Keohi HDTV - Brand Specific - Mitsubishi

[BRAND SPECIFIC][MITSUBISHI]

WS-65905 Calibration

Tip from Mr Bob: "When I arrived at the owner's home yesterday, the picture was already quite nice. After more than the 100 hours of burn-in, he had not even done a static convergence yet, and it still looked nice. It is a most imposing-looking machine, with a gorgeous, ornate dark triangular plate in the middle, pointing down between the 2 black grill cloths.

This is at 6' away, gentlemen. Not 10', like I sit from my 60"; not 15', as most people would treat a 65". Six feet, eyes to screen, toes at bottom of lay-back couch being even closer. And at this distance it was still impressive, out of the box. The Mit allows for RGBHV/Component hook-up, if you wish to incorporate external line doubling, but its built-in line doubler is VERY good. As far as the actual line doubling goes, the scan lines on slanted-edge material -- like the Z in Zorg, on the huge building he inhabited in Fifth Element -- looked virtually identical to those I observed recently on the $10K HD 700 Dwin, which I calibrated in Bellevue, Washington. It was hooked up using a several thousand dollar Faroudja 2200, which does provide other picture enhancing features. But the line doubling looked the same.

I could see the convergence errors, and I pointed them out to the owner, then put up the VE grid, and pointed out some more. But again, no more error than I would expect from any RPTV out of the box. And this one separates into 2 pieces, which is how he got it up the one flight of stairs necessary there. I think he said each half weighs 200 lbs., and assembles into a huge, impressively imposing monster.

Nice monster, nice monster...

It also has an easily removable glare screen--off in 40 seconds. Didn't need to charge extra for that, which is usually necessary for glare screen removal, as it usually requires removing the screen and taking the frame apart that holds and frames the 3 layer screen sandwich.

I immediately went to focussing, as I was suspicious of it -- didn't look as sharp as I expect RPTVs to look.

Sure enough, using my screen cantilevering technique, it was revealed that all 3 lenses were out of mechanical focus at least a little bit, with the green being the worst offender, requiring a full 1/4 inch of turning on the slanted guide of its barrel, the other 2 requiring 1/16" or less. 1/4" is a fairly hefty degree of out of focusness. Usually I find 2 out of the 3 lenses out on the new Toshibas, but usually no more out than 1/16" turn off at their wingnuts, which is what I have found to be pretty much the norm when a lens is out of focus from the factory.

No wingnuts were used on these lenses, they made do with a dry cloth tape. It was secure, mind you, but not as "cast in stone" as a wingnut or 3 would have made them.

I found no need to precision recalibrate the electronic defocussing of the blue, BTW. They had set it up perfectly, and I left it alone. This also is impressive these days, for an out of the box unit.

I next went to the convergence. Mit uses a global convergence, where one set of master settings sets all formats. There was no need to independently set up the convergence on each format, as is necessary on the Toshibas and the Pioneers.

As we found out on 55805 review, Mit has gone to a new set of service menu codes -- 2357 & 9 doesn't work on them any more. It is now 1257 & 9, plus additives, with everything else staying similar inside the menu. (click here for the service codes)

No more quadrant converging anymore either. It is now a COARSE set of codes, which covers the geometry, and a FINE set of codes after that, whichis the 64 point, for all 3 colors.

That took awhile, of course, as with the Toshibas, the 64 point's lines are WAY too thick, and have to be second-guessed after each pass, with truly thin crosshatch lines, a la VE and AVIA. Luckily, unlike my memories of my last Toshiba, the Mit allowed me to observe the VE grid behind the built-in pattern's lines. WAY too many lines on the screen, but beneficial if you know where to limit your eyes' focus.

Next was grayscale realignment, and guess what? IT DIDN'T NEED ANY! The comparator verified this to both of us, and we went right to the Color and Tint calibration, from VE. His original settings were a little weak, and even after the blue filter calibration, he liked slightly different settings, preferring less pink and more green--translating as more gold in the skin tones--in his tint settings. The Brightness was ideally set already, so we didn't need to change that, and Contrast was good also.

So we settled back to doing some serious DVD watching, and Whoa! Yeah.

SUPERB!

The subtle colorations of the heroes in A Bug's Life, with NO STAIRSTEPPING showing up in the edges of the animations.

The gorgeous Zorg weapon in The Fifth Element, with its hot pink and blue titanium hues. The building of Milla's body, layer by quick layer, from the alien's hand by the instant cloning machine--computer generated machine, but completely believable on film. Oops. I mean on video ... Chop, chop, chop...

Observing the skin textures -- "You can see the pores on their skin!" on the faces of the lovers in Meet Joe Black, in what seemed like a long, but was actually a very short, lovemaking scene. It was a completely captivating and heart-involving scene, nearly all faces-only--great plug for 16x9 format! -- reminiscent of how I wish Bogie and Ingrid could have been filmed, making love in Casablanca.

EXCELLENT suspension of disbelief!

The dynamic opening scene in Terminator 2. The flashing of the weapons, the gleam of the metal bodies of the Terminators.

The brilliance of the armor and the blazing color schemes--some of them looking black-lighted and neon, all together--of the comic-book scenes and characters in the opening sequence of Batman and Robin, with good old Arnold in that gleaming ice-suit...

All exquisite! And this is at 6' away!

I HIGHLY recommend this unit and am considering getting one for myself.

Oh, one thing I forgot to mention.

This set needed a lot of geometry correction.

The top and bottom edges, esp., were not straight. They were fairly wavy, and needed straightening out before I could begin the convergence.

The upper right corner, esp., had a "curl" to it, kinda like Kurt Russell's mouth did, when he did that TV movie about Elvis, shortly after Elvis died. (Did a spectacular job, BTW, I thought.)

The pic was not centered vertically, and was too wide, tho that may have happened in response to having the green focus being so far off mechanically to begin with.

Anyway, lotsa geometry had to happen before the precision convergence could be dialed in, which of course took several passes, but finally and ultimately came out extravagantly tight.