Lee Colortran desks

[Harry]

Hello dear people.

I have a problem with some old Lee Colortran desks.

I have bought 2 Prestige 2000 and one Prestige 3000 desk.

From two desks I can get no picture on the screen (It seems to be VGA but maybe it is TTL or something else...?)

From all desks I can get no DMX signal.

In the menu on the one desk that has a monitor signal, I can choose between Colortran signal en DMX.

Every dimmer or MH seems to "see" DMX but does not work. I think this desks still send DMX 1988 instead of DMX 1990, but I thought that that would make no difference. Or does it?

Has anyone ideas how to solve this problem?

If not, I will hang the presige 3000 on the wall for decoration, because it has beautiful lights in it. It looks like a jukebox.

 

Harry.

[strand600X]

Hi Harry

 

It's a long time since I used a lee colortran desk. We used to have the 2000+ until it went bang. It was a great desk and I loved it.

If I remember rightl;y we never used the DMX out of it as we where D54 but we did need some kind of protocol convertor that changed from the lee protocol to D54.

I may be talking utter rubbish here, it was a long time ago and I am getting old and the memory is starting to go.

 

 

bAz

[Harry]

Hi Harry

 

It's a long time since I used a lee colortran desk. We used to have the 2000+ until it went bang. It was a great desk and I loved it.

If I remember rightl;y we never used the DMX out of it as we where D54 but we did need some kind of protocol convertor that changed from the lee protocol to D54.

I may be talking utter rubbish here, it was a long time ago and I am getting old and the memory is starting to go.

 

 

bAz

 

No, no, you are not talking rubbish, the Lee signal was different from the D 54 that Strand used. But the DMX signal should be the same I think.

Anyway, thanks for your reply.

 

greetings,

 

Harry.

[church]

I have a couple of the the colortran desks including the Prestige 4000. The monitor is indeed a TTL model so your VGA monitor will look blank. The control output can be toggled between the colortran analogue multiplexed output and DMX, however you need to go into the setup screen to do this. If the battery in the console is dead the console will keep resetting - these should be replaced annually. I have found that a number of problems on these consoles are caused by oxidation on the pins on the integrated circuit chips, many of which are mounted in IC sockets. Two faults I experienced were the floppy disk performance was erratic producing a number of errors including full console reset and another fault that happened frequently was the screen would go blank and the console would reset itself.

 

I fixed this by removing each chip by carefully prying it upwards with curved nose tweezers. You need to wear an antistatic wrist strap attached to the conole for this. I then carefully applied De OXIT to each pin and the IC socket pin holders. I carefully re-inserted the IC. I did this for every IC which requires removing boards. This is not something to attempt if you are not familiar with electronics. After this operation the console has worked great for two years. This is a common problem with IC sockets. this is always the first thing to check before doing any more involved diagnostics. I also have the manuals and a set of schematics for this and the Scenemaster 60.