April 07

  Welcome Home, Video Processor!

    After reading (perhaps too much) about what constitutes a good picture I started noticing several artifacts while watching movies in my Home Theater downstairs. I thought I would just deal with them until I got High-Definition cable upstairs (where I have an HDCP-compliant 37" LCD TV.)  I have no HD sources in my Home Theater; only SD cable, Laserdisc, and SD DVD. My DVD player, a Denon 1600, has been modified to output via SDI. (more on that here.) My projector is an older Runco CL-700 (first-generation HD DLP, or as I like to call it "Graychip 1"). It has no digital inputs. By HDCP decree, if the source is high-definition no signals are to be passed over analog cables, even though the component cables I use can handle up to 1080i.In short, once I saw HD (CSI, in particular) I knew EXACTLY what I was missing downstairs.

    AVS Forum was having a March special on scalers. They had a pre-buy special on the Lumagen Radiance XD and promotional pricing on the Pixel Magic Crystalio II. The Radiance uses a newer Gennum chip than the Crystalio, and is cheaper. On the other hand, the Crystalio is available now, and works with my current  hardware better. I called Runco to see if my CL-700 would accept 720p. They said it would, using the YCbCr colorspace.

    Scalers are boutique items; few people have ever heard of them. Fewer companies make them.  Based on what I've read, those who have them wouldn't do without. Choosing between the two was easy; the Radiance XD doesn't have an SDI input nor an analog output. The Crystalio has both. (You can get optional modules for the Lumagen, but I wanted as few items as possible in the signal path. The SDI signal would be converted to HDMI, which sort of defeats the purpose of having an SDI output in the first place.)

    My Experience:

    Well, I don't know where to start. The unit shipped from Hong Kong, and arrived more quickly than if it had come from Chicago! I had to move my shelves in the rack around to make room for it (royal pain). I also had to get RCA-to-BNC adapters. In the long run I will have my cables replaced/re-terminated.

    I got the unit connected, feeding it my three sources; DVD via SDI from a Denon 1600 (audio over optical), Laserdisc via S-Video from a Pioneer Elite CLD-99 (audio over digital RCA and analog RCA. The AC-3 output goes directly to my AVR-5700, as it is the only device I have that can decode it.), and SD cable via composite from a Panasonic VCR (analog audio over RCA). Once I powered it up my projector said "unsupported format". Imagine my horror, thinking my projector is too old to work with the scaler. Fortunately, one of the nice things about the C2 is the LCD screen and control buttons on the front of the unit. I changed the colorspace from RGB to YCbCr, the primary output to component and the resolution from 480p to 720p and bingo! I had an image. Turns out the unit shipped with firmware 2.02.

    There are SO many settings in the unit and I haven't had time to play with more than 20% of them. So far, I have the unit using the Faroudja deinterlacer and outputting 720p @ 59.94 Hz.

First problem: Seems like the toslink connection isn't working. It works if I bypass my VP. I'll verify with my Laserdisc player later.

Second problem: Since my father-in-law was over he came down to see what I was doing. I had just put in The Bourne Identity. The special edition has an alternate beginning. I don't know what that was shot in, but the picture is horrid. Tons of artifacts and and aspect ratio of 3:1 or so (I'll measure later). I couldn't stand to watch it before I had the processor, so this would be my acid test.

Well, the Crystalio made things better, but this footage still sucked. Garbage in, garbage out, they say. By now my dad was really into the movie, so instead of more tweaking we just sat and watched. The picture quality was great. I saw no artifacts (well, OK, a little ringing, but easily just 10% of what I saw without the external scaler.) Unfortunately I had a ton of audio dropouts! Eventually I just bypassed the Crystalio.

We finished the movie and retired for the night.

    I got to play with it later on that week, re-routing the cables, and I haven't had an audio dropout since. I'm thinking it might have been a loose/bad cable. Anyway, here's the breakdown of my observation by source.

Standard-definition cable:

    I used to hate watching Standard-Definition cable in the theater because of the crappy quality (Yes, I was aware of the pitfalls of trying to watch SD quality on a theater-sized screen, but I had the connections there anyway.) Well, after installing the Crystalio all I can say is wow! It doesn't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, but SDTV is definitely watchable now. It look like a large SD set, not a poorly scaled up image.

Laserdisc:

    My CLD-99 purportedly has a good 3D comb filter, so I've only tried connecting via S-video. I will try composite later to see if the Crystalio's comb filter is better. I haven't even watched a full movie yet, but here are my observations based on a few sides.

    Heat: The opening scene with Robert DeNiro descending the escalator used to be so fuzzy I hated it. Now it's great. (This is one of the few laserdiscs I own encoded in AC-3. I sent the RF straight to my AVR and didn't notice any lip-sync issues.) I watched until the first robbery scene. I noticed a little moiré in the tow trucks grille, but otherwise I was quite pleased with the picture. I can enjoy my Laserdisc collection again.

    The Fugitive: Again, nice, smooth colors and no video noise (at least on side one, which is CAV.) It's obviously not a DVD, but the picture quality is much, much better than before.

    Five Fingers: This 1952 spy thriller set in WWII was filmed in black and white. It's a good film and I often show it to guests. The grays? were good and I noticed no rainbows (which doesn't have to do with the scaler of course. I just threw that in.) The other cool thing is I set my Crystalio to always format the output to 16:9; no more toggling of stretch modes in the projector for this movie since it was shot in 4:3.

DVD:

    This is what I've waited for. When I finished my home theater the existing DVD player I had was a $79 Costco unit. Not to knock the player, but you get what you pay for. After reading on AVS forum for a while I determined a scaler + SDI was for me. I have an extensive library of DVD's, and won't dump them for HD-DVD or Blu-Ray (I kept my laserdiscs, after all.) Anyway, I got an SDI-modded Denon 1600, which has Faroudja deinterlacing built in. I noticed an improvement in PQ right away, but could still see artifacts (some due to the scaling capabilities of my 2002-era projector. With the Crystalio in the chain things are as good as they are going to get for a while.

    The Bourne Identity: This is the only movie I've watched all the way through. I didn't see a single artifact! (Like I mentioned earlier, the modified beginning and ending were horrible, but the theatrical-release parts were great.) After I re-cabled the C2 I watched all the scenes that had audio dropouts before and they played just fine through the scaler.

    Star Wars - Episode III: I usually play the first five minutes of this when I demo the home theater, so I'm used to it. It is a high-quality "transfer" and looks good on anything. It looked better with the C2.

    The Tuskegee Airmen: This PBS special I figured was shot in video, so I used it to test the video deinterlacing. Strangely, the C2 locked on a 3:2 pulldown mode. Also strange; I got white flashes during scene cuts. I looked at the front panel of the C2, and it lost film mode intermittently. I'll do more research here. The PQ was great, however.

    Miami Vice - Original Television Series: Again, I was looking for video performance, but the C2 locked on 3:2 pulldown. No flashes of white between scene cuts this time. Again, nice PQ, noticeably better than before. The C2 didn't improve the acting, but I still love this series.

    Star Trek - Original Television Series: Once again, I was looking for video performance, but the C2 locked on 3:2 pulldown. No flashes of white between scene cuts this time. Again, nice PQ, noticeably better than before. (Am I sounding like a broken record yet?)

    Prince: Live in Las Vegas: Currently queued up in the player. THIS should be video-sourced. Update soon.

Conclusion:

    I've probably watched only 5 hours with the Crystalio II, but I understand why people rave about it. Most users have projectors with digital inputs and HD sources. I don't. I will, just not for a year or so. Even with my older HD1-based projector I feel like I've gotten my money's worth out of the scaler. Like far too many first-time Home Theater people, I got a 92" screen and wasn't happy with the quality of my existing sources blown up that large. (Of course, people starting now can get 1080p sources to go with their 1080p displays and skip all this aggravation.) The C2 allows me to enjoy all I have now, knowing that as I upgrade components in my home theater, my scaler can keep pace. Nice work, Pixel Magic.