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 June 1, 2006 Frosting on the Cake: Lumagen VisionProHDP Video Processor
Suddenly, anxiety strikes. Should you be doing more? Are there other improvements you could be making? Back in the old days of home stereo equipment, this type of feeling usually led to hours of resetting a phono cartridge’s geometry, retightening wires and adding magic juices to their binding joints, even making minute changes to the placement and angle of loudspeakers, as if some gremlin had moved them in the night. But today, most of the inner workings of our precious video gear are sealed away to prevent tampering by our inexperienced hands. We mostly have to sit and accept what we see. Now we can rejoice in a product that gives the power back to the people, and adds massive improvements to our visual enjoyment. The Lumagen VisionProHDP video processor ($2499 USD) offers enough ease of use for the average consumer to derive observable benefit, yet enough flexibility and range of adjustment that when you finally ante up for that ISF-certified setup, the techie will have all the tools necessary to make your system truly accurate. There’s still some confusion over the role of a video processor. The first benefit offered by the Lumagen is, for me, one of the most important: its ability to switch among as many as ten different video sources. Given the dearth of video source-switching capacity among today’s surround-sound processors, the Lumagen’s wealth in this department feels as if someone has just stopped hitting you in the head with a hammer. Imagine: no more Medusa-like pile of cables around your projector. With the VisionProHDP, all you need is one DVI-D cable. (Those with older, nondigital TVs will need a bundle of analog cables: a five-cable RGBHV or a three-cable Y-Pr-Pb.) Lumagen opted to use professional instead of consumer connectors, and I can see their point. Both the DVI-D and BNC connectors can be fastened down, whereas the more normal HDMI and RCA connectors can be easily pulled out. But that means you’ll need HDMI-to-DVI-D converters for your digital connections and RCA-to-BNC for your analog. To get you going, Lumagen provides two BNC-to-S-video and two sets of Y-Pr-Pb BNC-to-RCA male cables, all of very high quality. Nevertheless, if you insist on picking your own cables, you might want to factor in the cost of using these somewhat esoteric connectors.
In short, you can give the VisionProHDP just about any type of signal and have any input perfectly scaled to the precise needs of your display. Once the Lumagen gets a signal, it senses whether it’s interlaced or progressive; if the signal is interlaced, the VisionProHDP converts it to progressive, then uses Lumagen’s own systems to scale the picture to the size of the digital display, or oversamples the signal for display on a CRT. You can set the image’s precise size in both horizontal scan lines and vertical pixels. Each input has four different memory modes. This has been a boon in the Marshall household, where, I shudder to admit, we occasionally watch afternoon sports in a room with a wee bit of ambient light. I’ve set the DirecTV/TiVo input for both a dark room and for daytime hoops. Nice. Unlike many other devices that do some transcoding, the VisionProHDP offers all of its features on the DVI-D and HD component inputs. The massive computing power this requires usually scares off the makers of the DVD players and surround-sound processors that include some form of scaling. The overriding impression I got from the VisionProHDP was that it was one tough hombre of a piece of gear, unafraid to effortlessly handle anything I threw at it. In fact, its build quality, thoughtful design, and unflappability reminded me of the big power amps from Krell Industries and Jeff Rowland Design Group. Installing the VisionProHDP was simple. On its most basic level, the device offers all that switching; armed with its own internal test signals and an AVIA test DVD, you can do a good job of making your display look a lot better than it did fresh from the factory. But to complete the installation, I urge you to find an ISF techie who’s familiar with the Lumagen. You’re already spending $2499 to make your picture perfect -- skimping on this last part of the deal would be like buying a speaker cable that’s a meter short, just to save money. To plumb the depths of all that the VisionProHDP can do, you need someone who really knows what they’re doing. (The owner’s manual has six pages for the buyer, a full 30 pages for the installer.) Nearly every imaginable parameter can be tweaked to perfection by a good technician, to give you a better-looking picture than you dreamed possible. And if your tech can be a little creative in putting together a group of presets, you’ll be able to send that terrific picture through a greater number of inputs and watch it in varying levels of ambient light. The owner settings simply require a dark room and half an hour of your time. After I’d finished the easy settings, working with a Mitsubishi HC3000 DLP projector, my wife walked in as Scottie Pippin was discussing hoops. She gasped at the improvement. The picture had taken on a dimensionality and depth that were amazing. But when the camera pulled back for a view of the rest of the experts, we both noticed something wrong with the skin tones. But when they then cut back to the stadium, we could tell that the Lumagen had only been accurately revealing a poor job of lighting at ABC studios. The talking heads were overlit. One of the most instructive things I tried was using the Lumagen with the Oppo OPDV971H DVD player. Using two 720-line DLP projectors, the Mitsubishi and an Optoma H79, I sent an image from the Oppo at 480p to the Lumagen (the Lumagen did the scaling), at 480p directly to the projectors (the projectors did the scaling), and at 720p directly to the projector (scaling by Oppo). While the little Oppo did a splendid job, especially considering its $199 price, and the two projectors had good circuitry, the Lumagen was in another class altogether.
The reason was that you can do a complete setup of every visual parameter for the VisionProHDP’s DVD input, to ensure that your color temperatures are correct, the gray scale is perfect, the blue and red timing are spot on, and that every other detail is right. You can then do all of this for every one of the nine other inputs. Only a handful of projectors offer so much control of more than one input at a time. Such flexibility is a real benefit. The visual results? Better clarity, more relaxed viewing (my eyes actually felt more rested), and a dramatic increase in perceived depth. Little details in the backgrounds of Boz Scaggs’ Greatest Hits Live DVD went from pleasant blurs to clear filigrees. The pulsing, throbbing colors in chapter 10 of Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me showed specifically defined edges without ever crossing the line into spiky graininess. As if all this adjustability weren’t enough, the Lumagen is remote-controllable. The remote looks and feels a little cheesy, but functionally it’s a nice piece of industrial design that does the job. Besides the On/Off functions, you can directly (thank you) select each input, two of the presets for each input, four aspect ratios (4:3, 16:9, 1.85:1, and letterbox), and Zoom. With an extra keystroke, you can access the other two presets for each input. Hitting Menu takes you down a rabbit hole where madness lies for the non-expert -- but at least it’s there and easily accessible. Actually, it’s too accessible. Keep this remote away from kids and childish adults. The VisionProHDP is no toy; it’s a serious piece of business with enormous power, and though you can save your settings, it’s not all that hard to unlock them, create havoc with a few unwanted changes, and lock the new ones into memory. Having the VisionProHDP in my rack gives me confidence -- I know I’ve taken the extra step to ensure that I’ve squeezed every last iota of performance from my home-theater system. If your HT investment runs into five digits, you should try out a professionally installed Lumagen VisionProHDP. I think you’ll be amazed at what it can do. …Wes Marshall Lumagen VisionProHDP Video Processor Lumagen Inc. E-mail: info@lumagen.com
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So you’ve got a gorgeous new Stewart 100"
screen, and you’ve wired up your brand-new high-end digital projector to a pristine
HDTV source, fired up your high-priced multichannel sound system, and sunk into your
luxurious sofa, ready for an evening of entertainment. Life is good.
The VisionProHDP has two digital
(DVI-D) and eight analog inputs. The analog ins comprise two component-video, which can be
used for high- or standard-definition signals; two standard-definition component; two
S-video; and two composite video. Hangers-on still stuck with S-video and composite
sources will be happy to know that the component inputs can be programmed to accept their
lower-resolution sources. The Lumagen is happy with all consumer standards: NTSC, PAL,
SECAM, 50Hz, 60Hz (or, as they rightly point out, 59.94Hz). New MPAA head Dan Glickman and
his merry band of copy-protection hooligans will be happy to see that the VisionProHDP is
fully HDCP-compliant. Most important for the new variety of digital HD sources is that the
Lumagen also works on the per-pixel level: its outputs can be set to 480i, 480p, 720p,
1080i, or 1080p. 
