Unique, and BAD!, Sanyo Z1 Problem (1 Viewer)

[John_Bix]

Let me relate the following story. The gist of it is, I have a Sanyo PLV z1, and it is broke, and has me stumped...

I have been enjoying a z1 myself for nearly 3 years now. But a few weeks ago, a crazy thing happened:

I sat down to watch the US v Italy World Cup game in HD, and when I went to turn it on, the picture sort of flashed on and off, then when it finally came back, the colors were all crazy...like most everything was cyan or shades thereof. Very weird. It was like that for a few seconds, then the picture flickered off, then back on...normal. Then about 20 seconds later, flickered off, then on, only back to the shades of cyan. I thought "crappy OTA HD reception...they are always messed up" so we went to my neighbors to watch the game.

Came back down a few days later to watch something else, same problem. Shades of cyan. So I went about troubleshooting it, and long story short, I have my components going into the PJ thru a component cable, and it would work "ok" if I had the input set to "1080i" rather then "Automatic" as I had for the previous 3 years.

The one catch (why I said "ok" earlier), is that the screen would flicker, as if it dropped a few frames, intermittently. There was no apparent cause to the flickering...sometimes it'd go 1 minute between flickers, sometimes 10, sometimes an hour...and sometimes it flickered once, sometimes it flickered for about 10 seconds straight.

Now, fast forward a week, and the input completely dosen't work. When I turn the PJ on, the 30 second warmup countdown takes about 3 minutes, then when the countdown goes away, no picture shows up. The menus still work, so it's not a pure display problem. But all I get is black.

I have checked with different display sources, different cables, reset it, cleaned filters, unplugged it for hours, taken it apart (as far as I am comfortable with) and put it back together, and nothing changes. The ONLY troubleshooting possiblitiy I haven't tried is using the VGA input. But still, the extremely slow countdown (which is definately a new development) is still a symptom that would exclude it purely being an input problem.

Any thoughts at all?

PS

Oh, one weird detail I forgot to mention:

When the projector went into "shades of cyan" mode, it totally stopped responding to the remote. Manual input worked fine. Then, on the occasions where I had it on "automatic" input and it was NOT in "shades of cyan" mode, it responded just fine to the remote.

Don't know what to make of that.

 

[Stevecatch]

It might be that all 3 of the LCD panels got fried, especially if colors were doing funky stuff. I doubt it, though. What seems most plausible to me is that some type of Asic or something similar might have gone bad. Judging by the way that your remote also is being affected, I suspect that it's just a little burnt out chip. When you disassembled your projector, did you notice any chips that might have been burnt out or disconnected?

Well, when you say that you've had it for "almost 3 years," I'd like to point out that the Z1 has a 3 year warranty. Here's Sanyo's Contact Page for this kind of thing. Get your serial number and all the other information together before you contact them though. They'll be more helpful to you if you help them out first. Actually, I hear good things about Sanyo's support, except that it takes them 6 weeks to do a repair.

 

[John_Bix]

Thanks for the reply!

Well, it's not the 3 LCD panels fried, as the colors would work fine when the input was "1080i" and the colors are fine on the menu and the warm-up screen.

I am quite afraid you may be right about the "asic"...I was really hoping for another possibility though.