Technical Support Document 054 - 8/97

STARLITE COLOR SENSOR BRIGHT-END RESPONSE TEST

The Starlite colorhead uses an electronic light sensor to monitor it's levels of red, green, and blue light. Although this sensor is designed to operate efficiently and correctly with the Starlite system, some changes can result in the sensor receiving too much light for accurate measurements.

The most common symptom for this condition is that the light will turn full red (or sometimes another color) when run at higher lamp power levels. The following checkout will help determine if your Starlite is having this trouble.

Procedure:

1. Turn the Starlite on in the normal manner.
2. In the Starlite Preferences menu, change the Maximum Lamps Power to 99%. (See user's manual for details.) Upon returning from this menu, the head will go through a short re-calibration routine to accept the new maximum lamps power.

3. Access the Starlite Diagnostics menu, and run the Manual Control Test. The screen should show:
   

4. Note the two areas of the screen designated and above. Area is the voltage being applied to the lamps. Area is a display of the voltages coming from the three color channels in the Starlite's Color Sensor.
5. To test bright-end sensor response, turn the lamps on by pressing the LAMP key. Use the up-arrow underneath the Cancel key to bring the lamp voltage up to it's maximum value. (The voltage should almost reach the voltage rating of the lamps in your Starlite.)
6. Once the lamp voltage is at maximum, write down the three numbers on the bottom line, in area . The first number is the voltage from the red (cyan) sensor channel, the second is that of the green (magenta) channel, and the last is the blue (yellow) voltage. These numbers typically jump around a bit, so write down a value that represents an "average" value here.
7. Tap the down arrow (directly under the Enter Key) once only. This should make the lamp voltage decrease just a little. If the voltage did not decrease, try again. You should be able to get just a few volts of change here.
8. Once the lamp voltage has been decreased slightly, compare the three values written down in step #6 with the values presently being displayed in area of the display. All three of these numbers should be slightly lower, now that the light power has been decreased.
9. If any of the values remains the same, the sensor is receiving too much light for accurate measurements.

If you find that your sensor fails this test, the easiest remedy is to simply install some high-quality neutral density (ND) filter material over the sensor window. Please contact your dealer, or ZBE, for more details.