to the gels? Or are paper/card charts useless as the comparison doesn't translate from paper to screen very well?

My issues with the image on my Trinitron are that the whites could be whiter and the green is overblown (which I could reduce). I wouldn't know how to get whiter whites though.

My main concern is what to do with the settings I have in my TV. R-Drive, G-Drive and B-Drive are obvious but not the rest (to me). Any ideas?

[Taiyaki]

I don't think it's possible to get as good results with consumer crt's as it is with today's high end lcd's and panasonic plasma sets, unless you're using a top of the line Sony XBR maybe. However your bvm should be very close out of the box imo.

[andykara2003]

Hi guys, just to round off this thread, I just wanted to say for anyone put off by prominent scanlines that the 20" BVMs scanlines are much less distracting than it might appear from looking at screenshots & reading around the forums. I'm not keen on thick dark scanlines. However my BVM's scanlines are much less apparent than on my 25 inch PVM and don't bother me. I think than on these monitors, the size of the monitor is much more important than screen type when it comes to scanline prominence.

Having bought my BVM I'm thinking that anyone buying a 20" monitor for 240p gaming might as well just spend the extra £100 or so & get a BVM if it's going to be used a lot as the picture is amazing and you won't have geometry problems. Thanks to the advice on this thread I have now understood that the 'opposite to BVM' option I was looking for was a (low use) consumer Trinitron so I now have one of each connected to my gaming setup.

Thanks for all the help on this one