I've had my Marquee 8500 running for a couple of weeks now. Overall, I'm very pleased with the quality of the picture and my setup. I am confused about one of the setup steps. Following the guided mechanical setup, the directions are to turn the contrast down to 10% and then look into each tube to make sure that the crosshatch is centered.

I don't think I'm doing this right. I'm getting right up in front of the lens and staring directly into it. If I move my head a little in any direction, the cross hatch moves a lot, so it's hard to stay still enough to see any changes. If I try to adjust the pattern, I can see the cross hatch shift on the screen, but I don't see any change while looking into the tube.

Thanks for any tips or suggestions.

Do not look back and forth between the screen and the lens. Keep looking into the tube and stay still and you will see the grid move. do this for all colors. Now this is the time you center the projected image to the screen by phisyicly moving the projector after you center the grid on the tube face. If you folow the mechanical setup guide you should have no problems. start over and try it agin ignoring where the grid is on the screen at first till you get to the centering of the green to the screen.

Athanasios

Peer into the lenses close enough that you can see the edges of the tubes. (Just don't smudge your nose on the lenses. :)) Look at the distance between the edge of the crosshatch and the edges of the tubes. Adjust the centering so the crosshatch-to-edge distance is the same all around, or at least same top & bottom and same left & right.

Better yet, just pull the lenses so you can see the whole tube face. But that's a pain given the big hex bolts they use.

So, this is a really important step, right? I'm making sure that the cross hatch uses the tube evenly and doesn't extend off the edge of the tube. I think I just need to figure out what to focus on. Thanks for the tips!

Yes, it's important. If you use raster-centering to fix a bad mechanical setup, the circuitry has to work harder to keep the raster off-center. Your convergence stability can suffer. I had a temporary setup where I ran my raster high to make up for a mounting problem, and once I fixed the mount and centered the raster, my convergence was much more stable.

If you want to shift the main raster, that's done with the focus yokes. Loosen the brass wing nuts and the back part of the yoke will move around slightly but the raster will shift dramatically. I'd do a full initialization on the set before working with the focus yokes to make sure all convergence and raster shift controls are set to 50% electronically. You'll have to redo the astig settings as well as shifting the focus yoke dramatically will shift the astig.

Good point Curt, I wasn't clear. (It's been a while since I set up my 8500 -- been playing with a G70 lately. Forgot the details.)

So yes, you want to center the raster using the focus coil, after "nulling out" the electronic centering adjustment. (I forget the setting for "nulling it out" but it's basically in the center of the centering adjustment range.) That way the electronic centering doesn't have to do any work -- the coil does it. In my case, I had to run the raster off-center using the electronic centering, and it didn't like that.