Barco Lens Cleaning

[Kevin Roudebush]

I have a Barco lens that got some kind of coating on one of the inner pieces of glass while in a storage room during the shut down. I'm interested in getting it fixed. It was showing a "foggy" look of the image on the screen. If I shine a light through it, you can see there is a film but it isn't on any of the accessible lenses. Anyone have a suggestion? Want to make sure we have a back up and new lenses are expensive.

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

It may or may not be repairable, especially if it's moisture, and your indication of it looking foggy sounds like moisture. Oil - Grease contamination has a different, blurry type of look to it Weather or not it is repairable depends on if fungus has started growing on those internal lens elements because the fungus will etch and eat the optical coatings and even the glass and fluorite elements. And it's on the internal elements, that once it grows it can spread rather quickly. You would have to contact Cinonic to find out if it can be looked at, or if it will have to simply be replaced. I used to see fungus in lenses when I was a Tech at Canon. People that shot outdoors on rainy days... especially inside TV camera lenses from sports shoots. Of course, Canon could supply individual replacement elements, or groups of elements if they had to be a matched set. So at least their lenses were almost always repairable. Can't speak for DC lenses... The worst thing I ever had happen was a damage to the front of the lens barrel from an exploding Master IMage 3-D filter wheel. That was violent enough to cause the zoom not to have full range, but I repaired that on site.

[Leo Enticknap]

If CInionic can do anything with it, I fear that it would have to be shipped back to Kortrijk. I may be wrong, but I get the impression that they do not do any component level repair on Barco equipment in the USA. That's certainly the case with light engines.

I've never had to address a defect with a Barco lens, but I recently did with a lens on an NC900 - the zoom motor burned out (I measured megaohms between the two contacts, so the motor itself was actually done). We were told that they could not repair it, and that the only option (if zoom functionality was needed) was to buy a new lens, which we did.

[Marco Giustini]

Are you sure the "fog" is not caused by the face of the prism? Barco are notorious for getting dusty there. A little "fog" inside a lens might be ok to spot, I'm just making sure you're not barking at the wrong tree.

Inspect the prism with a flashlight (open the dowser before turning on the projector). That must be spotless.