WinDAS White Point Balance guide for Sony Trinitron CRTs

Using your laptop will be useless, unless you intend to use your laptop with the monitor on a permanent basis. As soon as you switch back to using your PC, the quantization artifacts will rear their head.
 
Can you explain further? I was not intending to use that Dell for anything and was hoping to use the monitor along with my laptop for whenever I play any games. I was also hoping to use the monitor along with many of my home consoles. Will it be ok for me to use with all my other systems?
 
Well if your laptop is your primary machine that you'll be using, then you should be reverse the roles of the laptop and PC in the guide.
 
Sounds like I will need to do this all over again. Which I am fine with it since I felt like I got the hang of the procedure. This time I can do it right.

I do have a couple more questions. Mainly concerning what you said about quantization artifacts. Would I be putting my monitor in danger if I plugged in my consoles? Basically I just need to know how to avoid getting those artifacts.
 
no there'll be no danger.

quantization artifacts, in this context, arise from trying to adjust the default luminance function (which is defined by the relationship between the luminance of each of the 256 input levels) to a different function. Given that you only have 256 levels to work with, any modifications can only be done by collapsing levels together, so you may end up with banding artifacts (visually unpleasing). This would only happen if you run the Argyll adjustment - argyll creates a LUT (lookup table), which, when implemented, modifies the luminance function.

Given that your laptop doesn't have the ability to connect to your FW900, how were you planning on using your laptop to drive the FW900?
 
Ahh gotcha!

And my laptop is 3 years old but it runs an nvidia gtx 660m gpu and the laptop has a HDMI port in addition to a VGA port that I can connect to the monitor. The laptop itself isnt a permanent solution either, I do plan on getting a proper desktop in the future, But for now, it's what I have to work with. I will make sure that my future video card has a DVI-I port that way I can calibrate it as much as I can and use it over VGA.

I got a bunch of old school games I can try out while I wait to build my new PC. I tell you, hooking up an RGB modded NES that running though a high end scaler, and outputting to this monitor is nothing short of amazing. And while all of that is fun, I kinda want a new PC soon since this year was a pretty good year for PC releases.
 
if your laptop has VGA out then you should be fine. Do the Argyll test on it to see if it supports 10 bit.
 
you did the test using the laptop to drive the FW900 right? (so you were running dispwin -R on the laptop but the colorimeter was on the FW900 )
 
Correct, my laptop has the colorimeter plugged in but I did dispcal -R and not dispwin -c
 
dispwin -R just shows me to a directory and dispcal -R actually goes though the a test.

Thanks for all your help man. I truly appreciated. Also gotta say I been watching the walking dead on the monitor and it looks nice. Though I think I will stick to my plasma for that. The plasma has a nice picture as well and its 50 inches.
 
no prob, glad to help. And yep, I meant dispcal - R. Just tested with my DTP-94, and I still get 10 bits, so your laptop video card doesn't seem to have a 10 bit DAC.

I'll be updating the argyll part of the guide in the near future to reflect some recent changes to argyll, but will need to experiment first.
 
I thought that the gpu was modern enough to have a 10 bit DAC, but I guess I was wrong. Either way it does leave me at a stopping point. I am satisfied with what I have at this point. But I really can't wait to get me a new PC to try out all the newest games using this little baby. My first wow moment came when i was running my Wii U. Metroid Prime is a game that came out in 2002 for the gamecube, but when using it with this monitor makes it look almost as good as some Wii U titles.
 
Hell yes.
Hey I got another question, would I be able to do this procedures on other monitors? You see I have a Sony BVM and an NEC XP37 that I wish to try and bring out their best quality and to try to preserve for as long as I can.
 
I don't think WinDAS works with the PVM's / BVM's, but I believe the BVM's have a service menu where you can adjust a large number of parameters. I've heard that for PVM's you can access the service menu by pressing enter and degauss at the same time. Not sure if this is the same for BVM's.

As for the NEC, you'll have to figure that out yourself. It's not a sony rebrand so I'm almost positive WinDAS wont' work.
 
Hey got another question here.Would it be possible to preserve the WINDAS/Argyll settings of the monitor if I had a pc that dual booted to windows 7 and 10? I plan on leaving windows 7 behind but sadly the drivers don't work on Windows 10. Maybe something like a virtual machine could work?

And after playing games on the monitor for the past 2-3 days I can finally say that I can finally see the benefits of doing the WPB procedure. Been mainly plainy Wii U and DC but those games look amazing when plugged into this monitor. Even better than my BVM when it comes to running 3d games. And the BVM is another top of the line monitor but the contrast really stands out on the FW900. It's even crazier to think that I could tweak it even further than this. I really can't wait to get a powerful pc to go along with this beast.
 
I am attempting to do this tutorial and get past the G2 and green level just fine but when I get to the luminance and chromaticity step the sliders basically do nothing. I did some research and another use had this same issue but stated it all of a sudden worked. Any ideas on what could be going on?
 
Nope nothing at all, come to think of it I couldn't see any change in the green level adjustment after the G2 step
 
weird, try starting the procedure again and see if the same thing happens. Maybe video tape it too if you can?
 
I've tried the procedure multiples without success but I believe I've solved it. I would always bypass the test at step 6 as indicated in the procedure. I just went through it step by step and now the green level and luminance/chromatcity steps are now working. I will re-run the entire procedure when I get a chance and thanks for the guide!
 
strange, I always bypass the test too. Oh well, really glad that appears to have solved it, and your welcome!
 
Great guide. Could you please reupload the test patterns?
I'm going to try to mimic the steps but with a diamondtron crt, i don't have the factory equipment so all the changes will require using the factory menu and the first steps tweaking the g2 potenciometer. The dedicated menu looks like this;
xVgu4jZ.jpg

The btcen value is the step you mention here?
spacediver said:
The next step is very similar to the previous step, except that it adjust the blanking level of the green gun for the central brightness value (future edition of this guide may describe the logic behind this step). Repeat the same procedure as that described in the G2 adjustment, and click OK. It will ask you to load up a black pattern, and as you already have this pattern loaded, just click OK.
Click to expand...
 
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Sure, here's a reupload, though these are 1920x1200 res. Yea the BTCEN value may be similar. If you ever do end up doing that step, see if the screen looks green when you do it, would be interesting to see if it's similar to the WinDAS procedure.
 
Wpb somewhat done, I did this;

- Set the preset values for a non calibrated display (half brightness, full contrast, btcen 5E0 and btmax 800, green gun at 08A, blue and red gun at 00), the screen was extremely dark and with a green tint
- Adjust the g2 potenciometer to set black luminance at 0.3cd/m2 (that's service manual value, although I think it's too high)
- Turn on red and blue guns to reach the 9300k level, once done the luminance value is now obviously higher, with the btcen value reset it back to 0.3cd/m2
- Adjust the btmax value to 3cd/m2
*At this point I should have loaded a 30 ire pattern and calibrate under that, but I forgot it and jumped to the gain calibration. It shouldn't be a problem afaik as I will balance the values in the following steps.
- Load a green image and adjust the green gain to the specifications (77cd/m2 for 9300k)
- Load a white image and tweak the red and blue guns to get again the 9300k point.
- Load up a 30 ire pattern (in my case I used the 30% white of the gray scale) to fix the lower numbers.
- Repeat the last 2 steps to get the delta as low as possible.
- Do the same thing with the specific values for 6500k and 5000k, while mantaining the green bias value across the 3 modes.

My setup isn't ideal as I need to do the changes via a quite huge osd so no full screen patterns.
Some questions. Why do the hcfr progam sometimes load the color test pattern at (016, 016, 016) instead of a full black? It drives me mad.
The gamma at the end of the calibration is ~1.96, do I just turn down the brightness and recalibrate? Or instead of the 0.3cd value use something like 0.25? That 0.25 via btcen or g2?
There is also a value that I haven't play with, the ABL. Does it modify the brightness?
 
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Blutrache said:
Why do the hcfr progam sometimes load the color test pattern at (016, 016, 016) instead of a full black? It drives me mad.
Click to expand...

Sounds like you have limited RGB enabled somewhere in HCFR instead of full RGB

Blutrache said:
The gamma at the end of the calibration is ~1.96, do I just turn down the brightness and recalibrate? Or instead of the 0.3cd value use something like 0.25? That 0.25 via btcen or g2?
Click to expand...

You can use argyllcms instructions to tweak gamma at end, as per the guide. But if you can get the gamma you desire without that step, then power to you. Lowering the black level might achieve this, and I'd try g2.
Blutrache said:
There is also a value that I haven't play with, the ABL. Does it modify the brightness?
Click to expand...

automatic brightness limiter I think. A protective mechanism that switches off the monitor once the beam current exceeds a certain threshold (I believe the threshold is what the ABL value represents).
 
Second assault, now with 0.15cd/m2 adjusted via g2, same steps as before but I didn't changed the gain values of the green guns (so the same values that reached the indicated green luminance values at 0.3cd/m2)
BCLJ2Cx.png

Gamma has improved drastically, my dtp94 struggles on the darker tabs and the values change sometimes a little bit. Delta E is below 0.50 on all 3 temperatures.
 
That looks pretty damn sweet! Good job, you're a pioneer - I think this is the first time someone here's attempted and reported a proper calibration of a non trinitron monitor :)
 
I tried the command line for argyll but got this error
sl1Zive.png

So I opted for displayCAL and did a "profile" with the "office and web d65 gamma 2.2), dtp94 with Refresh (generic) iwthout any corrections.
An hour later, I had a folder with the icc profile with a 93% of sRGB cover, thing is, I don't know if that's good or bad, but usually I calibrate the colorimeter before testing and I don't know how to do it on this program. There's also that corrections tab with a lot of presets for the dtp94 but none of them refered to a crt.
The end result is rather similar, small increase in brightness and a slightly green tint.

spacediver said:
That looks pretty damn sweet! Good job, you're a pioneer - I think this is the first time someone here's attempted and reported a proper calibration of a non trinitron monitor :)
Click to expand...
All the kudos to you and your awesome guide, it's extremely useful to learn the reason behind the wpb.
 
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don't worry about sRGB coverage. The primaries can't really be changed, and a good stable chromaticity across the grayscale, and a good gamma are the most important things, which you have achieved wonderfully based on your results.

Not sure what caused that error in ArgyllCMS, but dispcal should do you fine. Anyway, some of the switches in argyllcms have been changed since my guide, so at some point I should update the instructions.

Assuming you followed the driver installation instructions correctly, and still want to go the ArgyllCMS route, you can try creating a thread here (the authors of both HCFR and ArgyllCMS post there).

Glad you enjoyed the guide :)
 
Any tips for adjustments to reduce black crush if our primary input won't be a PC? Specifically, I'm using game consoles that won't have gamma adjustment either through native VGA (Xbox 360 and Dreamcast) or scan conversion with the OSSC for 240p sources.

Also, should we be starting the guide with the monitor in factory brightness/contrast values via the OSD or is 31/90 the preferred values?
 
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If you have no way of adjusting the gamma curve of the input device, then your best option is to set the G2 level so it's not super dark black.

You can use the grayscale patterns I've included in the package to do this. Make sure the second bar is distinguishable from the first bar (but only barely).

You can use the 16 bar patter for this or the 2 bar pattern.

Also see this thread

(This advice also holds if you cannot adjust gamma curve with 10 bits of precision, since if you only have 8 bits of precision, you'll end up crushing some levels together and losing luminance resolution, although this may not be noticeable in many situations).


Don't worry about brightness and contrast levels before you start. At the end of the procedure, they'll automatically be set to 31/90.
 
Blutrache said:
My setup isn't ideal as I need to do the changes via a quite huge osd so no full screen patterns.
Click to expand...

Not sure if you found out this little detail (its not very obvious) but in FACTORY MODE you can actually hold the PLUS or MINUS button to adjust a value and it will (slowly!) be changing that value with the OSD fully hidden. Can be easily tested with BTCEN where it is more apparent. I hope you did not do the "click to +/-1, click to exit" routine for every single +/-1 value change. Thats what I was doing at first, because I thought the values didnt change while holding. Turns out they did but rather slowly (good for precise calibration I guess).

spacediver Thank you so much for the guide, will be trying it soon. Could you (or someone else) please re-upload the patterns archive? Seems like it keeps getting deleted after 100 days.
 
unable to edit original post, since they introduced a character limit recently that my original post exceeds.

I've reuploaded it here, although it will expire if it goes undownloaded for more than 100 days:
 
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Perfect, thank you for a quick help!

Looking at the setup graphic, I am assuming I can technically perform the WinDAS part on the main PC, just not recommended, right? I would still use a second computer for the colorimeter bit of course. Would just need to alt+tab often and wait for the readings to settle. I would honestly rather do that than having to try and setup WinDAS on a second PC again. Ironically enough, I couldnt get WinDAS to work under Windows 98SE originally because the adapter I got only had drivers for XP and up. Eventually I did manage to set it up on my main PC (Win 8.1), which was a pleasant surprise.

I am mainly asking in case there is some issue where WinDAS and all the other mentioned tools, where they all need to be installed on the same machine in order to achieve something that I have yet to find out about/understand?
 
jka said:
I hope you did not do the "click to +/-1, click to exit" routine for every single +/-1 value change.
Click to expand...
Where's that? I used the + or - buttons, and sometimes it was a pain in the ass to get to an specific value. What monitor were you tuning?
 
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