CurtPalme.com Home Theater Forum

[JBoom]

An interesting development in the wake of my poor deceased 1208s.

Looks like I may get a chance to replace it with a Barco 800. My father inlaw has had the 800 in storage for the past 5-6 years. Given the recent death of the 1208s, we pulled it out and hooked it up to see if it was in working order.

The 800 initially powered up fine and displayed the normal Barco info screen with nothing hooked up to any input. That ran for about 30 seconds before we powered it down and unplugged it. So far so good.

Since this will be in a rear projection configuration hanging from the ceiling, I carefully pulled the Vert (761768) and Horiz (761766) boards and made appropriate changes to the the 4 toggle switches, according to the manual. I then replaced the 2 boards.

We then powered it up again. This time, however, nothing was displayed. The error LED on the controller is blinking about once every second. The LED on the Vert board is blinking on then off once every 3 seconds. And the red scan fail LED is lit continuously except for about once every 30 seconds when it blinks momentarily and I can hear that the high voltage may be trying to initialize.

As part of troubleshooting, I have toggled the 4 switches back to their original positions. Have cleaned the switches. Have reseated both boards several times. I even tried hooking up an 800x600 60Hz signal from my laptop to the RGBHV input. No change in behavior.

My father inlaw thinks that the years in storage may have caused an electrolytic cap to degrade and that s may have failed.

Any suggestions would be helpful.

[Curt Palme]

Check all bad solder joints on all boards. If the problem continues, then chances are the fact it's been sitting has popped some parts. I just had that with a Barco 800 that sat for 2 years. Within 10 minutes it smoked the EHT board and SMPS. Easy fixes (for me), but frustrating when you're 3 hours out of town and the customer didn't say that the set hadn't been running for 2 years until I got there.

if you're stuck, I can test a bunch of boards for you and repair them cheaply.

[Curt Palme]

Check all bad solder joints on all boards. If the problem continues, then chances are the fact it's been sitting has popped some parts. I just had that with a Barco 800 that sat for 2 years. Within 10 minutes it smoked the EHT board and SMPS. Easy fixes (for me), but frustrating when you're 3 hours out of town and the customer didn't say that the set hadn't been running for 2 years until I got there.

if you're stuck, I can test a bunch of boards for you and repair them cheaply.

[JBoom]

Please excuse my electronics ignorance, but when you say "Check all bad solder joints on all boards", are you telling me to re-melt every joint on every board or to just check for conductivity with a multimeter?

[Curt Palme]

Neither. Check for bad solder joints, ones with visible cracks around them. This is more or less though where a tech needs to step in for some troubleshooting or repair.

Diving into a set with minor problems without any electronics experience is asking for trouble, and it's quite possible you'll make the set worse.

There are several key upgrades that should be done to any BArco 800. I do those for $150 incl return shipping, and you've got a good chance that if the tubes are in good shape that the set will last 3-5 years if not more.

[Curt Palme]

Neither. Check for bad solder joints, ones with visible cracks around them. This is more or less though where a tech needs to step in for some troubleshooting or repair.

Diving into a set with minor problems without any electronics experience is asking for trouble, and it's quite possible you'll make the set worse.

There are several key upgrades that should be done to any BArco 800. I do those for $150 incl return shipping, and you've got a good chance that if the tubes are in good shape that the set will last 3-5 years if not more.

[km987654]