I'll probably head over there later today, but thought I'd see if any of you have ideas.

My friend has a Sanyo Z5 projector. He has a dvd player and direct tv, both hooked to the projector using seperate HDMI cables.

He said the other night, all of a sudden he lost the picture. He remembers the space heater kicking on about the same time, and thought he heard thunder. We had some storms recently, so he is not sure if there was a close strike or whatever.

Anyway, I think it has to be something in the projector, as he does not get a picture over either HDMI source, using their own HDMI cables. He DOES get volume though.

He tried component and s-video and that works, just picture over HDMI.

Since he is using seperate HDMI cables for each device, I would think it has to be something in the setup menu within the projector. Or, is it possible that he had some spike from the heater turning on, or lightning that would blow out just the HDMI video signal on the projector?

Strange. I would think a surge could damage any single part of the chain. But, i would think it strange if that is the only spot in the entire A/V chain that failed. Might try some kind of hard reset to make sure you are not dealing with some mysterious menu option.

Good luck.

I bet there is some type of failure with the HDMI input on the projector unless he was playing with the menu settings at the time of the possible lightining strike.

Has he ruled out a handshake issue with the HDMI cable?

Periodically, I have been reading about "strange" handshake issues with HDMI video in various applications. Now I have actually experienced it myself, or at least my son has. He has an XBox 360 plugged in to a monitor via HDMI(video only) when all of a sudden one day when he put the game on pause to switch to another source on the television, when he switched back, the game had come out of pause and returned to the beginning! We tried changing all sorts of connections, cable changes etc. and nothing changed. As strange as it may seem the HDMI connection was affecting the physical operation of the player! For awhile, he switched to component where the problem was eliminated, however, just this week, he decided to switch back to the HDMI cable and TV connection to see what would happen and low and behold, everything worked fine again!

Try to figure that one out. We couldn't.

Just got back, I think it is the projector, something with the HDMI circuitry. Component and S-Video work fine, but both HDMI 1 and 2 ports, nothing, nada, zilch.

He said the night it happened

it was storming pretty bad, and I guess there was a loud clap of thunder right at the time it happened. When the Sanyo's don't detect an input, they go to a default blue screen, and start a count down to shut off. He said he had just started a movie, and the projector jumped to the blue screen at the same time the heater shut off.

He ran upstairs and his wife said she thought the lighting had to be pretty close as there was no delay waiting for the thunder clap.

It is strange that everything else is working fine on all his components, it appears he just lost the HDMI input circuitry.

I may take one of my flat panel computer monitors over later tonight that has HDMI inputs. If we get a signal I'll know it is the projector. Good thing Sanyo has 3 year warranties.