 Hey everybody welcome back to another episode of Retro Tech and today I've got a new restoration project I've just finished up and I thought I'd walk you through the entire process of me buying this PVM off of eBay first off and it was sold to me as is and pretty much untested so I was expecting to use it for parts but I wanted to start by showing you this incredibly bad packing job that was done on this. I had never really seen anybody pack one like this. This was probably the equivalent of about five or six boxes that were just kind of stapled together or stacked on top of each other. Now thankfully there was a little bit of foam on the front and the back once I finally got through all the layers of cardboard so the cardboard though was was pretty tough to work through and to get the PVM out of it. But anyway this was the PVM. It's a 14M4U and again I bought it thinking I would use it for possibly parts but again this this packing was just pretty much unbelievable. Sometimes you get really lucky and the bad thing is is this seller would probably sell this another one of these PVMs if they come across it and think that this was a good packing job and I think that maybe half the time this wouldn't really make it especially across the country or something but this was the only bit of styrofoam in it or packing soft materials everything else was loads and loads of just cut up pieces of cardboard recycled cardboard boxes that were stapled together and they did write this side up and fragile on the outside so the good news was it was delivered to me with the right side up and thankfully I think it just was a lot of luck more than anything it actually survived the trip. This one did come with Saran wrap around the whole monitor so at least that was nice maybe that prevented something from getting scratched or damaged but overall I was not really impressed with the shipping job and it was another thing I didn't this one had a component SDI input in the back and I'll look at more at this in a second that's the board I took the shell off here but this is the board this is not usually in these monitors but this is a component SDI board and that's just a different type of input that's not really useful unless you're doing some kind of video editing or something but I wanted to just get it kind of turned on and tested initially and also you know see what kind of shape the screen was in so I like to start it up and run a couple tests and this one like I said thankfully it survived the trip and appeared to be working fine so now in the restoration process I've already removed all the boards here and I just saved that step I've made lots and lots of restoration videos in the past and I've definitely shown how to take a part of PVM I think that's pretty self-explanatory but they're modular boards you pull them out and I know there's a lot of cables in there but if you keep them kind of relatively in the place where they came out of they're easy to get back in extreme close-up look here of this electron gun this is an 800 line tube so this is what that electron gun looks like this is the CRT gun for a trinitron where it has all three colors in one single gun as opposed to if you saw a which I'll show in a future video when I break down the difference between shadow mask and trinitron tubes kind of what the guns look like in there they're different so there's the yoke and here's a look at the boards just sprawled out on my workshop area floor I do have some extra boards here from other projects but there's a power board and this is the first thing I'm going to restore and it's one of the things I always recommend to do if you have the ability to is to recap this board this is your power supply and most of the time when there's an issue with your monitor not turning on properly or something with sometimes you'll get some screen effects but that's it's usually got to do with powering on and not staying turned on completely this is one of the first things to check are these capacitors but I honestly will do this to monitors that I get in that even when they do work good I'll go in and remove the capacitors and replace them all simply because it's a preventative thing that this particular monitor was from 1997 so that's over 20 years and rather than have this pvm working for a year or two and then possibly develop a problem because these capacitors finally go bad I'll take the preventive measure of go ahead and replace them so this is just showing the procedure that I use this is my capacitor kit for this power supply but I always try to use an issue cone caps so if you make your own cap kit you know you can pick whatever you want but that's the ones I use and this is just some close-up of my soldering and this this board it's easier to solder on than the a board which is the geometry cap kit so I recommend starting with this one because you could really get your confidence up you know and feel good about quality work on this board because again there's not all the little resistors and other smaller capacitors and things that you'll see on the other board that's a two-sided board with parts on each side so again I just like to use that flux paste and I've done a video about that too what types of materials they use but that's pretty much it you go through and clean up afterwards with some alcohol and I recede this board back in the plastic shell this one has a shield that goes back on top of it and a screw and it's pretty easy so the second one is again the trickier board and the one you really have to be cautious while you're doing and the capacitor kit I've made for this particular pvm has about 19 caps in it so you got to start off by removing this board and this is the one with your flyback transformer on it and this one was particularly dirty as well so it needed to be cleaned I mean the the dust on this is just disgusting almost but there are four screws holding that plastic plate in into the a board there so I've marked the capacitors over in this area that I'll be changing so that's what I like to do ahead of time so I just go back and mark them with a sharpie on top the ones I'm changing and yeah just check out this dust on this board here it's just super thick so I'll just go through and also clean a lot of that off before I get this thing working again I just going to use some compressed air but I'll pull these capacitors before that and you know I wouldn't recommend doing this job with anything less than probably this type of a tool that I have this HACCO desoldering tool this does a good job of getting the capacitors out but I wouldn't recommend this if you're trying to do it with say like something really low end like just plastic manual suckers that's really going to be tricky and again you'll risk damaging something because you do have to get a couple capacitors that are right next to one of the chips for this cap kit so again it's pretty self-explanatory getting in here and removing all these caps it's always easier to remove the caps at one time and then come back in and again give it a good cleaning which I've done you can see the pads are well they're about to be cleaned so but this is what the area looks like afterwards there's also about six or seven capacitors around the flyback that are removed and changed out and that's just because that's a really hot area of the board so it's better to change those caps too on something this old but you could see how many capacitors there are on this board completely I did I mean this is afterwards and I've replaced those caps and that was 19 caps and there's still probably six times that on the entire board but once you get them in just double check that your capacitors are all facing the right direction you can even go back and make sure that your solder art points all look really nice nothing's bridged over and just like the other board I'm going to just slip it right back in the plastic here and get it ready to reinstall in the monitor and so we've rebuilt now the power supply and then we've replaced the caps for geometry on the main board now I don't recommend you recap in anything on the input boards you're rarely going to have any troubles with that and sometimes as is with this monitor this board only have one cap in it but all these boards right here go to this monitor and again this is the sdi board which is not normally in these all the time but this monitor came with it so that board requires this mini board to connect to the motherboard and then it'll communicate with the motherboard and the buttons on the front so since it was a nice day outside I decided to go out and get some sun and also the lighting is so much better outside that I could show you just what the simple process is of reassembling this monitor I've obviously cleaned the inside completely now this is after I've used compressed air I'll put in the aboard first and we'll get the anode cap pushed back into place properly and secured as you always want to make sure that's connected never forget to reinsert your anode cap and then turn on the monitor says you could really get damaged something or hurt yourself that way so the first board's already in there and the first connections are at the very front of that board so make those before you push that aboard all the way in and then the next board is the power supply and that's pretty easy just hook it up the way you undisconnected it this particular board did have an extra ground connection and so I plugged that in and there is a cable that connects to the power supply that's not usually used and that extra cable actually goes empowers the sdi board which I'll show you here in a second because I'll be installing that on the other side of the monitor because I just wanted to keep it with this monitor rather than taking the board out and then not reinstalling it so power supply is it sits in there nicely fits well and again really important to make sure that your power supply is working well that way you won't have any issues when you're trying to run your pvm all right so after you put that board in the next board to come in is going to be the input board there's a couple connections that you need to put in the back with the cables right in the back of this area on the main board there's just a couple that will connect there and then what I'm screwing in here is a ground plate where you'll notice you get a lot of ground connections just loop it back and forth between the front of the monitor and the back of the monitor and the boards and that's just so this monitor will have a good ground loop and be as grounded as possible next I'll install the neck board here that has three connection points on this monitor you may notice a fourth but just be very careful when you line this up you don't really want to bend those pins so just get right behind the middle of this board right here and push so if we go back here and zoom in on the a board for a second this little board that says bb on it it's seated in one of the sockets in the very center of the a board right next to the flyback you see over here this large area and then next to this other circuit board that's protected this circuit board connects in there and there's a um cabling that comes out underneath the monitor and that loops around to the sdi card which a lot like the power supply just screws right into the side there's a couple of slots on the side of these monitors and you just slide the plastic in and then secure it with the screws now I do have to warn you if you if you ever do come across one of those be careful because the weight on the monitor can be really heavy once you install that sdi board because remember the pvm shell is mostly plastic so if you put too much pressure on the bezel and the shell and I'll show you what I mean like back here when I'm installing all this it started to put a lot of weight towards the back of the monitor and a lot of pressure on the l part right here of this plastic because there's just a couple screws that hold that into place so the more weight was up top it started to pull the monitor backwards a little bit so I immediately wanted to get the shell back on there so it would hold it up and then secure with the screws it was very important on this one just to keep it safe so just be aware that make sure all your boards are screwed in that just goes for even if you've only got the power supply you don't want any of those boards coming loose and so once I after I got this adjusted I did put a little bit of caulk on the tube to secure the neck board as well though this is just what the screen looks like afterwards again this is an 800 tv line monitor and I will have a cool little video like I did with the jvc that shows you just the features with a lot of close-up pictures at different games today I used splatterhouse 2 for sega genesis or mega drive we get a real close up here of rick you can see the color depth and just the overall sharpness I was really impressed with this 800 line tube I know I've done 450 250 600 line monitors a lot more in the past and I rarely come across a pvm obviously with 800 plus lines and it looked incredibly noticeable I couldn't believe it was really noticeable I want to show you something here I'm going to pause this if you take a look at the background of this scene here you know it's a brick wall and if you watch this on say a lower line count monitor you're not going to see as much color depth especially between the blacks on here and so this this would even show up more pronounced on a bvm that had a higher line count than even this and uh was even better monitor but this is just again the pvm with 800 lines and at 14 inch and you could see just how sharp and clear again I have played this game a few times on some other monitors and it wasn't really this one that I noticed especially in these black sections how there was a different shade in there so definitely we'll see that more in this 800 line monitor so that's an impressive feature that I know some people are really going to get excited about when they try to compare this so something that's just 600 lines or even less now you won't I don't think there's much difference on the scan line overall it's just maybe the sharpness of what is actually produced on screen and again the darks and it looks really really great just a little close up here this is about as close as I could get on this on this screen without getting any kind of focus problems this is about as clear as I could get so just a really great tube for using 240p again this one's only going to do 240p and 480i but it does have that 800 tv lines and like I said that that really does make a difference so finish out here and I wanted just to show a couple of screenshots of some 480i and I was running this through component on a dvd player I wanted to show it because it'll even show up more here on the recording back you'll notice just maybe you could see it easier there there is some differences in the transitions of the seeds of course this is a cartoon so it's maybe not the greatest example but you could see maybe an example what people think that 800 tv lines is too much for some 480i content on Trinitron screens so I mean what do you guys think do you think that that's a good case to be made that that it doesn't look as good because on this one I do notice how for example when he transitions you kind of see you know the the jumpiness of the flickering on the screen back and forth and it's easier to catch now on this recorded playback than it really is when you're watching it with your naked eyes so I think it's a little pronounced still but if anybody else has any opinions on that I will be doing some more comparisons between this monitor and the other 750 tv line monitor that one was the JVC I got so now we've got good photos and some statistics to compare on the tube but that's going to be pretty much hit for this restoration after this whole process I do clean up the monitor and I'm not going to go through and show you the whole calibration process on this particular pvm because it's really the same as the m2 video I did a long about a year ago and I'll put a link to that in this video but that shows you exactly how to use the service menu and calibrate with the 240p test suite so you just get it calibrated get it cleaned up and it's sharp and it's already ready to go so a great little monitor if you find yourself again in the opportunity to get one they are definitely worth it if you're looking for an analog video monitor they're good they're sharp they're do RGB you really aren't going to have any issues with sync and get with a nice tube in it it's definitely worth you know a few hundred dollars for sure I mean this one think about if you want to know I mean this one is this one had I bought it off ebay and then I invested in both those boards and all the cleaning and all the calibration time I will show you one more thing in another video that I did to it I did a CRT convergence I used a new tool called a CRT convergence lens and I checked the convergence on there and I actually adjusted that to sharpen up the picture even more and now and I'll explain some more on that in future videos but again I will do another video with just some more details on the 14m for you that'll be shorter than this one but that's going to be pretty much it for this restoration so that's that's the process that I'll go through on all these pvms is the recap those boards and then clean it and put it back together and recalibrate it and test it and then it's ready to go and pretty much I feel like this one will be good for the next 20 years for just use as someone's personal monitor so again thanks for watching today I'm Steve and please let me know what you think of this restoration and let me know if you have any opinions on the 480i resolution and how it looks on these 800 line and above monitors because I feel it's like it might be something that's dependent to on whether it's a Trinitron or a shadow mask tube so again we'll talk about that more in the future and I'll see you guys next time with some more retro content