Sanyo PLV-WF20 horizontal bands at top and bottom of projected image.

[Devin McNamara]

So I purchased the mentioned projector off eBay. By the looks of the box when it got to my house, it had a bit of a rough time getting there. Thankfully it made it in one piece, however there is one problem. At the top is a yellow band and at the bottom is a blue band. They are both clear and perfectly aligned horizontally and take up together about a quarter of the screen. I thought maybe it was a bad polarizer but looking at them all I did not see any burn marks on any of them. The LCDs looked fine as well. Both lamps were brand new when I received it. Given the rough handling by UPS I assume that something got knocked out of alignment. I’ve read online that perhaps a lens in the optical path just after the lamp and before the polarizers can get bumped even slightly and cause this. I have not yet opened up any portion of the light path side. I have only looked at the light engine l. Is there any validity to my next assumption.

[Frank Cox]

I would be inclined to look at the screen size adjustment (page 43 of the manual).

[Devin McNamara]

So I ended up fixing it. I found and downloaded a service manual for this projector. I’m surprised these still exist in this day and age. I read through to the part about adjusting the optics. One section covers adjusting the checker board polarization lenses just after the lamps. The manual shows the exact same two bands and how to open and close them. These bands apparently exist in both axis to aid in centering the image. With the information i disassembled the projector down to this lens and attempted to adjust it. It helped minimally. At this point I pulled the whole assembly out of the projector to look for cracks or anything else off and didn’t see a problem. I placed it back in making sure the pegs at the bottom of it lined up with the tracks. After this the bars were gone. I took a closer look to see that the lens was parallel to the next one in line. It was not before. So what must have happened was during transit to my house it took a hit and caused this polarizer to jump out of its track causing the vertical adjustment to be way out of tolerance. Anyway if anybody else has this problem with a 3 lcd projector I would check there.