CurtPalme.com Home Theater Forum

[unkyjoesa]

Greetings all,

As you may or may not know I am wrestling with parting out my 8500 due to mounting constraints in my HT.

Something I observed when delving into the Marquee to tear things apart

Damn this is OLD technology - I know they are well built, but so may components.

I have a 2000-2001 Mitsubishi RPTV 56" that I recently had the joy of repairing myself. It had a bad convergence chip that I replaced to get working.

I expected when I took the cover off of the back of this thing that it would be a mass of wires and boards, remarkaby though it simply had a few boards.

Here is the main board - signal board as they call it

http://www.flickr.com/photos/unkyjoe/2300237095/in/set-72157604009197042/

Here is the power board

http://www.flickr.com/photos/unkyjoe/2300235521/in/set-72157604009197042/

Its the brown colored board on the right side, you can see how the two boards are joined together at the junction of the green and brown boards.

That is it, well there are some pcb's on the tubes as well. Very simple elegant design.

It is a shame they are not producing the Marquee anymore, can you imagine the improvements in board design that have come about in the last few years since those 95-98 models were made.

Man if there was a market for replacement boards for these projectors and someone with the circuit design skills imagine how many components could be reduced in the projectors.

Just look at the Color Correction board on the Marquee to get an idea of what I am speaking of, that entire board can be replaced with one IC and some supporting resistors and caps...

I know mods have been done to these boards to improve picture quality, but man can you imagine a whole new set of boards using todays tech

[Nashou66]

[unkyjoesa]

My bad -

But still I wonder how many boards and components even these new units use, anyone gotten to peek at the boards?

Still I think you would agree, they could be built with less components today, much less, as long as good quality components wer used - yes - no ?

[macgyver655]

Hmmmmmm.....

Marquee's are still being produced. Also there are hough differences between RPTV and CRT projectors. If you pulled the light box out of your Mitsubishi and tried to shoot it on the same screen as your Marquee you would see why. You probably would barely see a picture. Plus the fact of being able to resolve almost anything you put into it. Your Mitsubishi is probably 480p/1080i max and still not the quality of the Marquee or many other makes of Front projection CRT. All those electronics in a front projector are there for a reason and yes maybe some could be condensed into ic's but thats not always a good thing for many reasons which is why many manufactures didnt do it even though the technology was there at the time.

[Curt Palme]

[Curt Palme]

[km987654]

[unkyjoesa]

Make sense I guess, so the quality of the components today is sub par to what they were then?

So much for progress.

And yes I agree Curt the quality of the Mitsubishi I have is less reliable than the Marquee, this is the second time the Conv Chip has been replaced, and it failed due to heat, and it was a pain in the ass to get off the board to repair, in fact the board was kind of screwed up when removed but I was able to repair it.

I was just curious as to why so many components could not be combined into a little better design.

A few years ago most MB manufacturers tried to save money on components, a lot of system boards came out with CAPS from china that were not up to the challenge, I cant tell you the number of MB's I have pulled due to faulty caps.

These are some of the most critical components on computer MB's yet this is where they chose to save a little money.

I have computers here I have been using for 8+ years and they are still running strong, but those are quality built boards with quality components, they dont make them to last.

Hell I have a Sony amp going on out me, it is about 5 years old, but these things used to last 20+ years or more, like my older Sony amp, it is over 15 years old and still going strong.

So thanks for the clarrification.

[garyfritz]

[Curt Palme]

To me the biggest contributor to failure is heat. Put your hand on your satellite/cable receiver one day. Now imagine it crammed on top of a DVD player which is on top of a receiver which is in a stereo cabinet with miles of cables behind it blocking any airflow, never mind the slot in the back of the cabinet has a power bar bolted to it, and the glass door is closed. And your typical 20-something year old cranks it to 11.

That's why I cringe about people doing fan mods. NO PEOPLE, PUT IN MORE FANS! LIQUID COOLING! LIQUID NITROGEN!

[Curt Palme]

To me the biggest contributor to failure is heat. Put your hand on your satellite/cable receiver one day. Now imagine it crammed on top of a DVD player which is on top of a receiver which is in a stereo cabinet with miles of cables behind it blocking any airflow, never mind the slot in the back of the cabinet has a power bar bolted to it, and the glass door is closed. And your typical 20-something year old cranks it to 11.

That's why I cringe about people doing fan mods. NO PEOPLE, PUT IN MORE FANS! LIQUID COOLING! LIQUID NITROGEN!

[macgyver655]

It all has to do with cost. People want an item but they dont want to pay alot for it. So the manufacturers use 2nd and 3rd class parts to build with, making the item cheaper but less reliable.

I'll give you an example. This applies to tv's in the 90's. It may still be used but I'm not as involved in them as I was then. We'll take RCA for example. RCA would build lets say a 27" tv. Walmart, K-Mart and other stores would go to RCA and say we want a 27" tv to sell in our stores but we only want to pay x dollars but we'll buy 500 thousand sets. RCA would build them that set but leaving out components and I mean lots of components. The ones the RCA dealers were selling had all the parts but were more money, rightly so and would preform and last longer, but looked just like the ones in the dept stores. Other manufacturers did the same, I just used RCA as the reference.

I remember have 2 such different units in my shop and comparing main boards. The cheaper one you could clearly see 10's if not hundreds of empty part locations where the real RCA would be all filled up. Now you say how could it work without those parts. Well most of the extra parts were for filtering and signal efficiency. So the cheaper tv would have a poor picture, poor reception and would not last as long because the circuit was working harder to preform thus creating more heat (As Curt was referring to) and more likely to fail prematurely.

Same goes for audio equipment. You can but a 3 to 4 hundred dollar receiver, or a 3 to 4 thousand dollar receiver. Whats the difference. Quality of parts and quality of circuit design. The less informed people buy cheap quality thinking its the same and their just getting a better deal. Those who are more informed in quality will buy the Marquee (Just generalizing).
So now you know why these CRT projector have so many parts.


This is why we CRTr's are so strong in our community here. We know what quality is and thats what we want!!!!!!!!!!!!!



If ever you want my opinion on digitals, just ask. But hope I'm in a good mood when I respond.

[drice1234]

I can tell you that the screw manufacturers were shooting for CRT to remain in production. I have tore down about 4 or 5 CRT's and cannot believe the number of screws in these suckers.

[unkyjoesa]

Macgyver,

I dont think you can apply this with a broad brush though...

For example, I purchased a Sanyo 27" TV for my father in 1990. 18 years later this set is still going strong, it has been dropped once, had a child spill a coke in it, which I cleaned up.

There is one main board and a power board in this unit, simple elegant design, few components, lots of surface mount parts and has never been serviced.

I believe that items today are designed to fail. Why build a set that will last 20 years "like they used to" when we can sell them a new one every ten years.

Take CRT monitors, I have some that are more than 11 years old still going strong, yet I have customers that have purchased every brand of LCD monitors that last roughly 5-6 years and then bam they go out. I worry for the people buying flat screen LCD's today, how long will they last.

I love people that build PC's and cram all those components in a little bitty case with very little or no airflow and then tell me how wondeful they are, "Look how small they are!" 1 year later they wonder why the board is warped, hd's are failing, and the unit is overheating

[draganm]

[ecrabb]

I agree with Draganm.

Unkyjoe... I have to say... You're throughly confusing. First, you're posting about what you think is the inferior design and construction of your Marquee (with nearly 50,000 hours on it, I might add), and you're comparing it to a "value designed" consumer electronics TV - which looks better designed to you. Then, you seem to be shaking your head at people for buying new LCD monitors (presumably because they all fail in 4-5 years), yet you went and bought a cheap entry-level DLP projector that's undoubtedly built no better or no more reliable (much less, actually) than the LCD monitors! Uhhhhhh...

[draganm]

[ecrabb]

My dad has an Infocus horror story that I can't begin to do justice. It was such a CF, he'll never buy another Infocus product again.

OTOH, we have a crappy portable XGA Infocus DLP here at the office that's close to 5 years old and it still works perfectly. It did have the bulb die with less than 300 hours on it (out of warranty of course), but has otherwise been problem-free. Of course, it probably doesn't have 1000 hours on it.

I wonder if the reason so many people report problems with Optoma and Infocus is because of the sheer numbers of projectors those two companies ship - Infocus because they're so popular overall, and Optoma because they're so popular at the low-end of the market. I wonder if they're really much worse than the digital shoeboxes Panasonic, Sanyo, etc. sell that are in similar price ranges.

SC

[macgyver655]

[Curt Palme]

Seems somewhere about 20 years ago, maybe a bit more, some companies got the idea to sell volume over quality. Mac, you might agree with me that it was RCA. Zenith and Hitachi 20" remote sets w/converter were $549 and $499 CDN, the super deluxe ones were $649. THe TV store I worked at made maybe $150 per sale of the top end sets, as low as $80 for the budget sets.

RCA came along in about 1984-1985 and brought out the $299 special w/a 3 year warranty like everyone else. Those sets lasted about 3 1/2 to 4 years, and everymajor part was $125-$150 dealer cost. RCA had billboards all over Vancouver proclaiming that they were #1. 3 years later we were throwing out set after set, and had a lot of pissed off customers on our hands (we didn't sell RCA). All of those expensive parts were failing right around the end of the warranty period. That seemed to be the turning point. Everyone dropped their price, but I remember that I was at a Zenith service meeting where they admitted that they were losing their shirts with warranty claims, but each manufacturer was waiting for another one to drop the warranty terms to 1 year. Sometime after I got out of the TV repair business, someone did drop the warranty, and everyone followed suit.

By that time, customers were conditioned that a 3 year old set was 'old' and that if you didn't have stereo/MTS decoder/VCR hookup, you didn't have sh*t.

Now I think the cheapie TV warranties are 90 days, and sets and parts are being built to die quickfast. Heck, during one of my last days at the TV shop, someone brought in a $1200 Panasonic 32" TV (state of the art at the time), and he had set it on his couch to move his TV stand. The front heavy TV rolled off the couch and dropped maybe 12" to the carpeted floor. The PC board, held in with plastic clips cracked right in half. He almost cried when we told him that Panasonic didn't sell the complete PC boards... An 'old' TV (like a MArquee) can easily take a 3' drop with no issues. Try dropping a 9500 3' onto a concrete floor like I did a few years ago. One toasted HD10L lens, everything else was fine...

I've said it before, I'll say it again: I'd rather pay $500 for an 80 gig hard drive with an unconditional 10-15 year warranty (including free data retrieval if it crashes), than $99 for a 500 gig drive with an expected lifespan of 3-4 years, and usually a $350 data retrieval charge when it dies when I forget to do a full drive backup. I know the technology is there to make a 10-15 year lifespan drive. Apparently no one else is willing to buy one at a premium price...

[Curt Palme]

Seems somewhere about 20 years ago, maybe a bit more, some companies got the idea to sell volume over quality. Mac, you might agree with me that it was RCA. Zenith and Hitachi 20" remote sets w/converter were $549 and $499 CDN, the super deluxe ones were $649. THe TV store I worked at made maybe $150 per sale of the top end sets, as low as $80 for the budget sets.

RCA came along in about 1984-1985 and brought out the $299 special w/a 3 year warranty like everyone else. Those sets lasted about 3 1/2 to 4 years, and everymajor part was $125-$150 dealer cost. RCA had billboards all over Vancouver proclaiming that they were #1. 3 years later we were throwing out set after set, and had a lot of pissed off customers on our hands (we didn't sell RCA). All of those expensive parts were failing right around the end of the warranty period. That seemed to be the turning point. Everyone dropped their price, but I remember that I was at a Zenith service meeting where they admitted that they were losing their shirts with warranty claims, but each manufacturer was waiting for another one to drop the warranty terms to 1 year. Sometime after I got out of the TV repair business, someone did drop the warranty, and everyone followed suit.

By that time, customers were conditioned that a 3 year old set was 'old' and that if you didn't have stereo/MTS decoder/VCR hookup, you didn't have sh*t.

Now I think the cheapie TV warranties are 90 days, and sets and parts are being built to die quickfast. Heck, during one of my last days at the TV shop, someone brought in a $1200 Panasonic 32" TV (state of the art at the time), and he had set it on his couch to move his TV stand. The front heavy TV rolled off the couch and dropped maybe 12" to the carpeted floor. The PC board, held in with plastic clips cracked right in half. He almost cried when we told him that Panasonic didn't sell the complete PC boards... An 'old' TV (like a MArquee) can easily take a 3' drop with no issues. Try dropping a 9500 3' onto a concrete floor like I did a few years ago. One toasted HD10L lens, everything else was fine...

I've said it before, I'll say it again: I'd rather pay $500 for an 80 gig hard drive with an unconditional 10-15 year warranty (including free data retrieval if it crashes), than $99 for a 500 gig drive with an expected lifespan of 3-4 years, and usually a $350 data retrieval charge when it dies when I forget to do a full drive backup. I know the technology is there to make a 10-15 year lifespan drive. Apparently no one else is willing to buy one at a premium price...

[nuttall_chris]

[macgyver655]

Ahhhh... the old RCA's. Thats where the phrase "clicker" for the remote came from. Early tv remotes for these was a 4 button remote that when you pushed it a spring loaded slug would hit a tuning rod inside the remote and send a sound wave to the tv to change channels and volume, and it made a clicking sound when pushed. Sometimes noise made in the house would change the channel.