AE700 fan noise

[pmc]

This has been discussed before but I wanted to get other peoples experiences before I send my PJ back. I've had it about a month and it clocked nearly 100 hours. The picture is perfect but I'm convinced the fan is louder than it should be. It starts off not too bad but after 15 minutes - half an hour it gets much louder, loud enough to be a distraction on quiet scenes. I've checked it against a mates Hitachi TX-100 and it seems a louder, even when it's 'quiet'. When it gets noisy it's much, much louder. He swears blind the Hitachi never gets any louder no matter how long it’s on.

Its shelf mounted about 3 feet above my sitting position. The fan is set to normal and the lamp is on low. I don't think my living room is particularly hot and its nowhere near a radiator.

The AE700 is rated at 28dB, the Hitachi as 26dB.

Can other owners share their experiences. Has anyone seen (or rather heard) something similar? Has anyone else been able to compare it to other models?

[joffonon]

Mine does the same, and is also shelf mounted, but takes at least an hour or two's operation to increase in volume. I find the warmer the room, the longer it takes for the fan noise to increase. Try turning down the temperature a degree or two and see if that helps.

Is the shelf mounted near the ceiling? If so, remember that heat rises...

[pmc]

No, it's not near the ceiling. I find it hard to believe my living room is too hot, it's at a notmal temprature. Surely they should be able to operate at a reasonable room temprature.

Yeah but remember the PJ chucks out hot air. When you put it on standby it's almost like a fan heater. So the PJ is going to warm the air around it regardless of the room temp, so after a while it stands to reason the fan would have to work harder.

[pmc]

Hmmm, possibly. It's well ventilated though. The PJ does get very hot, I think thats the problem. It's overheating and this is making the fan work too hard. My point it though that it shouldn't be overheating in a well ventilated position in a room temprature room. Like I said my mate swears blind that his Hitachi never gets any louder no matter how long it's on for.

So is this overheating a problem with my PJ or something inherent in the AE700?

[Comer]

Is it upside-down on the shelf. I have read on AVS that the AE700 fan is louder when inverted

[pmc]

Nope, right way up and in shelf mode.

[markswift2003]

Sounds a daft question - but have you pushed the contrast up and left the auto-iris on?

[pmc]

Not a stupid question at all. Yes I had contrast set to +12 and auto iris on. Do you really think it will make much difference?

I've reset the contrast to 0. I'll see what happens.

[markswift2003]

Cool - I suspected as much. The auto iris also controls the intensity of the bulb and at high contrast it stresses the bulb so eventually the fan speeds up to compensate. I had exactly the same problem when I first bought the 700 after setting up with video essentials. OK, a pluge test only required me to set the brightness to -2 (these projectors are well setup from factory) but I thought I'd try and eke out some more contrast since an LCD will not bloom, but this resulted in your problem.

Knocking the contrast back to 0 and leaving the auto iris on solved the problem for me. Hope it does for you as well :-)

One thing I haven't tried is to increase contrast way up and turn auto iris off - that may be a better idea since asaik the contrast does not effect the bulb intensity (or it shouldn't anyway) so with ai off that may give a better subjective picture.

As an aside, I bought this to replace a 300 and the fan noise from the 700 is a lot more intrusive than the 300, but thems the breaks eh.

Mark

[pmc]

Thanks for the info. It does seem to help. It's much better though I am still debating if it's acceptable. I think maybe I'm now just being paranoid

I set contrast and brightness to 0 and turned the auto-iris off. Seems a shame that I have to compromise like this but I would rather have a not quite perfect (but still amazing picure) than a distracting noise.

[PJTX100]

Just to confirm your mate's comment about the TX100. Mine is ceiling mounted, it starts quiet and stays quiet in my experience. Because of kids I usually watch films at relatively quiet levels and it has never been a distraction....PJ