You Render Me Speechless, Colorless and Furious!
October 12, 2015 1:56 AM Subscribe
I got an old rear projection TV for free — it's a 65" Toshiba 65HX83 HD. How can I calibrate this monstrosity?
It still has some life in it, nothing's burnt, but the color rendering is horrendous. Can anyone talk me through a DIY tuneup? Messing around with standard settings ain't cuttin' it. The online guides I found throw around terms like "ISF" "colorimeters" "calibration software" and "test patterns," but I want to do this cheap. And it's an old set... do these walk-throughs even apply?
If it matters, my goals are to: 1) run movies off my laptop, and 2) help my roommates set up gaming systems (probably PS4 & Steam Machine). #1 is achieved, but the damn screen is so dark I can barely make out faces or shadows. Surely there is more awesome to be had!
My current setup is a mid-2012 Macbook Air and a mid-2015 Macbook Pro, DVI/HDCP > HDMI > USB adapters, and an RCA cable.
It still has some life in it, nothing's burnt, but the color rendering is horrendous. Can anyone talk me through a DIY tuneup? Messing around with standard settings ain't cuttin' it. The online guides I found throw around terms like "ISF" "colorimeters" "calibration software" and "test patterns," but I want to do this cheap. And it's an old set... do these walk-throughs even apply?
If it matters, my goals are to: 1) run movies off my laptop, and 2) help my roommates set up gaming systems (probably PS4 & Steam Machine). #1 is achieved, but the damn screen is so dark I can barely make out faces or shadows. Surely there is more awesome to be had!
My current setup is a mid-2012 Macbook Air and a mid-2015 Macbook Pro, DVI/HDCP > HDMI > USB adapters, and an RCA cable.
Best answer: The manual for your TV mentions the possibility of burn-in on a picture tube, and an implosion risk if the TV is improperly disposed of. That suggests to me that it doesn't actually have a lamp; it has a CRT instead.
When CRTs get old, the cathodes lose emissivity and the picture gets dim. This is wear; there's not much you can do about it. You can have a technician adjust the sub-brightness control to jack up the cathode current and make it run hotter, but that's a very temporary cure as it will then wear out even faster.
The only real fix is a new picture tube, and I would expect that to be quite expensive.
posted by flabdablet at 4:07 AM on October 12, 2015
When CRTs get old, the cathodes lose emissivity and the picture gets dim. This is wear; there's not much you can do about it. You can have a technician adjust the sub-brightness control to jack up the cathode current and make it run hotter, but that's a very temporary cure as it will then wear out even faster.
The only real fix is a new picture tube, and I would expect that to be quite expensive.
posted by flabdablet at 4:07 AM on October 12, 2015
This thread is closed to new comments.
2. Read a little on using colorbars and then using either a full screen colorbar picture set the monitor up.
posted by chasles at 3:30 AM on October 12, 2015