Anyone get RED Ray and Seiki 50" working together yet?

[Kevin Wild]

We got our RED Ray and hooked it up via an HDMI 1.4 cable. The menu flickers like crazy and the videos won't play. They occasionally show for 1 second and then the screen goes black again. Very frustrating. Anyone have any ideas?

Kevin

 

[Chris McKechnie]

I don't have a redray, but I would suggest swapping out the HDMI cable and changing HDMI ports on the back of the tv. I know that some users have been experiencing problems with various HDMI ports on the Seiki.

You could also hook up the RR to a 1080 TV to make sure the signal (albeit only 1080) is in fact sending/working. Could hopefully narrow down if it's the player or on the Seiki side. My bet is it's on the Seiki side.

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

You can swap HDMI cables until you're blue, it won't help. The HDMI inputs on the SEIKI are all FUBAR.

The good news is that it can work with a decent booster or other HDMI repeater type device. It works perfect through a Gefen HDMI extender. These are the best: http://www.gefen.com/kvm/gtb-hdbt-pol-blk.jsp?prod_id=11041

Can be had from various online shops for around $220. Monoprice also has an HDBase-T extender that works in a pinch, but I've had it run short on bandwidth here and there. It's also not enough cheaper to justify the shortcomings vs. the Gefen.

That said, there are enough problems with the SEIKI as a 4K display, such as its inability to properly display 24fps input. In NTSC/ 60Hz regions, the panel refreshes at 30Hz when operated at full 4K raster. Period. No changing it. So we get 2:3 pull-up judder when playing back UHD/4K 24fps to the display. The long SEIKI thread around here has all these details, the extenders and boosters for use with REDRAY and a couple other sources it doesn't like, the judder, the improper shielding around HDMI input #2...

If you're within your return window on your SEIKI display, send it back. I hung my SEIKI in my basement and figured the kids could use it as a TV down there -- yeah, it's that good. Kids hate it because the scaling algorithm it uses makes everything so soft and mushy looking. In a nutshell, feed it native 4K @ 30Hz (or 24/25 Hz if you're in PAL land) or don't bother to turn it on.

 

[Kevin Wild]

Thanks, Jeff. I wondered if that's what it was. I may get an hdmi booster just so we can finally use this stupid Seiki! Return window was long gone as we got it when it first came out with the delusional thinking we could drop a $700 PCI card in our mac and play out 4K footage to it. Yeah, right. Never got it working...refresh rates were terrible on it from the Mac. BIG waste of money on the graphics card. If we can get a decent 4k picture to show clients, the Seiki won't be a regretted purchase. But now, I'm investing more in it...ugh.

I'll order one now if I can type my credit card number with my fingers crossed.

Kevin

 

[David Kuhn]

I just plugged my Redray into the Seiki in the lab... it blinked a lot on powerup but did make it to the main menu. Once I tried playing a video however it gave me an error... the badly translated equivalent of "Invalid Video Format". The Seiki has worked pretty well as a computer monitor for High Resolution content (secondary monitor), but clearly they're pretty limited.

 

[David Kuhn]

So the Gefen hdmi extender did clear up the major issues with the Seiki and Redray... I'm now able to playback any content (with pullup judder sadly). Only issue is periodic resync of the screen (goes blank then after about 4 seconds pops back up with a "3840 x 2160 resoluion" popup message. I'm playing with different HDMI cables to see if anything will help... but it sounds like what Jeff said, not a great interface in the display.

Edit - the loss of sync was caused by a bad hdmi cable...