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So I picked up an "as-is" ES10 very very cheap in the hopes it was a simple power supply capacitor issue, unfortunately when I opened it up everything looked fine. Replaced a few that others had identified as time bombs since I was already inside and had the parts, but the issues persisted.
First up, here's what was wrong:
On power up I would get a white screen on any output for a half second which would then fade to black, front panel display on the unit worked fine (but dim, obviously), but you could cycle through inputs, open and close the drive, etc... everything seemed functional except for video output (on composite or S-video, my little monitor needs an adapter for component instead of RGB).
This got me digging around for service manuals and I found one for the ES10P as opposed to the ES10Ex suffix one in the index on this forum, since the "E" suffix service manual listed 220-240VAC and "P" was NTSC only with 120VAC input, I went with the assumption that the P was for North American models and went forward with that (even though the Canadian ES10 I have shows no suffix at all).
Now onto troubleshooting:
Scanned the service manual to find how to run some diagnostics, that unfortunately was a dead-end, have to give credit to Panasonic, for once, since you can check for errors using only the front panel with no video output. This is done by holding REC, CH UP and OPEN/CLOSE simultaneously for five seconds to get into the service menu, then pressing 01 on the remote, it will show the last error code held by the internal timer (mine came up with F00, so no errors).
Very few things are more annoying than a device telling you everything is copacetic when it's obviously not working. Kept reading the service manual, now looking for some kind of hard factory reset to get to a baseline.
This is where I found an interesting item on page 27, section 13.2.
"When the unit does not operate normally after replacing the Timer Microprocessor or Main P.C.B. with new one, reset Timer Microprocessor."
To do this, with the power OFF you short TW7501 pin to ground momentarily, this resets the timer microprocessor (IC7505).
Gave this a try, saw the same white flash on my monitor (despite the power being off) and then started up the unit, noticed that it cycled through some functions with the disc drive which it hadn't done before and then success, some glorious 480i Independence Day is all of a sudden on my screen.
I did a quick Google of DMR-ES10 and TW7501 to see if anyone had tried this and it didn't come up with anything really so thought I might share here. No guarantees this will work if you've got a dead NTSC ES10 sitting in the attic but you may get lucky and it only requires a little off cut of wire and popping the top off the unit.
**One thing I found interesting when I went and looked to see if this was in the ES10Ex service manual was that 13.2 is the same title, but instead of shorting pin TW7501 with power off it instructs you to short Pin 4 of IC7502 while the system is ON to reset the timer microprocessor. It describes the action as doing the exact same thing (transmitting low to pin 11 of IC7501 to reset it) but still, interesting the difference.
Some photos below, and again, disclaimer, this was a hail mary that worked and I would only recommend this on a lost cause unit, shorting pins of microprocessors and getting it wrong is a great way to seal the deal and brick early 2000's electronics for good.
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