The display in my MkIIa seems to have picked up some strange behaviour. The 3rd and 4th columns from the left are getting all screwed up, resulting in a fuzzy lit up band in their place.

From what I can tell, the individual pixels in column 3 & 4 seem to light up if another pixel in that same row is also on. And I believe the more pixels in that row that are on, the brighter the pixels in column 3/4 are. If I play with the dimmer and set it down low, the problem seems to go away... but i have to set it very low, about 20%. Even 40% works sometimes, but after a few secondsthe same problem comes back.

I've read this post and I think it might be a similar effect... although in my case it is on the left side of the screen, and very very annoying.

I've had the player for about 9 months now... it just happened in the middle of my drive this afternoon. I thought it had something to do with the extremely cold temperatures around here right now, but the car wasn't particularly cold at the time, and the problem still remains now that it's been back in the house for the last 6 hours.

I took some pictures to help show what's going on...I've attached one, but take a look at the rest here.

Has anybody seen this before? I suppose this might be covered under warantee, but I would really hate being without my empeg.

Hmm... Curious. I can think of three possibilities, but I have never seen this kind of thing before.

1) fuse. Perhaps a blown, or borderline, fuse in the display circuitry? I would have expected significantly worse display results if this was the case, but it might be possible.

2) cable. Check your display cable (from the main board to the display module) to see if there is any visible fraying or damage.

3) software. Perhaps reflashing the kernel, or verifying your software installation. Maybe something is causing problems with your display driver, or something is writing where it shouldn't. Do you have a stock software load, or (if not) what utitilies do you have installed?

Does this line appear when the unit is booting also? Or syncing? That would help tell if it is a hardware problem (especially if it happens while booting) or something in your software.

I was running v2.00beta13 of the software and HiJack v300 for a while now, but that's it for the software modifications. Nothing else fancy, I'm a hardware guy. Anyway, I updated all the software just to be sure (again with v2.00beta13 and HiJack v300) but the problem is still there. And it's present during the bootup animation.

I saw the faq items about fuses and like you say, i would expect to see something different. It's not really even garbled, it's just this column of pixels on the left side. Another thing - it's a bit hard to tell, but i think the rest of the display gets slightly dimmer when the bars show up. I had the dimmer brightness turned to 40% and the bars were cycling on and off for a bit.

I'm not sure if it's the cable, but I can probably check that.

I'm really thinking this is a hardware thing... with the VFD itself. Sometimes the bars appear to fade in. It happens quickly, but you can still see it fading - it's not that it just switches on quickly.

Definitely contact support on this one. It's not one of the standard problems. Although I seem to recall a few reports of some early production Mk2 units having a similar problem.

One other thing... for what it's worth, the pixels in that column are pretty bright... If I set the dimmer to 100%, they can be brighter than the rest of the pixels on the screen. If the software is trying to drive the pixels as bright as possible at that setting, maybe that would indicate a VFD problem. But I don't know if that's really the case.