Marquee Modification Performance enhancement thread

Ok, then i need the resolution and framerate, so i can calculate your pixel clock, BD players can do from 480 to 1080, 24-60hz
What model moome card are you using.?
If you tell me the composition of your videochain and Marquee ill try reproduce it here, and see what i can get out of it in a standard trim.

Also need your screen size, tube type and lens type.

So when your ready with light output measurements and pictures of focus controle ill be ready to reproduce it here with standard yokes, running same pixel clock.

Its not a competition, but im curious to find out more about how the marquee works, and what mods is worth the time and money, and to do so ill need to do a bit of homework, so it would be nice if you would hold a open mind as i will, and we can get past all the selfdone is welldone, and see if we can up the game a bit, make just a bit more professional, and eliminate all the personal atatchment and felings involved in these things.

Im amased how personal these things always gets, its a dead piece of junk we are beating with a stick as good as we can, and nothing more, not worthy of tears or frustrations.. I do it as a hobby and a personal challenge, and have done hundreds of mistakes or experiments that did not work as i would have liked, if we cant challenge each other in this hobby, there is no basis for these forums, then we just as well turn towards people that have no interest or knowhow about these matters and let them congratulate you every time the projector turns on.

I would so much like if we could all challenge each other on a higher level, and move the bar up, and to do that we first need to establishe a common reference or good understand of each others reference, and you want to do a mod, but want to keep your reference level a secret, wich basically makes it worthless to the rest of us.

So i beg you to open up a bit, and accept there is multiple angles on each aspect of these old junkpiles, and if we all add a angle its much more likely to lead to something greater.

I dont do mods, but i do experiments and test diferent compositions, and dont mind to share my findings, and i have no personal feelings towards my hardware so wont get upset if you challenge my results, thats how i work in my professional life, and think these hobby related things should get the same kind of treatment.

So everytime i ask you a question you refuse to answer i get the feeling you actually have no clue what your douing. Most is basic questions related to CRT, wich you will need to deal with if your past basic SD setup. So far i guess u have no clue what resolution or moome card you run, and how to eliminate raster ringing without clipping the image or generate convergence and stability issues. And a bit like MP never measured lightoutput or grayscale tracking and both focus and color uniformity across the screen, wich is very much related, and important factors to know before starting to change the existing system, so your able to do a full evaluation, and judge if the mod is a partial improvement, and a degradation in other ways, and if so if its worth the compromise or not, or whatever combination the outcome will be.

My experience is that 90% of the known mods are making the overall performance worse, taking more than they give, but people seems to be happy that there is a difference, and thats all that matters, making it a very subjective evaluation based on various preferences.

Kurt, for days in this topic, and years in general, you rejected the idea of using substitute focus yokes.
Then, after I went over my thoughts on it so often I got sick of repeating myself, now you suddenly want to jump in?

Pardon me for being a bit skeptical of that.

But, hey, really it's no problem if you know the basics of my setup.

So...first,understand that I have a fully installed movie watching setup and I have a test projector setup, and they
are not the same. If the results are good enough on the test projector, I'll install them in the unit in my home theater.

In either case, I'm using a 9500LC Ultra that is more or less in stock condition with the Elcan made HD-10L lenses on it,
the screen is 96" wide and is a flat 1.0 gain screen.

In either case, my source is either direct from a Sony BD player to the Moome card, or I can insert a Lumagen VisionPro HDP or a Lumagen HDQ into either signal chain. (These two units have identical capabilities, but different connector options. They even share the same firmware and run the same updated version.)

In both cases, I run 1080p-60 if I run direct from the BD player to the projector.
If I install the Lumagen in the signal chain, then the BDP input is 1080p-24 and the lumagen outputs 1080p-72.

Tubes are new condition LUGs, red and green C elements installed.

Kurt, you will recall that I simply asked you a few days ago if you'd sell me some stuff you have no use for.
You gave me a great big attitude and said no.

So is it any wonder that I wasn't willing to give you any information?

If you want people to treat you decently, try treating them decently. This actually works, most of the time when it's tried.

This thread and douing buisness with you is 2 different things all together, and please try not to confuse things.. I have in the past waisted time replying you regarding your requests to find that you did not bother to use your time to reply, happened multiple times, from i made the conclution i would not waste time to do buisness with you.. Thats straight forward honest and not to misunderstand. If you dont like the way that work, i think you should blame yourself.

Now i still dont have any idea what moome card, or general setup of your Marque, build year, and various boards used, like vim neckboards beeing the most important, and what trim the vim is in, wich makes huge changes to how the videochain works, and look.

1080P 60hz standard timings is 148Mhz, the HDQ wont pass above 165Mhz, so 1080P 72hz is not a option, you may do 817P 72hz with some tweaking, but its very tricky to get the pixel mapping right. In general the HDQ is not worth the time, its seriously outdated, and a huge bottleneck to ad to the digital videochain, its not just bad, its very bad for HD material.

You mentioned calibration with the lumagen 11 point calibration.. And think you might need some help to understand the basic calibration procedures.
First there is no auto calibration in the old Lumagen, and the 11 point is a manual calibration, you basically need a probe and a calibrationsoftware on a pc.. Measure each step, and correct in the lumagen untill it hits your target. Now the HDQ will far from alow 8 bit precission, and suffers from terrible chroma loss.
So the reduced bit resolution will make your CRT look like a old Digital projector. You might make a calibration that measures better at the points you measure, but it will look much worse.

So your best option is direct from player to your moome card, and deal with grayscale as good as it gets and maintain full bitdept, and chroma resolution if the player is capable, most older players are not, specially if they have any kind of enhancement features.

Now the marquee have some low level noise issues.. vertical lines and roling noice, with you can clip out running 16-235 out of your player, and set the moome to 16-235, but the tricky part is that the moome 16-235 is actually 0-255, alowing to display BTB and WTW, this means you waist some precious dynamic range in the videochain, and you have a elevated reference level out of the moome card, wich is what alows you to lower brightness or G2 to clip the noise.

If you get a good videochain/ noise free it will alow you to run the moome 0-255 setting, wich will clipp black at 16, and white at 235, letting 16% IRE be 0v out, and not sure how its done in the moome, but im pretty sure its done in the analog domain, as there is no bit degradation, wich is normal if converting in the digital domain. This can potentially give you the ultimate out of black performance that no CRT can do.

But you need to know your moome card, there is quite a few editions, and they are far from performing identically, or having the same options.

So hope you understand that just the digital vidiochain have a huge influence on the final image, just as its hard to find 2 identical Marquee projectors, so its also important that your reference and test is performed on the same projector, with the only variable being the yokes and controleboard in question, as if your comparing 2 different projectors there is no knowing whats up or down.

So ill recommend you start to find out how to do basic calibration first, as thats a must have to establish a baseline for evaluation, as just a color shift will influence how you persive sharpness, and light output changes can do more than any mods combined. And with calibration you also run true basic testpatterns checking bitresolution Chroma resolution, 1:1 pixelmapping, and that you preserve the full image, and your clipping points on all 3 colors.

Those boards have serious challanges with bandwidth too, basically half of what the classic neckboards have..

But, a "full" calibration probably requires more than the basic spot photometer that I have. So, unless someone is willing to lend me a full-featured calibration system, that's unlikely to happen.

I can calibrate to a given luminosity and white point. But it'll be a basic, not advanced, calibration due to equipment limitations.

I do believe that it is not necessary to fully calibrate the entire video chain in order to observe a difference in focus performance (resistance to blooming as well as sharpness) across the full available range of brightness, between the stock and the modified unit.

The difference, should there be any, should be apparent independent of the greyscale calibration, or lack thereof.