Calibrating my Barco 801s
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.