CurtPalme.com Home Theater Forum

[pm]

Hi,

Sony VPH1252

Please be gentle! Noobie with more setup questions....

The above is my first PJ and I think I've had reasonable success setting it up.

Here's my setup and what I see as the good news.

I've set it up at standard distances for a 4:3 100" screen and had good results setting up the raster to almost fill the green tube nicely centred. The R & B tubes were almost perfectly aligned mechanically and needed very little movement to get alignment with the G.

I use the PJ as the second screen of a PC setup at 1280x960 @ 60Hz connected through the 5xBNC connections.

I can sucessfully play my HD material through PowerDVD and TV card through Windows 7 media player.

The pictures look quite natural with good skin tones and good contrast.

BUT! I still feel a little disappointed. The sharpness just isnt what I hoped it would be.

I know at that size I'm never going to get LCD like sharpness but that led me to question some of the things I've read about what I should be able to see.

For instance, I read about being able to see the individual dots on the H pattern.

I cant see individual dots forming the H, but I do have quite well defined H's, at least on R&G.

Could somebody draw me a picture of exactly what the H should look like in an ideal setup please?

Again, how thick should the lines on the crosshairs of the raster pattern be on the screen? Mine are about 10mm thick. Any amount of tweaking (mechanically or electrically)hasn't got them any smaller. If my maths is correct, the screen is 60" tall and setup for 960 lines. Each scanline equates to approx 1.5mm. That makes my raster crosshair about 6-7 scan lines thick.

Is that logic right? Is this normal? Should they be thinner than that?

On the H pattern, the green looks sharpest, the red slighly less so and the blue looks distinctly fuzzy. I understand that some of that is down to how the human eye/brain perceives the colours?

The machine is reporting about 6000 hours, however i see almost no wear at all on the R&G tube, the faces being a uniform milky white. The B has an even 4:3 wear pattern which is noticeable but doesnt look anywhere near as bad as some I've seen on here.

I guess what I'm looking for is a more detailed explanation of what I can realistically expect from my machine.

Any help/pointers gratefully received!

Cheers,

PM

p.s. Would there be any point in me buying one of the HDMI input cards for my 1252 or should I put the money towards a 9" machine instead. Being UK/Europe based, which 9" PJ would offer the best bet in terms spares/tubes in the short to medium term?

[ecrabb]

PM,

See this thread, then feel free to ask questions:
https://www.curtpalme.com/forum_archived/viewtopic.php@t=22939.html

Once you've done your initial setup, you can use test patterns from the HTPC at the resolution you're running to get focus better.

Yes, save your money for at least an 8" LC/EM machine or better yet, a 9".

SC

[stefuel]

First thing is you have a electro-static focus projector. There is only so much you can expect out of it.
I would try a standard PC resolution like 800X600 and see what it looks like. You are stuffing more lines of resolution
into it than it can fully resolve. When you do that, the image begins to soften.

[AnalogRocks]

I use to run mine at 1024x768@72Hz. It looked nice.

[AnalogRocks]

I use to run mine at 1024x768@72Hz. It looked nice.

[stefuel]

[ecrabb]

720p looked pretty decent on my old 1271, which should be spatially equivalent to 960p, but 960p would be significantly higher bandwidth. Of course, my 1271 was a pretty low-hour machine compared to most.

On my 1271, I ran 1080i from set-tops for most program material, and 720p from the HTPC for the best tradeoff between sharpness (readability) of UI elements and spatial resolution.

Yeah, I'd probably go 1024x768 for 4:3.

SC

[AnalogRocks]

[AnalogRocks]

[pm]

Thanks for the tips guys.

I saw the thread and there was some obvious common ground.

I wasn't afraid of the trim pots, but didn't find any great gains through that route. I found the range of movement for best focus was tiny anyway.

Yup, the 1024x768 does look better.

I'll give a computer based test pattern a go too.

Cheers,

PM

[pm]

After a few days of getting used to it, and after taking in some of the comments about what to expect, I think I'm now being a bit more realistic about what I can get from this machine.

And consequently enjoying it a bit more!

I've followed the Sony Install manual to the letter, together with the threads on here, and I think I probably have a pretty good machine really.

I've managed to set it up without to much fuss, straight down the line. The colours look good and the flesh tones look amazingly natural.

As a previous poster suggested, I found a DVD of PAL test patterns and it transpires that the factory settings of Brightness 50 and Contrast 80 work perfectly with both the inbuilt test patterns and the external DVD.

The only thing that remains disappointing is the general focus, especially from the blue tube. That does have some visible wear on the phosphor face but the R&G are both milky white and the focus is still not as sharp as I'd thought was possible.

Any further thoughts on what I may have missed are more than welcome.

Here's some screen shots that I've managed so far. Again, any critical observations are welcome.

Sony VPH 1252 1024x768 @ 72Hz

Cheers,

PM