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 Post subject: Lumagen Radiance Pro and Algolith Mosquito for Laserdiscs.
PostPosted: 06 Sep 2021, 23:28 
Young Padawan
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I get some questions about these. I will briefly talk about their benefits to your LD picture and how you should set them up.

I will keep it simple. The Radiance Pro (RP) has zero benefits to your LD picture with an asterisk on “benefits”, more on this later. It has no analog inputs therefore you can’t connect your LD player to it. You will need another video processor to interface between the LD player and the RP. A typical candidate is the Radiance 2144 (R2144) which has analog video inputs and the best 3D comb filter in the market for LD players.

Some throw in an Algolith Mosquito HDMI (Mosquito) between the 2144 and Radiance Pro. The Mosquito is an excellent digital video noise enhancer (reducer). I have tried this in the past but decided against it due to a few shortcomings. For optimal results, the noise reduction (as well we sharpening) should occur after de-interlacing but before aspect ratio management (ARM) and scaling. Therefore you need to set the R2144 to output 480p into the Mosquito. The R2144 converts the Rec.601 (SD) colorspace of any analog input to Rec.709 (HD) colorspace even if it is set to output 480p. The next video processor in the chain will assume the 480p signal is in Rec. 601 and perform another conversion to Rec. 709 before it upscales. This double color space conversion will result in a minor shift in the colors. The other short coming is the older chipset in the Mosquito doesn’t allow 1080p60 video and lossless audio codecs. This is not an issue if all you have connected to your R2144 is your LD player.

There is one more shortcoming of the Mosquito in the chain which is the most important one for me. Although the RP can upscale any video from 480 to 4K but it is really most optimized for 1080p to 4K upscaling. It is highly recommended that you set the R2144 to 1080p and have the RP upscale from there to 4K. This is due to simple mathematics. You have the FPGA in the R2144 applying a 6x upscaling filter to go from 480 to 1080 then the FPGA in the RP applying a 4x upscaling filter to go from 1080 to 4K. The alternative (as in 480p into the RP) is the RP applying a 24x upscaling filter and stretching its processing power, rather than splitting it onto two separate FPGAs on the previous scenario. I prefer the split cascaded upscaling route. This makes integrating the Mosquito even more difficult. As previously mentioned, the noise reduction needs to be done before scaling and the Mosquito can’t take 1080p60. I believe it is best to use a low noise LD player and skip the Mosquito.

Now let’s talk about the asterisk on the “benefits” I mentioned above. The RP upscales 1080 to 4K extremely well. If you own a 4K display and if you want the absolute best then the split cascaded upscaling I explained previously will yield the ultimate results. The RP is extremely expensive for this purpose though. I would recommend it only if you own other 1080p and 4K source devices.
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 Post subject: Re: Lumagen Radiance Pro and Algolith Mosquito for Laserdisc
PostPosted: 25 May 2022, 02:24 
Young Padawan
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Lumagen released a new firmware update to their Radiance Pro processor which re-works the entire pipeline, adding a couple more bits precision and improving the overall performance from already excellent to beyond. I will update my above comments based on this new firmware since it transformed the Radiance Pro into a new processor.

Overall, my main opinion did not change. You should not buy this device for LDs. If you happen to own one or plan on buying one, now you want your Radiance 2144 or similar device to output 480p60(rather than 1080p60 as suggested previously) into Radiance Pro. Radiance Pro upscales from 480 to 4K very well now. It matches the sharpness of the cascaded upscaling method but has lower video noise.
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