This article is about one of my recent spontaneous projects. A few days ago, I got lucky on an ebay auction and picked up a broken Acer K330 projector. I often look for these kinds of offers because I have spent several years in the audio/video repair business and am pretty confident in my skills when it comes to fault-finding. So I figured, saving some money by restoring a broken device couldn’t hurt.

First some facts and features: The K330 uses a three color LED module, which promises a long lifetime and low energy consumption. A Texas Instruments DLP module handles image generation. In sum this lets me hope for good contrast and strong colors, even if the brightness of 500 lumens doesn’t seem that much. An interesting thing about this DLP chip is that it uses an uncommon diamond pixel grid for size reasons. Diamond in this context means that the pixels do not form a rectangular pattern like in the usual TFT monitors but rather a grid of 45° rotated and slightly squeezed, not completely rectangular tiles. Of course, this means that internal resampling has to occur to map the image from the rectangular domain onto the diagonal domain of the IC.

So, this projector was obviously broken when it arrived – what a surprise. The seller had already informed me that it had suffered from overvoltage of unknown cause. The VGA picture was supposed to be very green-ish, the HDMI input dead in whole and the media player erratic. A slight flickering in the picture was also mentioned. I’ll take you through the repair process for this device from here on. Continue reading →