 Hey, welcome back to Retro Tech. We do a ton of unboxings on this channel, mostly of CRTs. And the major reason behind this is to prove to you that there's really no consistency when it comes to ordering a CRT off the internet. I think I've proven many times that you never know what you're gonna get when you open the box. Sometimes you get the wrong monitor. Sometimes you get a destroyed monitor. Sometimes you get good packing. Sometimes you get terrible packing. And you never really can tell what you're gonna get no matter how much you try to communicate with an eBay seller. But today's PVM was shipped to me in a nice box that was bought off eBay. And the price was about $400. And that seems like a pretty good deal, especially considering that it was listed as fully working and tested. All right, let's get into this unboxing and I'm gonna try to help you understand why eBay is a terrible place to try to buy CRTs. Well, look at this box. Oh, what a wonderful box. What could be contained in such a sexy, glorious piece of cardboard? Surely we must find out. Oh, don't wanna show you that. Please, Andre. Enough with the suspense. Let's see what's inside this beautiful box. Let's see what kind of travesty packing job is inside this box. Oh my. Power cable. Oh me, oh my. What have we got here? So this is all giant foam pieces. Expandable foam, wonderful. Hey, that's interesting. I have never seen one of these packed completely in that expandable foam like that. It's not gonna be easy to get that out of there. Look at that. It looks like the bag just exploded the foam out all over the place. So the monitor surely is fine if I can get it out of here. Oh, oh my gosh. Oh man, I really don't know that I can get this thing out. Seriously, seriously. How the hell do you get this out of here? Oh my gosh. It's like, it's like that son of a biscuit is freaking glued in there with all that material. I'm gonna have to split the box in half at the seam line over here and cut it out. What in the world? I have never seen a pack like this, a CRT pack. A CRT pack. Goodness gracious, this stuff. I'm gonna have to go down to the city dump to get rid of this thing. I might have done it right there. Let's see, it's too bad. I really thought that was a good quality box. It's been ruined. Unusable, oh my gosh, what a bunch of rubbish. Oh my goodness. Oh man, the shipping monster, you know? Goodness gracious. Solid piece of foam right there in the shape of a PVM. Let's look here at our PVM. That's right, it's a PVM in the mail. The most important thing is does it work? And is everything else in good sound shape? Everything on the tube looks to be solid. Nobs are okay, knobby. Here's a real quick look at this box and this foam again. So we do have a double wall box, which is very nice. Now this company is a reseller of all kinds of electronics equipment, so they apparently know what they're doing. I'll give them that. There's no way that this probably could have been damaged. I mean, I guess there is always a way, but this would have been very hard to damage. Look at this, there's a good, I'd say five or six inches here of just solid foam. Now I say solid, but it does give a little bit, so that's the good thing as the CRT bounces around inside this box. It does have the ability to take some soft impacts and not affect it, hopefully, but we're yet to see and we're gonna go inside now and test the monitor. So this is our PVM. We have here a 14M2U model. This is a North American model produced in July of 1997 by Sony Corporation in Japan. This is a very early model number, one of the first few, well, 5200 probably off the production line. And we have a one amp rating for power. Down here, this wonderful monitor has a great set of inputs. Of course, you've got line A and B, which are set out to be composite video. And then mono audio line C is of course S video, but for the best experience, we're gonna go for RGB and sync and audio. And yes, you can stick both your stereo audio inputs into even the outlet on here and it will actually read that audio from the outlet safely the way that these PVMs are designed, believe it or not. Anyway, we're gonna test RGB and we're gonna flip it around here and hopefully we can get a good test going. And let's just see what happens. The first time I've turned this on since it's been unboxed, I can hear the CRT powering on. You'll notice our remote tally light down here is illuminated and that's something we don't normally want. So all right, we've got no sync. Off, okay, there we go. So to get that remote off, we need to do menu, then go to user config, hit enter, go down to user preset and make sure that's turned to off because if it's turned on, that'll turn that remote setting on. They'll be locked out of what you're able to adjust on here. All right, so let's go ahead now and we'll select our RGB inputs. Whoa, okay. There we go. Oh, perfect. Look at this. We've got some major discoloration on this tube. So it's a good thing it came to this shop and not somebody else on eBay because if we just normally degauss that, it's not strong enough to get rid of this. It's definitely an issue here. We're gonna set up and take care of. So check this out. You can see these intense spots of discoloration and what has caused that is magnetism, external magnetism actually. It's affected this tube and it's got the, you know, phosphors in the wrong position and stuff. So what we need to do is we need to get this balance back out and really the only way to do that was is going to be with an external degausser, which I've shown before on this channel. So I'm gonna get set up right now and we're gonna run through that process real quickly here and hopefully we can clear up this because this is almost like pretty much unusable in its current state. Check it out. There's a big patch of green here in the center. Some blue up here, some blue down here and then an intense blue pattern over here. And this is our red screen. If I change it to green, those colors kind of get a little inverted and then blue, same thing. We have the issues again there. So hopefully that will be the only thing that's really the problem on here. And even on white, you can tell that it just gets all meshed together and looks pretty nasty. So anyway, we're gonna get set up. We're gonna do this repair with the degaussing coil. All right, so according to eBay sellers, a good tested PVM can include things like bad screen purity, awful magnetism problems and even a remote mode that locks out half of the service menu. Way to go eBay seller. All right, we've got our big beefy degaussing coil and it's gonna be something that we can run for a minute and then we have to let it rest for 30 minutes. So we can't do this a bunch in one time. It generates an excessive amount of heat and just a layer of magnetism that will help disrupt the bad patterns and help us clear it up. So I'm gonna run through that pattern right now. I'm hoping that the red still can show these great color disruptions in here and that this degaussing coil will clear them up. So let's see right now. I'm gonna just go ahead and start with this process and we're gonna start by kind of getting closer to the screen like that. And then you should see some heavy discoloration as I run that. See how you can see red, green and blue there, I hope on the screen. And I'm gonna do that a bunch because I really wanna get that cleared up and I don't wanna have to do this again. So I'm gonna do that and then I'm gonna slowly expand the size of that circle and come towards or away from the screen, away from the screen in larger circles and then I'm just gonna cut it off and check that out, folks. That is crystal clear right there. I see no more issues with anything. We're just 100% red. Let's quickly cycle through these other colors and see how they look. Green is solid, blue is solid. And of course that means that our white is solid even though you can't see it very well on the screen. There you go. I'll give it a regular degauss and now this thing is ready to use. So again, this is just another example of why eBay is the wrong place to go and buy a CRT if you don't have to. Now, if you do have to use eBay, it's always gonna be better to try to have patience and wait for something that is gonna be locally available or at least a couple of hours driving distance from you. That way if you have an issue, you can just leave the PVM behind and requested eBay return right away. Also that's gonna get rid of your chances of having some of the damage in shipment or something happen like magnetism change along that route. The other thing is, is if you are buying a PVM on eBay, you need to be prepared that it's gonna need some level of servicing. It's not gonna come into you in some great, wonderful condition unless it's already been serviced and it's professionally transported to you. There's all kinds of things that can happen to these PVMs over the years. Many of them have components in them well over 20 years old and it doesn't matter how good you took care of it, those components will eventually wear out and fail. That's gonna do it for today's video. Let me know what you think. Are you still gonna try to buy PVMs from eBay? Well, you know, I'm pretty ignorant so I will definitely keep buying them from eBay but hopefully I can show you that it might not be the best decision for you if you're not prepared to have kind of a little bit of a trouble along the way. Thanks again. I'll see you next time with some more retro content.