Panasonic ae700 troubles

The deterioration of my Panasonic pt-ae700e's picture has reached the point that I'll ship it to Germany for warranty repair.

I first noticed problems when a blue huey started to appear on the border of the picture and the black bars. Horizontal or vertical depending on the picture geometry. the blue glow was not there until longer viewing but the time started shortening until they were in the picture from projector start. After that they started to grow in size and in color intensity.I contacted local Panasonic to inquire what was wrong and would they do a warranty repair. A service tech told me that the problem is in the polarizators. there are 6 in the unit and depending on how many and what kind (there are 2) were broken the repair estimate was 400-600€ and they would not repair it in warranty 'cos Finnish projectors only have 12 month warranty.Well it's a "no brainer" get it fixed locally and pay the units street price for it or to ship it back to Germany where they have a 24 month warranty and get it done for free.
Later a black mosaic started to appear on the bottom left corner that reacted to the input signals color or contrast. This problem was not seen on the projectors internally generated test patterns, but that doesn't really tell us too much. I'm not sure are these 2 separate problems or the same.

Here are 2 pictures where you can see the blue glow/color on the left side and the mosaic drop out on the bottom. Pictured is a submarine under water.
The latter is pure black or "no picture" from the same program in my Topfield.
Look at that nice blue and black checkerboard. What it shows nicely is the area that is affected and discolored by the blue ameba.







I cant be with out some form of display, so I borrowed a 32" 16:9 100Hz TV.
Yes I do have a 21" monitor but that's just too small, or at least I'll try to minimize the time I have to use it. This gave me the opportunity to test connecting my Lumagen video processor via VGA to this TV.



Now who needs scart, or other inferior analog connections? :) I didn't want to move my AV gear cabinet or the gear itself anywhere and the existing cables are too short just to run the wires and THAT would look messy.












We had to resort to creative problem solving to get the VGA connected. Lumagen only has BNC analogue out. Having only standard BNC and VGA cables I couldn't make the connection a VGA extension cable would have been required or a sex changer for the D-connector. Having neither I was a bit worried for a moment but then i remembered having a spare KVM switch. That would do nicely in male to female conversion and enabled us to get that long VGA cable connected.
the VGA in of this Finlux model has always ben a challenge, being very picky on resolutions and even worse whit timings. The only supported resolution whit a close to accurate geometry is 720x400@70Hz but this was too lo-fi for Lumagen witch doesn't support under 480 resolutions.we tried 640x480 but couldn't get the picture to fill the screen properly. So we tested 720x480@60Hz witch proved to be close enough. The picture was set up for 16:9 geometry and can be changed to 4:3 whit 1 button on the Lumagen remote. NICE!


The warranty trip can take anywhere from 1-3 months so of we go and hope to se you soon.

My precious!!!

The conclusion...
http://testi-3.blogspot.com/2007/04/panasonic-ae700-troubles-are-gone.html