Quote from Hangar45 Admin on December 15, 2017, 3:38 pm

(Original thread started on 04-20-16 by Ron Rollo)

As I mentioned in the Hangar Day thread and some of you got to see first hand, I had a pixel die about half way into the day. Actually upon closer inspection, I have one dead pixel which is black in color and one stuck pixel just above the dead one which is bright white in color. These are smack dab in the middle of the left projector and the results are it looks like a little bright star always there following us around.

 

You would think that out of 1,024,000 pixels per projector it would not be a big deal. Well if this projector was for boring office slide presentation, we would roll with it. And to be honest with you, I will live with it for a while and see if I have any other pixels fail on this projector or any of the other two.

 

So I have been doing some research and have discovered that the cause of a dead or stuck pixel is a manufacture defect. I guess you could drop the projector to also cause this flaw but primarily this all hinges on the quality of the DMD chip. For lack of a better explanation of the DMD chip, it is the heart of the projection system and is sort of like a micro LCD screen. Each pixel is actually a tiny mirror. So in the case of a DMD chip with a native resolution of 1280 X 800, that equals over one million tiny mirrors that that have to work perfectly.

 

Each mirror is either open or closed or somewhere in between. If you have a dead black pixel, the mirror for that pixel is stuck closed. If it is white, it is stuck open. If it is somewhere between open and closed, you end up with a colored pixel like red or blue. You may have seen something like this on your desktop LCD at some point.

 

Once a stuck pixel, always a stuck pixel. It can not be reversed. There are a few VooDoo attempt solutions but the reality is the only way to resolve the problem is to replace the DMD chip with a new one.

 

Which brings me to this. I finally found a great page that helps point us to the exact DMD chip that we need for the make and model of projector that we have. But with that said, I would still verify by pulling the faulty DMD chip before ordering. By the way, some projectors us what is called a DLP chip.

 

Here is the page that I found:

http://www.tsely.com/dmd-chip-for-all-brands-of-projectors-on-amazon/

 

In my case it will cost me about $170 to replace the DMD chip.

 

http://www.ebay.com/itm/NEW-PROJECTOR-DMD-CHIP-FOR-1280-6038B-1280-6039B-1280-6139B-1280-603CB-/252351044249?hash=item3ac14b5a99:g:wzoAAOSwq19XCpju

(this link will probably disappear in a few days)

 

So if nothing else, I now have options. I can live with it at a cost of $0, I can replace the DMD chip for $170 or up grade to higher resolutions projectors sometime in the future at around $2,700 for a set of three.  I hope this information is found useful and dead pixels are not as scary!

 

(Posted by Dave Simmons on 04-25-16)

I did a bit of research also. I found a video on how to change a DLP Chip. I had assumed that the problem we observed was also a bad chip (different chip, same symptoms). There is a video on YouTube, How to Fix Dead Pixels on a DLP Projector [3M SCP716], that shows how to change the chip.

 

(Posted by Ron Rollo on 04-25-16)

Thanks Dave, I saw a couple videos and it looks fairly easy to replace the DMD/DLP chip. I am probably going to just wait on doing anything for now and see if any more broken pixels develop. Like I said in my first post, it is just nice knowing I have a solution to the problem that does not require changing out all three projectors. Because trying to find one projector that is five years old to match the other two is not easy either!

 

UPDATE:

More pixels are failing on two of the three projectors. It might be time to replace all three and upgrade to the newest technology!