questions about a beat up trinitron

[slugger_dan]

I was recently given a slightly older Sony Trinitron knowing that it had a bunch of issues. I don't know the first thing about CRT repair so these issues may be related to eachother I don't have a clue. any insight?

-scanlines are all wavy and 'compressed'. like if a background is scrolling it's like viewing it underwater or something. Different parts are 'squished' together and looks pretty goofy in sidescrollers. The sides of the screen are 'saggy' which is pretty obvious on lifebars in fighters as they curve downwards.
-some parts of the screen are 'rainbowy' which is obvious in part of the screen where the 'THIS GAME IS ONLY TO BE SOLD IN JAPAN' or whatever screen comes up. Instead of white, I actually see red green and blue on some of the letters mostly on the far left side. Also obvious on lower left credit counter while the right one looks mostly clean.
-the top right of the screen is unusally red, it becomes more red as you go closer and closer to the corner. It's obvious on the full blue screen when changing video inputs and kind of noticable ingame.
-there is subtle blue distortion on the very far left of the screen. Some pixels on the leftmost column have a blue tint to them and some pixels on the rightmost column have a red tint to them. the most inconsequential issue but I thought I'd mention regardless.

it's like 70cm large so before I start getting onsite techs for a (paid) quote can anyone give me some sort of idea of what the tech would have to do to fix this? should I just dump it and go for another set? while I didn't pay anything for it I would absolutely love to have this TV in great shape, even if it costs a premium. I simply can't find any other trinitron's like this around my area, it would be great to have this one all working.

I can get into the test menu but I doubt that's going to do anything for these problems and I don't want to fuck around with settings without knowing if they would mess up the TV even more.

TIA.

 

[DanAdamKOF]

Sounds par for the course for a Trinitron, I have a 34"/ 86cm widescreen model, and I had problems similar to yours. I spent a few hours one day adjusting stuff in service mode and got it looking much better. It's still not perfect, but if I set aside another 2-3 hours or so I could probably get it looking a bit better.

For the first problem check your geometry, you'll get that shimmer looking effect when things scroll if it's not set up right. Get a test pattern DVD and adjust at a crosshatch (adjusted for your aspect ratio, if necessary) until the squares are close to the same size.

For the second, adjust your convergence/landing, again the crosshatch will help.

The others, they might mean you need to give it a degaussing, or they could just badly adjusted convergence/landing in the corners.

 

[fake]

I have a big Trinitron and I have similar issues, but not as bad. Any small text is pretty much unreadable. Certain logos (ie: big, bold font) look like there is static on top of them. Also, if a lot of white is displayed for more than a second or two, it becomes off-white or yellow.

I've tried to fix these problems for hours but can't fix them.

 

[1980te72]

i have a 20in one and it has the same wavy scanline problem as well but i dont have any of the other problems you having i think the wavy lines is pretty common on the trinitons on mine it wasnt so bad like 2 years ago but its been getting worse as the time has passed
also how do you get to get it in to service mode

 

[xiao_haozi]

The color hazing sounds like you need a good degaussing. Mine came in contact with some heavy magnets way back and had the same issues for years.

 

[madman]

also how do you get to get it in to service mode

Varies depending on model. Google your model # and "service mode" for the best result.

 

[slugger_dan]

thanks for all the replies:

dan: I tried fiddling around with the "GEO" settings in service mode although while I could get one side of the screen looking decent it would completely destroy the other side of the screen, damn frustrating. If you could apply settings to each individual portion of the screen that would've been swell but i guess that's asking an awful lot.

to add the issues, I did not see any that would correct horizontal distortion, as in stuff is squished horizontally and stretched during scroll. if it's not under "GEO" on the TV I assume it's not helping me, there's a whole bunch of options but as I messed around with them seeing what they actually do I couldn't get the picture looking much better at all.

might have to get someone over and physically operate on it or something, oh well.

I looked at this page:

http://myweb.accessus.net/~090/sonyadj.html#warn

which does mention convergence settings but I could not find any of that on mine unless I missed it entirely, I didn't see any sequence of letters like those when flicking through all the options.

---

deguassing? how would i go about doing that manually, or does it require a tech? will it fix the color issues + screwy scanlines or just the former? sorry for all the questions I just know that CRT repair isn't cheap and that's the extent of my knowledge.

---

for the service mode I just followed the instructions on that link just there. for my particular set I had to press MUTE and then 0 to save, pressing ENTER (which is not on the remote but the TV front panel) just switched video inputs.

 

[DanAdamKOF]

snip

Did you check the PAL service mode menu page that one site has? http://myweb.accessus.net/~090/sonypal.html

 

[slugger_dan]

yeah I kind of forgot to reply..

I checked out the PAL page before, it's unusually empty compared to the NTSC page. hell, the NTSC page describes it better for my TV and the service instructions work on the TV I have here. alot of stuff I read on the PAL page just doesn't match my TV..

I will deal with it until I get a tech over, besides when I'm in a fight the focus isn't on the fucked up background =)