Projector flicker

[orwell84]

I am getting a sort of flicker, like bands moving through the projected image in game. It looks a little like when you see a video of a crt monitor though much less pronounced. It is most noticeable with greys and darker colors. I see this more when the projector is run from my laptop, compared to my desktop, but my setup requires running it through the laptop.

Is there any way to adjust for this effect? Projector is an Optoma 525ST with low mileage.

Thanks for the help.

[Matt Olieman]

Check Optoma maintenance for cleaning of the color wheel or google regarding this problem. I'm assuming this is an LCD projector.

I had a similar problem and cleaning the color wheel fixed it. There is a sync marking on the wheel that sensors look for. When it doesn't see the markings it flickers.

Matt Olieman

[orwell84]

Thank-you, I will give that a try

[maussuam]

Hey,

sometimes the image starts to flicker when you use economy mode, which dims the light a bit. I swiched to high power mode for a while and then back, that helped.

Bastian

[orwell84]

Actually, the effect is probably better described as scrolling horizontal bands. I tried a number of adjustments on my graphics card and projector and this is what I found.

Frame rate was what seemed to make the big difference. The banding was more pronounced with higher fps (like 65 fps). Locking fps to 35 FPS pretty much eliminated the problem. Playing with brightness and contrast helps too. I may be running in economy mode so I wll have to check that. I didn't notice this effect on my PC which ran monitors for panels too because it kept the fps low. But on a client running wideview, fps is much higher for the outside view. It makes sense in a way when you consider projectors are mostly built for movies which run somewhere around 30 fps (motion blur blah, blah, blah). There is also a frequency and phase adjustment on the projector, but they didn't seem to do anything. Perhaps business/movie projectors are just not built to handle higher fps. BTW, 35 fps looks smooth to me. My own threshold for detecting low fps is about 22 fps. Gameplay is still smooth, I just become "aware" of fps.

Thanks for the help. Hopefully somebody else will stumble across this thread if they have the same issue.

[honkey]

Its usually video noise. Your power socket for the projector and the computer/laptop must have the same earth, most homes everything is the same anyway, try using the same power socket. Also try with the laptop just on battery. Another thing that can cause it is your video cable is too close to a power lead or something metal that is big. Video isolators can fix the problem too but they can be expensive for ones that actually work

oh and DO NOT wrap the video lead around things like projector mounts and pipes or in tight coils, this will cause all sorts of problems

[737NUT]

I had an optoma HD70 do that on me and what I had to do was remove the color wheel and clean the led emitter and detector for the color wheel. Cleaning the color wheel itself didn't help. I was also a DLP which really makes it worse.

Rob