Please school me - laser color correction boards

[Randomseed]

So without getting uber technical what does a color correction board do and should I be considering upgrading my projectors with them.
Should use with analog only, ok for ttl? What's the skinny and is it worth it?

[buffo]

Briefly, a color board adds a variable delay to the color signals that get sent to your lasers, which allows you to match up their response speeds.

Basically you "slow down" the color signal to your fast-response lasers so they match the performance of your slower-response lasers.

It's absolutely worth it for full color projectors with analog modulation that are used for graphics or abstracts. You will definitely notice a difference, both in the increased depth of the color palette and in the removal of annoying color "tails".

On a TTL-only projector, the benefits are less noticeable, but a color board can still eliminate color tails even on a projector with TTL modulation. It won't help your color palette though.

Watch this video for a good demonstration of how it works:



This was filmed at SELEM 7 just 3 weeks ago. (Thanks to DKumpula for shooting, editing, and uploading the video...)

Adam

[Randomseed]

ok sounds like something I do want then. Are the boards universal and just need tweaked or are they driver or something else specific?
Who's selling them?

[buffo]

Are the boards universal and just need tweaked or are they driver or something else specific?

They are universal. The board is installed between the ILDA port on the back of your projector and the modulation inputs of your lasers.

Who's selling them?

Rob (Stanwax) is selling them now, but I don't know if he has them in stock at the moment. As you saw in the video, DKumpula bought the last one's he had of the old design, and I'm not sure when the new version will be ready. You can contact Rob here on PL, or you can contact him through his website: http://shop.stanwaxlaser.co.uk/

Adam

[dkumpula]

Rob (Stanwax) is selling them now, but I don't know if he has them in stock at the moment. As you saw in the video, DKumpula bought the last one's he had of the old design, and I'm not sure when the new version will be ready. You can contact Rob here on PL, or you can contact him through his website: http://shop.stanwaxlaser.co.uk/

Hi Randomseed,

I got the last of the stand-alone version of the board about a month ago, but you should still be able to get the daughter board version. I have two of the daughter-board version and as far as I can tell, it is the same as the stand-alone except for the daughter-board connector on the bottom of the board instead of pins on the top of the board. (It is meant to be paired with the ILDA board that Rob also sells.)

I just installed one of the daughter board versions this week as a stand-alone (just connecting on the bottom of the board with taller stand-offs) and like the rest of the DZ color correction boards, it greatly increased the color performance of the projector.

I believe you will find David (DZ) and Adam's tutorial extremely helpful. You'll also want to use DZ's frames to tune (in ILDA or LDS format) which are attached here:

Color Board Adjustment Frames.ild
Color Board Adjustment Frames.lds

Happy tuning!

-David

[daction]

Heya,
Great time to be talking about this. I am not far off turning on my laser after a re wire. I have installed robs new combo axis flip colour correction board.
Really nice unit . It came with all the bits to make the cables. If you can I would recommend getting one thats mounted to a panel ( I broke one of the ribbon cables mucking around with the slots that i cut).
Kiwitinker and I have been talking about this since we became aware of them ( maybe 2 years ago).
Its taken that long for me get get one.

[daction]

Heya, well I have set the colour board up ( still needs some tweaks). Kiwitinker came down to Whanganui a month or so ago. So we busted the laser out.
On quick show we set it to do a circle. In quick fx I set it to cycle thru the colours. Before I had the colour board it was not smooth at all.
Now its smooth. I had the threshold for the green a touch too high as we could see a faint green out line . Easily adjusted.

[dkumpula]

Heya, well I have set the colour board up ( still needs some tweaks). Kiwitinker came down to Whanganui a month or so ago. So we busted the laser out.
On quick show we set it to do a circle. In quick fx I set it to cycle thru the colours. Before I had the colour board it was not smooth at all.
Now its smooth. I had the threshold for the green a touch too high as we could see a faint green out line . Easily adjusted.

Hey Daction!

Yes, good fun for me as well! In fact, I just installed my 6th DZ board yesterday. It's worked wonders for me on old and new modules, including various combinations of dpss greens, dpss blues and straight diode reds and blues. Fading from white to dim white is such an improvement as compared to fading from white to blue/green.

Most of my reds are still a bit anemic on the low end, but I'm about to attempt to compensate for this by PBS cubing a lower power red connected to the 4th channel output on the colour board. My thought is that if the gain turned up on that fourth channel, I can get the lower powered red to compensate for those dimmer whites and then have the main red do most of the "heavy lifting" after that.

Cheers!

-David

[sbk]

Most of my reds are still a bit anemic on the low end, but I'm about to attempt to compensate for this by PBS cubing a lower power red connected to the 4th channel output on the colour board. My thought is that if the gain turned up on that fourth channel, I can get the lower powered red to compensate for those dimmer whites and then have the main red do most of the "heavy lifting" after that.

What about a software configurable correction board to address this?

[m0f]

Software correction can work well when the option is there, as long as using a separate dac for each laser. Tuning the curve in Beyond really helped with getting colours to match up when fading down the brightness. I've noticed big improvements since setting up some profiles in the advanced colour section, though I'm still just using only 3 colour channels, it made a big difference over the the standard 3 colour setting with min / max values only.

However there's no adjustment for delay, which is where the colour correction boards are helpful. And also is nice to have it tuned in hardware and not dependant on a particular software.