well said bro Desray, most of projector owners are facing the dilemma of which to give up, brightness or wider gamut, hard to have the best of both world. If I were you, I will also choose NZ7, it does not justify another $10k for higher model with filter which dim your screen further.
Given my current situation, if I don’t have a screen and if availability is not a constraint, I would give 3.0 gain screen a try. Reason being: I can have a choice then, I can either try natural mode, to boost brightness to max, and see how HDR looks, or select cinema mode, with lower brightness but wider gamut, and see which one I like more……
Thanks bro Bryan. In the past picture quality is never my focus, but madVR opened up a whole new world to me, and I realized how ignorance I’m in this domain. Yes, I am motivated to pick up more knowledge and skills, since the info are so easily available in AVSForum, what I spend is just some spare time. There is no reason I said no to myself. Moreover, learning is fun……
You are definitely right on hot spotting, and I’m aware of the risk. Need to pick the screen carefully, there are many 3.0 gain screen users in china nowadays, without hot spotting issue and positive feedback. Some even use 6.0 gain but that’s really mad, and majority of them come back with negative user experiences.
Finally time to submit my long overdue homework, lol. Sorry, I was playing miniDSP SHD for the past one week and didn’t really have time for movie lately (still owe bro Desray my impression on SHD but I will only do it after playing around different ways of Dirac calibration, so it will take a while).
Below you will find the comparison between:
Oppo 203 video output to Epson TW8300 directly, with most watchable (brightest) HDR mode 1, colourspace BT2020 selected
Oppo 203 video output to BMD mini 4K capture card, processed through madVR and output to TW8300, SDR and BT709 colorspace selected
It took me two nights to complete the photo taking (need to power off projector to reconnect HDMI) so I tried my best to compare with the same scene but it is not possible to be the exact same frame.
Please take note that I didn’t do any further tuning to optimise the picture quality for HDR mode 1 and madVR (I have yet done any serious tuning on madVR settings up to date), so there might be a lot of room for improvement for both, so below comparison will give you a very rough idea of how the “raw” TW8300 HDR and madVR PQ looks like.
1st Movie: Zootopia Disney Openning Scene - you should be able to tell which picture is with madVR TM -
I noticed picture is a bit pale/dis-coloured after madVR, particularly for the brighter scene. Need to explore how to fix it through madVR setting optimisation. One easy fix might be adjusting gamma of TW8300 but I would prefer tweaking madVR settings as much as I can and leave projector gamma untouched……any suggestions?
The difference in Black Panther is quite amusing and I have noticed the same thing on my LG projector in HDR when I have Dynamic Tone Mapping on. However, @Ronildoq has managed to tune his projector so he has good shadow detail in Black Panther, while keeping DTM on.
As for the paleness, I assume you adjusted the contrast control up? Ideally, after calibrating the projector, and telling MadVR it’s calibrated, it should be appropriately contrasty. I believe you can load a custom curve into MadVR, but I never tried it as I didn’t need to. The only thing I sometimes do is for very dark movies, I will move my projector iris smaller to remove the slight DLP haze I get on very dark movies. But not sure your projector has an iris.
You mean the contrast control in my projector menu? If this is the correct understanding, the answer is no, I didn’t touch anything in my projector end.
Ya, I also plan to explore custom TM curves to see whether it helps to improve the bright scenes, I guess it will.
What magic did Bro Bryan do to achieve that? Just wondering……
Yes. Try that first. MadVR prefers a calibrated projector so best to do try to calibrate as much as possible, say with the Spears&Munsil disc. Or get a colorimeter and use Displaycal
I want that contrasty look with the black levels , I don’t like to raise black floor too much , so without DTM , we can see the levels are raised for blacks as well… similar to white clipping …
The one above looks brighter with DTM off, but the black levels not so nice. With on, though this scene gets blacker and darker, but it’s still visible on the big screen. No crushed blacks. Shadow details are still there. But what I gain is from the inky black contrasty look from the projector…
I don’t want to see the entire jungle light up like a stadium, it is after all a jungle and it’s supposed to be dark.
So if u observe the brighter image above, when u turn off, the contrast takes a hit
I’ve been assessing for some time now, I find it ok to use the internal DTM… no issues at all from what I’m seeing on screen, especially on the 135”… no problems all the details are visible
Sure, its a preference thing. However, if you compare with the Blue Ray SDR version of the same movie, you may find that you have definitely lost some shadow detail compared to the HDR scenes above. The above scenes are the bright scenes from Black Panther and he higher contrast may be an individual preference. However, the dark scenes of Black Panther like what @matrix16888 showed earlier, the picture ends up with big black swathes all over the screen if you have DTM on and everything looks murky.
Projectors only produce 100 nits or so, which is the SDR definition. Therefore, to expect OLED blacks and highlights would not be reasonable for a projector. So the question is how you want your compression. Do you want it contrasty with loss of shadow detail or see everthing, but it looks less HDR. With the current technology, you have to pick one or the other.
Ya couldn’t disagree. U push one settings for luminance, the black suffers and contrast suffers. Vice versa and so on.
Totally agree with u . At the end of the day, the room and ambient light etc all play a part and the calibration too… so a lot of factors come into play…
I prefer that hdr punch and inky blacks, yes cannot fight the OLED for sure but definitely don’t want my black panther to become grey panther
The first image with brighter scenes, seeing it in person is what I enjoy having this pj, the desire is more towards having that contrasty look on the election scene than without. Both scenes show the details but one had that inky blacker black looks to it . When it came to jungle scene, the image lightens up with DTM off… but also not sure what details is lost as I can see everything just that it’s slightly darker compared to DTM off… and personally I still feel that it’s ok if I cannot see 1 or 2 stones on the floor of the jungle … so that’s fine for me
I’m also using 3 separate tone mapping curves on the pj, so 1000nit, 4000nit and 10k nit source are all mapped differently
If you are using your Vroom, Dolby Vision DTM, through LLDV, also makes an impact and adjusting the DV string makes a difference. Personally, I found my best setting at 100 nits (the minimum - you can set it lower, but it will still be 100 nits).
I still use LLDV, but my current strategy is to get LLDV to tone map down to 1,000 nits then to let MadVR take over. For non Dolby Vision content, I just let it rip through MadVR.
Matrix settings on the madvr doesn’t look correct above… is there something else the users need to do ? The jungle scene for black panther looks like it’s in the hockey stadium
The prisoners in the jeep are supposed to be dark, threre is no light in the jeep, where is the light coming from ? If u r driving at night and took a pic, it’s supposed to be dark
Do u guys enjoy watching all the details in the process sacrificing black levels and contrast ?
This is interesting… because I know a lot of people want to see the details and want the contrast the same time… but it’s hard… the settings above looks like require a lot of tweaking
It’s interesting to see LG internal DTM actually make the picture darker, I felt it a bit too dark to my liking based on the picture itself, but it might be just nice if watch in front of the screen. The picture quality of LG with DTM off is way better than my TW8300 HDR mode, I believe that’s the advantage of laser projector, higher luminance actually makes HDR movie very watchable even without DTM on.
For my dim bulb projector, with 50 nits measured luminance, it’s complete darkness for movies like black panther, which is not watchable at all (my eyes getting tired very soon, trying to figure out what’s going on in the darkness), madVR lights up the whole jungle - agree with Bro Bryan that it’s not realistic, but as what I mentioned in the beginning, it’s not the fault of madVR, it’s the missing of optimisation of madVR settings, I believe with custom TM curve and some setting optimisation, I can have better contrast while reasonable shadow details retained at the same time.
Will post back once I get better PQ after tweaking…… fingers crossed,
After seeing what Bryan posted, @sammy bro Sammy, did you mix up madVR one with without madVR one? The 1st picture is always without madVR and 2nd is with. So madVR is much brighter……
and I have noticed the same thing on my LG projector in HDR when I have Dynamic Tone Mapping on. However, 
