Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: Christie ZX only outputting white screen

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Posted by Matt Fields (Member # 3211) on 06-24-2010, 11:52 PM:

I have a Christie ZX/Dolby DSS200 screen where the projector will only output a blank white screen when playing content from server. Swapped server and it played fine on other projector, so it does not seem to be the problem.

So far I have:
Double checked IP addresses
Double checked Channel settings (Getting white screen on 2d and 3D, Flat and scope channels)
Test patterns do play normally
Blu Ray player plays normally (Through scaler/DVI input).
On 2D content, tried only using 292A or 292B instead of Dual 292. This did not help.

Worked fine on Wednesday. Only thing that happened on Thursday was a power outage in the morning for about an hour. Projector electronics are on UPS/Surge protection (Server is also).

We ran the interrogator and my tech is sending it off to Christie, but I thought maybe someone on here had the same problem.

Posted by Brad Miller (Member # 2) on 06-24-2010, 11:59 PM:

Turn lamp off, wait a couple of seconds, turn lamp back on.

I have one machine that this exact same happens to once every few months or so. That fixes it every time and won't delay your show. No idea what is actually going on (Christie is looking into it).

Posted by Matt Fields (Member # 3211) on 06-25-2010, 08:30 AM:

Tried Brad's idea and it didn't work. So if anyone has ideas, I'm game.

Posted by Mark Gulbrandsen (Member # 72) on 06-25-2010, 09:26 PM:

Matt... It sounds like you have more than one ZX there. I went through waiting and waiting for the Christie guys to help but they could never quite make up their mind and decided that sending out other boards was the way. I can tell you it is the way if you have weeks on end to be dealing with a problem like this. I recommend doing what I did in order to trouble shoot the problem with little delay and that is to simply swap the modules between 2 projectors. Be sure to label which modules go to which projector so they end up back in the proper place! In doing it this way we nailed the problem in a very short time period. Christie on the other hand had sent out a series of modules to try some of which several in a row were non functional. In our case it turned out to be the light engine because the problem stayed in the machine that had been acting up. I think in your case you'll find it's a bad module.

Posted by Matt Fields (Member # 3211) on 06-25-2010, 10:36 PM:

Mark- I'm all digital, four screens, all ZX's, all dolby servers, three with Dolby 3D. Thats what we have been doing...just haven't switched out the right thing yet and I ran out of time today because we opened. When we close I am going back at it. I'll post what we come up with. - Matt

Posted by Mark Gulbrandsen (Member # 72) on 06-26-2010, 07:54 AM:

Sounds good Matt! Let us all know what you find. It's much quicker to diagnose this route than wait for them to look at your logs... they probably have a guy sitting there with hundreds of projectors worth of logs to look at fomr people trying to report various problems. Oh, and did I say if you have an NEC you don't have to send the logs to NEC to have them deciphered... You can look at them yourself and see what is or isn't happening. NEC has a whole page that lets you see the logs on the spot. You can also filter the logs so you only see a certain range of dates.

Mark

Posted by Matt Fields (Member # 3211) on 06-26-2010, 09:57 PM:

Well I'm back on screen...but I'm not sure if we actually fixed it or if the problem just went away. Similar to what Brad is dealing with maybe.

Here's what we did before it started working:

Swapped out the 292 cable. This was not the problem.

Swapped out three of the boards (I don't remember their names, all of the ones in the card cage except the far right card with the cables attached). None of these seemed to be the problem.

Updated the Christie software to the latest version (3.0.0). This didn't help either but didn't hurt.

Updated the DLP software to 14.0.48. This may have helped, it started working soon but not directly after we did this.

Basically it just started working, just like it just quit working. I just hope it lasts.

Posted by Steve Guttag (Member # 268) on 06-27-2010, 07:04 AM:

It shouldn't have affected you but it would have...TI software 13 had a 3D license that was going to expire (not this soon, as I recall). In firmware 14, the license was kicked out to 2099...probably long enough to see the projector to the end of its use and probably long after 3D dies out again!