 All right everybody, I'm really excited today to bring you a brand new video here on the Sony PVM 2950Q and This is personally one of my favorite monitors of all time as far as a monitor. That's going to do primarily 240p or 480i video and It just does an excellent job of processing that and I recently had an opportunity to get one of these again in my shop And I have done videos before on, you know, the performance of this monitor as well as you just some overall I did do a calibration video too, which I'll link to that playlist This video monitor is great for things like Tate because you can turn it on its sides. It's also very large and Actually the reason I have this last photo here This is the Philadelphia Museum of Art and if you'll remember the 2950 I recently or I've repaired previously and Restored actually is at that museum now So today's actually this monitor belonged to a friend of mine named Sean and So we're going to take an initial look here Sean got this off of our government deals Website that I featured, you know a couple videos ago and market watch And I wanted to show you just how this looks to begin with you can see right here and I'll go through and probably pause this video as I'm going and Preferably I'm going to just pull myself out of the picture for a moment And then we'll go through this calibration screen without me there. There we go and When you look here, you'll notice first off that we do have a slight screen tilt Where the squares are tilting towards the right side a little bit now? thankfully that can be corrected in a service menu, but you'll also notice some screen bowing and A little bit of linearity issues here as well. This is just primarily due to the age of the monitor It's not really been calibrated within any of the last few Years at all. So I especially I can't tell that this is really ever been calibrated now Sean did take a risk and bought this monitor as is pretty much nothing else done besides a power test on it and His auction wound up going to about $1,300 from what I can remember for this monitor He did look out as I said because it works perfectly It just needs some adjustment and we're going to go inside and make sure we do a good cleaning on it I'm also going to service the boards inside. We'll go through replace a bunch of capacitors And we'll also test the capacitors and to get started. We're going to remove this outer shell now the outer shell It's separated into two pieces similar to like the 20 30s So there are quite a few screws that hold it into place definitely more than the 20 30s I think there's about 12 total, but just slowly pull that out And the whole chassis then and we'll stay hopefully in there but it's just slid into the front half of the screen bezel down here and that's pretty much it for the back shell now you have access to the boards and The inside but the first thing we need to take a look at is just look how nasty it is inside I can tell that it's probably never been opened since it was originally put together. There's a lot of dust just built up back here and Really if you don't have experience with Servicing your CRT. It's still a good idea to go in here and try to clean off dust If that's the last thing you're going to do is just go in and you know Just want to look at the inside of it and do a visual inspection That's what I always start with and then you can also see some of the areas that really need to be cleaned Especially up here around this anode cap We've got a lot of dust built up and some of the grease is exposed over here But a real thick layer of dust on the back of that tube That will definitely be cleaning up as we go along today now Some of the things you'll notice this monitor does have a Unique yoke set up where there's actually a couple of separate yoke boards here one We will not be removing and then you've got the neck board That's not very standard for many PVMs or BVMs really and then if we get over here We've got a power supply right here on the left. It's also very dirty and That's another good thing to get in here and clean if you have compressed air Or if you have any type of just brush that I mean a soft bristle brush like a paintbrush or something But the first thing I need to do is discharge this PVM So let's just hang on here for one second And I want to get in the picture and just let you know that this is something that you should not Really do if you don't know what you're doing just you know Watch many times if you've never discharged a CRT You definitely don't want to do it the way I'm gonna do it right here. This is the way though that the Sony manual Recommends you do it because it limits the ability or limits the risk of damaging the back of the tube However, it is a little bit trickier and a little bit more dangerous or difficult to do so Just heads up this part right here is something you can slow down and watch you can go back and watch any of the videos about safety and Discharging properly, but this method I'm gonna walk you through real quickly here is the method that Sony would recommend and to do that we're gonna Go ahead and roll our footage here and what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna clash now again the monitor has been turned off it's been unplugged of course and I'm gonna pinch the anode cap together and Make the anode cap. There's a there's a metal Prong in there that I'm pinching together against the side of the tube so that I can get the cap off there and Now you can see it's very very difficult to do it sometimes like this But it might look like I'm being forceful But I'm just being forceful in the right way because I don't want to damage anything But you could see you once you get those prongs to come together You can pull it out and again, this is probably the first time this has been discharged since 1994 so then you just turn around and tap it against the metal frame and that is the way Sony recommends that you normally should discharge the the Anode cap from the tube initially because again, they don't want you to damage this ring back here by Sliding a discharge tool in then afterwards you can go in and use your discharge tool and still discharge the tube Because no matter what there still could be energy in there and then energy can build back up in the anode cap so might as well just tap it a few times as well and So that again is the recommended way by Sony, but it's definitely not the safest way you could do it So the next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to start working on the boards by Getting the main chassis and all the other boards out of the way first and to do that I'm going to do two things. I'm going to slide that board out And at the same time I'm going to pull off this main neck board Because it is all primarily connected together at one. There are a couple of connections towards the front of the monitor That's where the Degas coil and power buttons and the yoke connects straight into the chassis there And so it's real simple to get it back together because again the connectors are all Individualized and they're not they're not Similar any to each other that there's specific spots they can go in the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to recap This v-board which is only on this 2950 and these larger monitors with this special yoke There were I think you know six to eight caps on this special board here But I wanted to show you that this one If you do if you do work on these older boards these older Pre-mid 90s and early 90s circuit boards and even earlier than that are going to be a little bit more fragile and I had an instance here where I had a couple of traces burn off on this board that I had to go in and repair And you'll see that at the end But those are the caps right there. Those are the old caps. So it's seven caps that were in there so we took those caps out and then Went in and installed a new cap kit of replacement caps for all of these and Of course, I like to go in and work on Using flux always it just seems to make everything work better when you're trying to solder and use flux again watch your temperature so that you don't burn up your pads and Also make sure that you have the polarity Matched in the proper spots there when you're going through and recapping anything But it's a pretty straightforward job. It's it's again. You've just got to watch to not Hold on to your traces too long and end up burning them I do like to go back through a couple times and just quickly try to reflow the solder and then generally after that I finish up with everything at the end I'll come back in there and clean off the remaining flux with ice propyl alcohol and that can be done, you know with wipes or With a brush similar to like a toothbrush like I've done before But then after all that's been done you can what I decided to do was just go in here and then clean the rest of this So there was a lot of again build up back here dust debris and Just left over Years of built up just you know grime So I like to take an old paintbrush that's soft bristled and get in there and knock all that dust off it's not going to be dangerous to do that back here when everything's turned off like it is and It gets into those crevices really well without really moving things too much You don't want to move a lot of this stuff around Something else you want to be mindful of is this black masked area in this Back of the CRT where it's got a special paint that you'll notice is slightly duller and You don't want to rub that paint very hard or it'll flake off and there's a possibility You'll have beams of light going straight through where you can see through the entire back of the tube but this is that whole area cleaned up and pretty much repaired and you're noticing here my two yellow jumpers that I had to make my repairs on therefore my Repairs I had to do on the circuit board where it was just too old and fell kind of apart on me there So now we're going to jump into the other circuit boards here and get to repairing them And we're going to go through and I didn't mention this before but I did go through and test all the capacitors After I removed them But what I want to start with on this whole board is the power supply unit on the side Because this one most likely has the capacitors that have been exposed to the most amount of heat and Especially around these large heat sinks. I'm wondering if how those are holding up after this many years of Age and use so we'll get this power supply over here onto the bench and we'll get to work on it and it's Again, just a pretty straightforward circuit board the way I like to Work on these is again just start with one section start pulling the capacitors out Make sure you've got your listed capacitors that you're replacing ahead of time And even if you want to go ahead and check and make sure that your List matches what you is actually on the board there But prior to pulling it just to make sure everything matches up so that you're replacing the capacitors with the proper ones and Because sometimes Even if you get into manuals you'll notice that the capacitors might not match exactly what the manual has said on Some of these it does happen or it might not tell you whether There's a bipolar capacitor or anything like that So but it's always important to make sure that you're replacing capacitors with good capacitors and the proper ones too Or you'll have real trouble. So again, I'm gonna be using my Meter here that I have not done a video on this meter But it probably will eventually once I get to using it some more but I'm just testing the overall cap health on a lot of these and Checking out, you know, how much usage is coming off a lot of these capacitors on this power supply board I've been documenting it and just like You know, I was hoping that I would be able to find some capacitors on this board that would be falling out of spec more Just to be able to document some Use something that was You know happening in a specific spot similar to what had happened in the D series The only issue was it just appeared that this particular 2950 had really little relatively no hours of Use put on it I mean probably somewhere less than 5,000 hours Because all the capacitors on this board and the prior board that I had just kept before this You saw the V board they were all within 90 percent of their taught you know spec'd reading and The specifications for the actual monitor is 20 percent on all the capacitors So there was still a lot of life left on a lot of these capacitors and they're even though the There's not really a big advantage to change in them except for Knowing that the age of the capacitor itself is still Older at almost, you know, it's from 1994 So we're talking about 25 years 26 years old these capacitors are But they're still hanging in there and working well But just to make things, you know more easy on Sean We're going to go ahead and replace it with better capacitors that were them were in here For the most part we'll either get the same or better because this monitor Didn't have as high quality of capacitors in it as the BVMs do they did a lot of these capacitors only rated to 85 degrees Celsius and They still were mostly nice brands, but at the same time there weren't as many of them that were rated for a hundred five degrees Celsius So we stepped up and increased that Temperature rating and went for the higher quality caps when we could that would have had, you know a listed higher life span Than just an 85 degree Capacitor would have had so that is one advantage. Now one thing I didn't I haven't shown this before I do like to do this more or every time I do repairs like this and that's check my continuity of all my Solder points so after I go in and replace the capacitors I'll go in with a continuity meter and just check for continuity on all my solder points After I've cleaned it and it's ready to go back in the monitor that way to just quality it's a quality control check and It avoids me having to worry about any problems or eliminates any potential issues that could come up When I've reinstalled everything and I'm trying to get the monitor to work And I don't want to have any unexpected issues come up So now I'm going to jump into the regular boards on The rest of the monitor and real quickly. I'm not going to go through and show you recapping this entire Chassis, but I did try to keep it Held up for example the way it is right now a lot just to keep it together for the most part when I was servicing it And that's kind of just take advantage of the plastic and the shielding around it to hold it in place But a lot of capacitors in this one I mean it's it's a big job and it's kind of getting back to that thing where if there's not an issue This is just a little bit of an advice on this one if there's not an issue with your 2950 Don't be so concerned with recapping the actual main chassis. You could go in and cap the Sporadic boards pretty easily you can get that power supply out of there easily you can get the neck boards Recapped easily, but not so much on the main boards. You have to take it a lot You have to take a lot of boards apart. It takes a while To get everything out and then it's kind of an awkward Situation to put back together, but just so you know again, I went with this one There was not a specific capacitor on the entire monitor that had fallen out of spec for life expectancy, so I just was again completely shocked by that and Just shows you that if there's not a real issue with your monitor and you're not ready to jump into a large repair It's not it's not something that you really have to do right away There are ways you can check for that But well first we're going to get in here and clean the rest of this shell and things I want to show you a little trick I've recently come up with and that's using a really high quality interior car cleaning product and Something about this product just lets it like lift up the old oils and dirt soft that plastic and It doesn't sit on there a long time So it doesn't harm the plastic and it's also works well on metals So I just use that on the shell and showed you that right there I did that on the entire shell for this monitor and it really worked out. Well, it got it really nice and clean I've got a lot of that old dust residue and build up off and now we're just going to go in and Re-seat the main chassis re-seat all the boards and this repair is getting close to Finished and we can get in and start testing the monitor Just again take your time when you're putting all this back together and make sure that you connect everything properly And again, it's not going to hurt to go and double-check everything you do. I mean, it's not There's nothing wrong with that so take your time and make sure you've done it right the first time and Just be safe as possible if you do this work yourself or if you just want to sit back and watch you You can just hang out and we can watch You can watch this repair on this video and then you know make up your own mind if you really want to get into it and if it really needs to be done, but Everybody can get in and pretty much clean their monitor The one thing you're gonna do before you put your cap back is you've got to apply some fresh die electric grease I use the brand Permatex and Just put a generous amount there on the anode ring and then you can do the same on the inside cap Make sure you got a nice layer and that's gonna eliminate the chances for dust to form or Get in there and cross Crackles, you know, it can get dried out in there, too So if you're if your flyback makes a lot of noise up at the point where it meets your tube You should consider Just going in and changing this that grease out because that can make a big difference getting the right amount of grease And here it is all put back together cleaned up and beautiful and I want to go through some of the interior Well internal things you can adjust here first off. We're gonna come down here real quick I'm gonna pause it and I want you to take a look at right here where my cursor is that is our flyback Adjustment so that's where we would get in here and if you wanted to turn that Potentiometer with the back off that's gonna control your focus and right above it. It does say focus So that's that's what that controls I'm gonna show you some of the other internal controls that you may want to use Before you put your shell on and get set This one right here is your screen control. There's a potentiometer right there and that's your g2 voltage Don't adjust that unless you you know really need to you believe your to tube is either tuned up too high Or if it's really old and needs to have an extra boost of brightness Then you can use that but it will wear out your tube if it's not set properly There's the convergence adjustment for horizontal convergence and this yoke Again, I said it does its own self adjustment through the sub menus and the regular menu Where you can do tilt correction from those menus So you don't have to worry about adjusting your yoke like you might on other CRTs that don't have that tilt correction feature So now we're gonna go through and I'm gonna quickly Kind of breeze through just how you know this monitor looks after You get done calibrating it and we'll go through and show some calibration to some of the techniques Again, you got to have a remote to get into the sub menu in this one It doesn't have to be the exact remote but to find out more on that I'll link again to the calibration video specifically where I go into detail on how to use the remote How to go in and access the service menu and how to make adjustments and then write it so that it keeps the adjustment the point I wanted you to see here was just kind of watch the screen as it changes and We get our adjustments Set for Calibration All right, so there you go. You can see me use that tilt correction and I'm actually As I increase and decrease that tilt correction setting It'll move that and actually tilt the yoke so that the the deflection yoke so that the picture shows up Nice and parallel and even of the way it should be now you want to get in again to the service menu And then you can start making your geometry adjustments Again, you're gonna see all that in that other video but right here I like to always start by getting my picture centered vertically and Horizontally and then I go in from there and try to work through the corner adjustments and It does take a lot of give-and-take. You got to just go back and forth on The 240p test suite and just try different adjustments and watch with your eye to see What adjustments are working what adjustments aren't working? But again big thanks to to our team EO and from that whole 240p test suite Plus all the great stuff he works on over there at his his MD for your projects, so I'll link to that website for more information on this Software because often get that question and in case you don't know you can get it for just about every gaming console now And it's pretty much free if you have a way to play ROMs that you can download off the internet, but you're gonna want to sit there and just tweak those corners the pin convergence and Are the pin cushion settings and the vertical bow settings? So you get it pretty much the way that you like it again It's not perfect because it's still an older set But you can tell when you get fresh capacitors, you know how much it evenly Distributes the signal meaning when you move it it you're actually seeing it change in all four corners and evenly throughout the screen and you're getting a nice, you know difference between the lowest of the settings all the way to the highest and Once you get it set Then you can go in and start running some tests and they there is an output There is a chance that when you change between different video inputs and different Consoles that you will have a left to right horizontal adjustment That will occur on your picture and that is normal So you can go in thankfully just to the regular menu on this monitor and you can change things Some of the things you can change the horizontal centerness and size as well as the vertical centerness and size so again, just go through and It just takes a lot of time to play with those settings, but eventually after you know Toyin with just about every setting you can get in there You'll come to a place that is about perfect or as perfect as the monitor is capable of and That way you've you know, you've done your best as far as for geometry is concerned on a CRT like this one okay, so here it is the very finished and cleaned up Beautiful-looking Sony PVM 2950 Q. Thanks Sean for let me look at it I'm congratulations on getting it and I'm sure that if you're not happy with it. I can find another home for it But I just know that you're gonna be Extremely happy with it because it is pretty much one of the very you know, one of the perfect top-end monitors for 240p and 480 I video content. I mean it works great. It has a great Level of inputs. You've got stereo Audio straight out of it. It supports a remote like a television does and it's just all around a very solid Unit that looks very well, and it not only holds its value But it's definitely grown in value and again this one was auctioned off at $1,300 and then there was many more expenses. So I know he's at least into this monitor for $2,000 or so but you know something like this should easily sell for $3,000 after being fully serviced like this and So just you know take your time if you get one of these and Again lucky enough for him but lucky enough for anybody if you find one the most important things I recommend or making sure it's cleaned up and Going in and you know Just checking everything with a visual inspection once you get your hands on the monitor And then don't worry about the capacitors unless you have a real issue that happens Especially if you think that your monitor doesn't have a lot of hours The only way I'd worry about that is if you have an opportunity to recap it or you really want to do it yourself Or you have access to somebody that has the skills to be able to properly to do a procedure like this And it would be a very costly job to get like an entire recap of something like this a lot of money So just to expect that but otherwise Congratulations on your new monitor, and I hope everybody enjoyed this look at the Sony PVM 2950 Q Look for more videos coming up real soon on the D series again We got some more cap work to do on those boards that have surface mount capacitors Thanks again everybody, and I hope you have a wonderful day. I'll see you guys next time with some more retro content