Ever since I bought my Barco projector (i guess it has been a year or 3 now) I wanted to get the most from it. And since it is a CRT projector it is garantueed that you need to put in a lot of time to get everything correct. Allthough the PJ is realy high maintanance (it requires constant care to get the optimum result) the result is worth it. A CRT projector has, for a long time, been one of better performing projectors. In the past it was never a question wheter you should buy a CRT projector or one of the other techniques (DLP/LCD). Black Level and resolution where the main reasons you should not buy a DLP/LCD. Not to mention the side effects they brought with them (screendoor effect, rainbow effect).
In these years I have frequently read about the need to calibrate it so you can get the best results. A greyscale calibration makes sure the PJ uses the correct amount of red, green an blue to display a grey-color (from black to grey to white) as accurate as possible (grayscale-calibration).
The reason it never got calibrated was my lack of action. I always wanted to have the PJ set up correctly in my room before I decided to have it calibrated. Ofcourse it was never set up 100% correctly, so I posponed it again and again and again. Further the costs where to concider aswell. A calibration can cost up to €150 for a CRT device. And then you can only have 1 device calibrated. And as I felt my setup was not final, I thought I'd be throwing away money. And lastly I recently decided that I will buy a new projector in the near future which should be even better, so again, doing a calibration would be a waste of money.
Well... Last week I came across a cool from thread: Greyscaling for dummies! It explains how one could do a greyscale calibration yourself (ofcourse, I need to add that doing it yourself is by far not the same as having an ISF certified person doing your calibration). After reading it carefully the experimental me shouted out and I decided I should buy a color analyzer and give it a shot.
It is quite fun to do a calibration (well, at least to me it was fun). Tweaking your display device to display a optimal picture is cool and gives you a sense of achievement! Furthermore, the resulting image realy is quite different!
I always heard the difference would be big, but I had not realised it would change this much. The image has more detail and the image appears to have more depth.
And the best part is, I can calibrate whatever and whenever I want. In my calibration spree I decided I should calibrate my Barco, My Dell 2407WFP, My laptop and the old Sony KV28FX65 television.
There where different results from the calibration on each of them. The TV for instance was massively off. the colors where to 'cool' (more blue) and much detail was lost due to the wrong use of the brightness/contrast combination. Though it was off, it was the most easy one to calibrate. It only took my 1 try to get as close to the optimum as possible. The Dell was a different story. It was already quite OK and needed just a little finetuning. Unfortunately the servicemenu of the dell wasn't as helpfull as I'd hoped so I was not able to get it as perfect as I would want to. The laptop was a different story altogether. I did not put much time in it. The screen of my laptop is just bad in general. White at the top isn't the same as white at the bottom. So calibrating the center just makes sure the center is OK. But the rest is still wrong. Lastly, the Barco. This is the most difficult one. It is very susceptible to environmental changes. This is due to the nature of the Barco. It has relative low light output. Therefor the smallest light source has an effect on the image. A perfectly dark room is the most optimal, but this isn't always possible. In my room this results in that my greyscale differs when I'm measuring in the morning, midday or evening/night. So I needed to compromise. I decided I'd calibrate it for night use only and accept that when Im watching during the day that the image might not be as accurate as it could possibly be.
All in all I would say that buying the color analyzer was a great move. I would not say it can replace a professional ISF calibration. But when you have the time and the motivation to learn a thing or two about display's, it is a realy fun thing to do.
For a long time I was wondering if it wouldn't be nice if you could boot your Vista Bootable CD from a hard drive. Because hard disks are much faster in comparison to a DVD I figureed having the bootable DVD on a hard drive would shave off a few minutes of your installation time. Unfortunately I could not find any information on how to make this possible. Google just came back with results regarding Dual Boot setup's or having a full Vista install on an external hard drive or USB. Not the thing I was interested in. The sollution to my 'problem' illuded me.
Today I came across an article in the Personal Computer Magazine (PCM) issue of this month in which they wanted to boot the Vista Install DVD of a USB stick. Reading the article I found nothing that implied that it can only be used on a USB stick. So I grabed an old disk drive and fiddled around a bit.
After a numerous amount of reboots and trial&error I finally got it working! The Vista Installer booted from the disk drive. Although I have not completed a full install, I am quite sure it works.
The thing that annoyed me the most when booting from the DVD was that I had to wait quite some time for the white bar to fill, after which the actuall install environment showed up. Although it was faster, it wasn't as fast as I had hoped. I think it has to do with driver loading and lots of small files. My guess is that when you do a full install it you will notice a great increase in speed. The actual copying of files should go faster, although I have not yet tested this (maybe i'll test it in the future).
From the hindside the operation is quite simple. Maybe that is the reason I couldn't find it anywhere and havn't heard anybody trying it before.
However, a simple 'how-to' would probably in order, for the ones who where looking for this too 
Things needed:
- A hard drive which has nothing on it (no partitions and stuff)
- A running Vista setup (i use 'diskpart' which is a part of vista and not of XP)
- A bootable Vista Install DVD (may be a slipstreamed disc. I used a Vista with SP1 slipstreamed)
Now the steps to follow:
- Open a command prompt and run diskpart: c:\> diskpart
- View the lists of disks and find the appropriate disk: list disk
- Select the disk you want to use: select disk 0
- Verify that you have selected the right disk: list disk (the one with the * is the selected disk)
- clear the disk of all information: clean
- create a partition: create partition
- select the created partition: select partition 1
- Make it active: active
- Assign a drive letter: assign
This is almost identical to what PCM had in its article. However it didnt work correct for me. The PCM stated you should format the drive using FAT32 (using "format fs=32" between step 8 and 9). However, Vista is not always able to format a drive in the fat32 file system (which was the case with me).
I found out that vista is not able to format drives larger than 32GB in Fat32 filesystem. You can force it on a command prompt ( format /FS:FAT32 X: ). But most people say that drives larger than 32gb will slow down due to fat32 overhead. What I did was the folowing:
- Open vista disk management:
- Select your disk
- Right click and select "shrink"
- Shrink the disk to something below 32GB. (because you havn't used your disk this should be seconds)
- Now right click it again and select 'format'
- Choose Fat32 as the file system and check "Quick Format"
Now you are done preparing your disk!
Don't close your command prompt. You're not done yet...
Assuming your DVD drive is "D:" and your hdd "E:", copy the files from the drive to your newly made disk using xcopy (or any of your favorite copying programs, like robocopy for example).
c:\> xcopy d:\*.* /e /f e:\
Now you are done and you can close your command prompt.
You can use the rest of your disk if you'd like. Just create an extra partition and format it the way you like.
To boot from the disk, reboot your system and enter your BIOS. In the BIOS you have to make sure the boot priority are right. Make sure it boots from your HDD and not from your DVD (remove the DVD from the drive helps too). And make sure it boots from the correct disk.
If you have done everything correct, you should see the system booting from your new "Vista Install Bootable Hard Disk". No more hours of waiting while installing your Vista!
Important Update (24-12-2008)
I was trying to install a fresh Vista 64 install on a machine which did not have a PATA controller and thus I was not able to boot from a DVD. So I was forced to use my own technique and install from a hard disk (yay).
I quickly ran into a problem which I hadn't noticed before because I did not complete a full install from HDD.
The problem lies within the Vista installer itself. When you boot from the HDD and enter the setup, chances are the installer starts to complain that it can not find a suitable CD/DVD/USB driver for the device where the installation source is located (duh, its a hard drive).
After hours of tinkering with RAID drivers (i didn't read it correctly and thought it was complaining about not finding the raid set) I finally noticed the problem. After some more google-ing I found a google cached item which explained that when you hold the CTRL key while booting the installer the setup will not be loaded and youll get a command prompt.
When on the command prompt, first go to the root ("cd \") then execute "bcdedit /createstore" and then enter "setup" and the setup will correctly start, and wont complain about the driver.