 The NEC XM 2960 is a mid to late 1990s era professional presentation video monitor produced by NEC or the Nepone Electric Company. NEC was originally founded in 1899, so it's a company with lots of history. If we look at NEC in the early 1980s, we'll see a growing company that has just gone public in many global market exchanges following the success of their semiconductor business. NEC dominated the personal computer industry in Japan with around 80% of the total market share at this time. NEC began to bring their PC products to new markets throughout the late 1980s, including European and American nations. At this time period, most personal computers were built all in one with the CRT monitor and PC built in together. But by the late 1980s, technology had progressed to the point where there was a need to separate the monitor from the PC and NEC began producing standalone monitors. By the early 1990s, NEC was a large producer of CRT displays to accompany many of their personal computer lines. This brings us to the monitor series we are covering today. Of course being the NEC XM and XP series multi-format CRT monitors, this is easily one of the best CRT monitors NEC would ever make. Here's our first look at the massive NEC XM 2960. Again, this CRT is just colossal. It's almost a two-foot cubic shape and it weighs nearly 120 pounds. It has a 27-inch viewable display area and it is, and of course the 4x3 format. The video resolution, it does change on this based on the input that you are using. If we start with composite video, it's going to be listed at about 500 TV lines of resolution. And then if you move up to S video, you're going to get up into 600 TV lines of resolution. And ultimately you could go to RGB support and that has a maximum resolution of 1024x768. Now this one does support a lot of video formats and resolutions including NTSC, PAL, CCAM and any RGB signal with a horizontal frequency range of 15.75 kilohertz up to 65 kilohertz for this model. And if you have the XP model, that will go all the way up to 95 kilohertz on the horizontal frequency range. And then it needs to have a vertical frequency range of 40 to 120 hertz. It has a universal power supply inside of it that does work from 100 volts AC all the way up to 240 volts AC. The monitor also has a very nice remote control that provides complete functionality in the palm of your hand. It even supports geometry adjustments which is good because this monitor needs a lot of geometry adjustments. Now let's flip around and take a closer look at the back panel of the CRT and then we'll look at the front panel too and kind of go through a little bit more on what you can hook up into the monitor. Looking now at the back of this monitor, we're going to first go over a lot of the inputs and what we've got going on here. This looks very standard to a lot of televisions from the late 90s would look except for the fact that it's using primarily B and C inputs. You do have a lot of options for inputs here. First off, video one and video two are pretty much identical. They've got left and right audio in and audio out here and then we've got B and C for input and output on composites or regular analog video because of course you could be using a different format but if it goes in through that way then you can use this input or this input or you can use S video and instead if you want to use S video and have a picture quality increase then that would be the way to go. If we go over here to our RGB inputs, there's actually two on this monitor. First we've got the RGB input one up here which that is actually this bottom input. This is the input, the larger. It's a 15 pin proprietary adapter so you can get a 15 pin cable. If you find one that has this orientation, you can use it with this monitor and make a custom cable because you could pretty much put any type of sync you want to on the cable and then input it through this input and then there's an output which is even, it's still 15 pins but it's three rows of pins now instead of two like this bottom one and then you've got a sync dip switch for either not sync but whether you need 75 ohm termination or not. If you do have this looped through you're going to have it on high but if you do not have it a loop through it and you need 75 ohm termination that's built in there's a selector switch there and you've got your RGB audio down here. RGB to input over on the bottom and right hand side this is going to be our more common input and the one that most people are going to want to use for RGB video for things like retro consoles and things like that the most common setup is going to be what I have here where I have the input going in I have red, green and blue going in there and then I've got my sync cable attached to the H and then to get it to work with this one I need to have the sync on high. If I have the sync on 75 ohms it'll flicker and it won't sync up properly but if I have the sync on high it will work and then I need to have my RGB colors terminated to 75 ohms and then that will work perfectly and then if I wanted to daisy chain out I could daisy chain out of this but this sync separation here just gives us the capability to input different types of sync if you had extra on devices or other things that had sync separated between horizontal and vertical sync can easily input that in this monitor and then we've got our remote PC external controls which you can use a universal controller that would have been manufactured by another company or even NEC probably had a version 2 where you could plug in this and control it from there and that's part of this remote plugs here kind of similar to the Sony style and then we've got a dip switch and then the dip switch has a guide up here that tells you what the dip switch actually does so it you want to have at least normal sync selected up so that's number two on the dip switch and then wireless remote you want to have that turned on number seven and that way you can use your wireless remote and your normal sync if you wanted to do sync on green you can actually switch that up here by switching this dip switch and then if you wanted to have it in a power management mode which I don't know that we'll be worried about it's number four and then one thing to note if you do put it on number six if that's turned on and even if number eight is turned on then that could limit even the ability to turn the monitor on check that these dip switches are selected at least the way they are set here so that initially when you turn it on it'll work if it's supposed to work the last thing I want to mention on this is this cut out right here there is a giant noisy noisy fan in this you might have even heard the fan in the audio background from the opening segment I had to turn the monitor off just to shoot what I'm seeing now because this fan is so noisy it's got to be changed it's one of the noisiest fans that I've dealt with in a long time even on a CRT very noisy very annoying hopefully it's just something simple on like five or twelve volt DC power rail so we can change it for something else but that's that's not a good solution as is now let's turn around and take a closer look at the front side of the monitor and we'll go through some of the buttons and once you've got your power plugged in you could push this button to turn the power on and you'll get a standby light that will eventually go green and then this is simply how you go through and change first through your input so there's your RGB one RGB to video one video two and you can press this to proceed down here into the menu and then you get to use the on-screen menu will come up and then you can use these buttons to cycle through the menu and make adjustments similarly to a television or something a computer monitor from this era again I said that they did have a very nice remote control for this monitor and here that is and this would be the preferred way if possible you want to get this remote that way you could do even more than what's available on the front of the monitor you've even got a degausing button power on and off input selector and then this is our proceed menu setup and we could get in here and easily easily adjust things like our width height even our side pin cushion normal motor over scan under scan brightness contrast controls and then volume controls so a very nice monitor there's the model number on it so ultimately our goal is to get this monitor looking spick and span as far as cosmetically and internally on performance like I said one of the biggest things we need to do is figure out a good fan option because it is just too noisy it almost gives me a headache sitting right next to it so that'll be one of the first things however I want to show you some things on geometry that we will want to take a look at through the 240p test suite and if you want to know more about this software I will have a link below but this is a great software that we use to calibrate our CR trees for geometry and many other things it's got a lot of great test patterns but you could see some of the abnormalities we might have where we might need to fix our yoke a little bit and some curved screen action on that pattern and then if we look at our linearity you can notice some things just minor tweaking adjustment we do have some convergence that's really separated in this corner and up here so maybe some additional strips can help out with that but all in all it looks pretty good so what we want to do is I know it's going to be dirty inside there too I've just got a feeling and then we will open it up in the following videos we will take a look at all the circuit boards and then we'll clean those we'll see how far the owner wants to go because if he wants to go all the way we may be able to replace a lot of components internally and then see what kind of improvements we can make on the screen adjustments and we'll take a long look afterwards and we'll see what different consoles and other devices that we can put into this monitor to really check it out and see what it's fully capable of and see how maybe you can make the best of it if you're lucky enough to come across one of these because honestly even in the now four or five years of CRT serious CRT working that I've been doing this is one of the first opportunities I've had to even work on one of these large NEC monitors much less fine one that's even for sale in my area but hey just look for those videos and we'll see you next time with some more retro content it's time to wake up hey that's right you ready to go work on a CRT oh yeah well hey before that let's just let's take a look at some of NEC's early products including some of their original CRTs yeah until everybody you're okay