JVC RS4500 (native 4K laser projector)

[Kris Deering]

Chad B calibrated it for me, not sure exactly what he uses to be honest.  I saw it last weekend watching Hotel Artemis.  It's loaded with instances from start to finish. 

I attached a log from Chad's calibration.  he uses 7500K to color from for HDR he said and created a custom 2020 profile so to not engage the color filter I believe.

I've seen some content that has red noise when you're watching a movie that has high saturation levels in red. I have a Sony test clip for HDR that is really noticeable for this. I don't have Hotel Artemis to test though, so can't help there. Just for testing purposes though, try the scene with the HDR color profile and the BT2020 profile. I know they aren't calibrated, but it will be interesting to see if they change anything. It would tell you if it is a problem with the player, the profile Chad created or a limitation of the lower saturation.

[Baseball0618]

I've seen some content that has red noise when you're watching a movie that has high saturation levels in red. I have a Sony test clip for HDR that is really noticeable for this. I don't have Hotel Artemis to test though, so can't help there. Just for testing purposes though, try the scene with the HDR color profile and the BT2020 profile. I know they aren't calibrated, but it will be interesting to see if they change anything. It would tell you if it is a problem with the player, the profile Chad created or a limitation of the lower saturation.

Will do next time I have a few moments to test.  I am wondering if it's bad chroma processing on the UB820?  On this forum stridsvognen has mentioned the following:

I agree about the tonemapping, but the chroma is a scam, the Panasonic have some serious chroma bandwidth issues wich they then boosted/ enhanced, wich adds a lot of distortion/ ringing. That makes for a more punchy image on level with adding some detail enhancement, and thats what most people like.
If you want to clean up the distortion and do a balance between chroma bandwidth and the ringing, try set chroma sharpness to -4
It goes for all Panasonic UHD players

[Kris Deering]

Weird. I haven't noticed anything. I also had a long talk with Chris Heinnonen who did a deep dive and he was talking about how great the chroma rang out in his testing. I don't have a 820 at the house anymore, but I have the 9000, which uses the same processing. I will look at it again. Maybe something got messed up in a firmware update.

[Kris Deering]

Here's his comments on the chroma scaling:

"When upscaling Blu-ray discs, the DP-UB820 offered the clearest, most detailed chroma scaling we’ve seen, which results in an image with more details and fewer artifacts. It won’t be mistaken for 4K HDR content, but the Panasonic does a better job than even the Sony players and our prior upgrade pick, the Oppo UDP-203."

[stridsvognen]

I think the isue is the way most look at chroma handling, there is quite a lot of parameters to check up on with chroma handling, and panasonic have what looks like a chroma bandwidth issue in the chipset, its quite normal, like a OPPO 103/ 105 will display that on the processed HDMI 1 output and not on the HDMI 2 output, or Lumagen also loos some chroma, its normal with processors who can manipulate the content, just the Panasonic is the most extreme case i experienced.
Thing is that the panasonic chroma bandwidth seems to be soo poor they had to enhance it to make it look properly on various testpatterns, same thing you can experience with older Lumagen processors with game mode on, the chroma boost have a side effect, its ringing, i prefer a mild chroma bandwidth roleoff over distortion, thats why i prefer the -4 on the chroma sharpness setting on the Panasonic players, and it goes for all the Panasonic UHD players, new and old series, the result is ilustrated in the image below, standard setting and -4 on the chroma sharpness.

It should have 0 effect on tonemapping and other performance parameters.

If you want the best chroma upscaling i think its the XBOX

[Kris Deering]

What is the output? 4:4:4? The Lumagen is designed to output 4:2:2, so I would imagine its chroma output would look different in this regard. I don't have an Xbox One X here to compare to. I have a Oppo 205, Panny 9000 and a Lumagen Radiance Pro.

[stridsvognen]

for this test 422 is fine, and dont know about the new Lumagen, i know the older ones make a bit of a mess with 444 in.

S&M chroma multiburst its a 1080P pattern, its the fast and dirty test it will mostly slap it right in you face no matter if its a 1080P or UHD videochain, look at the right side of the pattern the high resolution squares, see if they hold same output as the others, they can both peak or roleoff, both is wrong, the 2 big vertical bars on the left is where ringing is first noticed in between the red and blue bar, heavy ringing like the panasonic can be seen on the end of all the vertical lines, and if you change the chroma sharpness setting to -6 you will see the ringing is mostly gone, a bit left on the big vertical bars, and the 2 high resolution squares on the right side is now compleetly dark.

Panasonic is beating the drum on the multitap upsampling wich they ilustrate with a faint chroma zone plate, that zone plate would not be visible at all if they had not manipulated/ enhanced the chroma. So in the end the OPPO is handeling chroma much better, it dont seem to do anything wrong. Just that OPPO tonemapping is defective and will never be fixed, so out it goes if you need good tonemapping.
If you have a Lumagen and dont need the tonemapping i would try a XBOX One S its cheap. you might even have one somewhere in the house.

[stridsvognen]

Weird. I haven't noticed anything. I also had a long talk with Chris Heinnonen who did a deep dive and he was talking about how great the chroma rang out in his testing. I don't have a 820 at the house anymore, but I have the 9000, which uses the same processing. I will look at it again. Maybe something got messed up in a firmware update.

I got this reply from Panasonic. Its identical on ALL Panasonic UHD players, first time i seen it was the UB900, and fairly surprised that not one single review ever mentioned it, might say a bit about the value of reviews these days.

Dear Mr.

Thank you for your e-mail.

In regards to your query I have looked into what could be done with the settings.

It does not seem there would be a way to completely get rid of the ringing while keeping the proper output.

It would rather seem it is a limitation of the processor and you were right about the -4 chroma sharpness as it would seem like the best output is delivered with that.

In regards to a software update I am unsure yet if this would be an issue with the software but there should be a software update coming up at some point and perhaps it will also address this.

Kind Regards,

Customer Service Team
Panasonic UK

[DavidHir]

stridsvognen,

Does that chroma issue just affect UHD, but also BD 1080p?  Funny as I just looked at the Spears test disc recently comparing 4K upscaled BD to native 1080p on my RS440 but didn't look for this specific issue.  But, I found the native 1080p patterns looking better in general versus 4K upscaling (but we're talking an eshift projector here).

[Kris Deering]

for this test 422 is fine, and dont know about the new Lumagen, i know the older ones make a bit of a mess with 444 in.

S&M chroma multiburst its a 1080P pattern, its the fast and dirty test it will mostly slap it right in you face no matter if its a 1080P or UHD videochain, look at the right side of the pattern the high resolution squares, see if they hold same output as the others, they can both peak or roleoff, both is wrong, the 2 big vertical bars on the left is where ringing is first noticed in between the red and blue bar, heavy ringing like the panasonic can be seen on the end of all the vertical lines, and if you change the chroma sharpness setting to -6 you will see the ringing is mostly gone, a bit left on the big vertical bars, and the 2 high resolution squares on the right side is now compleetly dark.

Panasonic is beating the drum on the multitap upsampling wich they ilustrate with a faint chroma zone plate, that zone plate would not be visible at all if they had not manipulated/ enhanced the chroma. So in the end the OPPO is handeling chroma much better, it dont seem to do anything wrong. Just that OPPO tonemapping is defective and will never be fixed, so out it goes if you need good tonemapping.
If you have a Lumagen and dont need the tonemapping i would try a XBOX One S its cheap. you might even have one somewhere in the house.

Checked this tonight. If I use the test pattern on the S&M disc with the Panasonic UB900 it does add obvious ringing to the stripes on the left side. If you take chroma sharpness down you can eliminate the ringing, but it destroys the chroma resolution in the upper frequencies.

If I tried the Oppo 205 it was fine. I fed this through my Radiance Pro (4:2:2 out of the Oppo and out the Lumagen, as per Lumagen's recommend setup) and no issues at all. Resolution patterns looked fine and no ringing.

[Dylan Seeger]

If you have a Lumagen and dont need the tonemapping i would try a XBOX One S its cheap. you might even have one somewhere in the house.

As Kris mentioned before, at this point in time, you really need proper tone mapping to get a great looking image from UHD Blu-ray on a projector. I suspect the Lumagen Pro is out of reach for most people. A very cheap (relatively) solution would be to use madVR for UHD blu-rays. You could piece together a PC powerful enough for around $500-$600. I suspect the chroma upscaling (and resolution upscaling) that madVR uses is better than what can be found on the Lumagen Pro. madVR has the unfair advantage of having a much more powerful processing solution than what is inside the Lumagen. If I lived closer to Kris I'd invite myself over and we could do a little shootout.

If there was enough interest, I'd be more than happy to build HTPCs for people who've never done it before.

[AVSCraig]

Be that as it may, Blu-rays look sharper / better on my RS4500 using the UB900 vs the Oppo 203. So much so, I sold the Oppo some time ago. I don't see ringing in actual video. And I don't sit around watching test patterns.

[Baseball0618]

I've seen some content that has red noise when you're watching a movie that has high saturation levels in red. I have a Sony test clip for HDR that is really noticeable for this. I don't have Hotel Artemis to test though, so can't help there. Just for testing purposes though, try the scene with the HDR color profile and the BT2020 profile. I know they aren't calibrated, but it will be interesting to see if they change anything. It would tell you if it is a problem with the player, the profile Chad created or a limitation of the lower saturation.

Went back and viewed a few scenes of Hotel Artemis and changed some of the gamma settings and color profiles and the noise I was seeing appears to be related to the very high saturation of this particular film as you mention above.  There is a scene in the beginning when Jodie Foster answers a phone sitting up in her bed with a lamp on next to her and the whole scene is low APL w/ lots of red tones.  When I switched from Chad's custom gamma to HDR the reds still looked over saturated, but a lot of the shadow detail was gone.  In the scene part of Jodie Foster's bed is in the bottom left corner and when I switched out of the custom gamma to the HDR gamma the pattern on her bed cover completely disappears and the entire scene gets significantly darker.   It's a testament to Chad's abilities as a calibrator when you A/B the work he does for you. 

Kris thanks for your help and you can buy Hotel Artemis UHD copy on amazon for $21.00, it seems as though it's loaded with torture material.  It's not a bad movie either if you like John Wick type plot lines. 

[stridsvognen]

stridsvognen,

Does that chroma issue just affect UHD, but also BD 1080p?  Funny as I just looked at the Spears test disc recently comparing 4K upscaled BD to native 1080p on my RS440 but didn't look for this specific issue.  But, I found the native 1080p patterns looking better in general versus 4K upscaling (but we're talking an eshift projector here).

It has equal effect on 1080P and UHD, i set chroma sharpness to -4 with all content. But with 1080P upscaled to UHD it also adds luma ringing, so there you also need to take the luma sharpness down on both settings. I know there has been some recomendation to set edge correction to 1 for BD to UHD upscaling, however that just remove some ringing and introduce another.
If playing with the S&M chroma multiburst you should start checking straight out of the player to the display, no processing if possible, so eshift off, and go turn things on off and adjust see how it behaves. Just be carefull not to put to much attention to 1 specifik pattern, use multiple patterns to make sure you dont introduce distortion or artifacts in other type of content.

[stridsvognen]

Be that as it may, Blu-rays look sharper / better on my RS4500 using the UB900 vs the Oppo 203. So much so, I sold the Oppo some time ago. I don't see ringing in actual video. And I don't sit around watching test patterns.

That means that you see the effect of Panasonics enhancement wich is good, and i belive thats why many players processors and displays have enhancement features buil in, with the oppo you would have to turn it on/ adjust it, with the Panasonic it comes with defoult settings.
I never sell my gear, i love the posibility to go back and test combinations i might missed, ill agree the OPPO overall is not a specially good player, same can be said about the UB900, today the new Panasonic machines and the Xbox is the choice here depending what needs i have in a specifik setup.
If you like the UB900 i think ull love the UB 820/9000 it has good tonemapping, and adds the same enhanced look you prefer.