 Hi, I'm Steve. Welcome to RetroTech. We'll be talking about all kinds of technologies from the past and how they can be used in today's society. So today we're going to be taking a look at a very special item here, and this is a Sony PVM, and that's for professional video monitor. These are CRT monitors that were commercial grade. This particular monitor was used, it came from a university in their film department, and it's just been shipped to me. I have worked with these monitors many times, and it's a very good PVM. It is a 20-inch screen, and it does accept multiple formats. It's very excellent at displaying anything that's 480i display or 240p. So what I'd like to do is just go a little bit over the monitor, and then we're going to turn it on, see how it looks, and finally we're going to go through, and the most important thing that you're probably going to get out of this, is seeing how we're going to get inside the monitor and go through and change the geometry settings, because I know they're not going to be good coming from the university. They weren't using it for any of the things that we would be using it for. So let's go ahead and get into the monitor. First off, let's talk about some accessories. This is a very good monitor because it comes with a lot of accessories. It's old. It originally came out in 1986. This model is from 1991, and they ran until about 1993, and then they were discontinued and changed over to a new monitor. But this one has a number of accessories. It's got first, it's got a built-in stereo amplifier, so you can actually get these Sony speakers separately. They are shielded so they won't affect your picture or damage the CRT, and they are great. They work great with the monitor, and it's really one of the best things about it. The other thing is it comes with a remote, or you can get this remote for it. And this remote, it just has a basic features, but it can turn it on and off, adjust your volume, you do a picture adjustment, and it lets you scroll through your inputs just by sitting there and using this remote. I have an instruction guide with mine, and this is a little bit rare, but it's available through PDF. It does have some good information, and it's something that you might want to highlight from it. This particular monitor does have a 560 line count, and that is a little odd because most of the time there's 600. It does say here that the RGB input goes up to 2,000 characters, and I'm not really sure what that means as far as comparatively to the 560 line count. If there's a formula, if you want to put it in the comments or know any more about it, that would be greatly helpful. But basically, it does have a full 20-inch screen, and that is one inch larger than the other PVMs that came out after this. They were 20 inches. That was actually, I had a 19-inch screen. So you do get a little bit larger screen with this one. It does look great with the all-black, and again, there's other features I just talked about. So let's get right into it. We're going to take a look at the back of the PVM now. I'm going to show you how to get it open, and then we'll go into looking at what it looks like when we turn it on. Okay, so here we are looking at the back of this monitor, and you can see there are some adjustment knobs, very minor adjustment knobs. Basically, you want to make sure that these settings are set like this, where the remote control, well, if you're going to use it, you need to have it turned on. So we'll need to turn that on, and then manual controls are for the front screen. So for some reason, your screen's not working. You might just want to make sure that those are on if you get this. Now, notch and new dynamic colors. I've not really seen anything to do with that. That will have you helpful. The H-Center only works on digital RGB, so it is no good for us with the calibrations we're going to need to do horizontally on this monitor. The V-Hold, if it is scrolling vertically and not holding its sync, that can help, and that's about it on top. Now, we'll scroll down here a little bit, and you can see what the inputs look like here. And right away, you're going to notice some things that it's got multiple inputs, and the ones that are going to be useful for us are these composite lines. Just take your standard yellow video cable, and you can see I'm using this gold connector. You want to make sure you use high-quality connectors on this, or you're very likely to not even see a picture sometimes, because this thing won't properly ground out if it's a cheap one and really loose. So you want it to be tight. And then, again, you got your ends. And you can go output on these, but another thing to notice on here is these do have termination switches, so you've got to make sure those are turned on to make sure that you have 75-ohm termination on your lines. So there's a line A, a line B that's both composite-only, a VTR-labeled line, which has this videotape recorder input, which is basically useless at this point. But it does have S-video down here. So if you have it switched to the S-video, you can use S-video in your stereo. And then here's your speakers out, and then there's actually an AC out right here that you can actually put something else, so you can actually use this power out as long as your monitor's plugged in. And the last thing over here is your RGB input, which you can see it's a different input. It's got its own special adapter, and it's like, way more like a serial port, but it's good, and you can get them off your retro gaming sites and it fits in there nice and snug and just connects. And then you've got sync on green. If for some reason you're going to put that through there, it'll accept it, but I don't, so I just leave it on regular sync. The next thing to know is that with your audio, you'll have two audio outs. You're like, well, what do I do with these? Well, on this monitor, you're going to need to put those in to one of your other lines that you're not using for video. And once you do that, you know, like your video two, and I'll show you on the front here how that works. But you're going to want to have your audio going into one of these that you're not using the video source on, and then you're going to have your computer input here with sync on green turned off, most likely. So that's pretty much it for the back of this. Now, let's take a look at the speakers. Just a quick look here at the speakers, and these are Sony APM speakers. They are not the original ones with this monitor. Those are a little rarer. So my solution was to find these. They're a little bit more common and available in eBay. I was getting pairs for about $30 to $40 ships to me, and then you can come and make some homemade brackets to add to the brackets with them, and it matches up perfectly with this. It has got the nice Sony look, and you can make it look really nice, and you can see there's some model information on that. The speakers work really well, and they go perfectly with this monitor aesthetically. Okay, so that's all good and great, but now we want to see what it looks like with the screen on. This one today is a Super Nintendo. This is the smaller junior console, and it has been modified for RGB output with Voltar's RGB board with the 7374 chip, so it does have an extra sharp RGB picture. It also will output S-Video, and it will output Composite, and it really does a great job. Go ahead and turn on here, and you notice the first thing to turn on is the power button in, and if you have your remote, you can use that to turn it on and off to just make your power button pushed in, and it will come on and off. Pull up your controls, you put your control button, and then you've got your settings here for volume and some picture settings, very limited, and then changing inputs. To change inputs, you're just going to press A, B for the two lines on there, and A is that there's two blinking when you press computer. What you need to do first is assign your audio line, which us, it was line B, so that'll blink, and then we press the computer line, and now we've assigned the audio line and the computer line together, so now we'll get our audio signals from where we input them. I've got the 240p test seat pulled up here, and just right away you can see that there's a big long line area right here. We've got some screen curling, which we need to make to the yoke, and a lot of changes are going to need to be made to the screen, just to make it look great. Don't be afraid if you see this. A lot of monitors you can get in and change these geometry settings without actually having to get inside the monitor. This one, unfortunately, we have to get inside and turn potentiometers, and a lot of people are intimidated by this, but I'm going to show you how to do that on this monitor. You can take that information and anytime you run into a monitor that has potentiometers, you can use this information to try to help how that will work, and you can basically translate it to the other monitors, because none of these monitors are all the same if they're not the same models. Then you get into the later models, they have these service menus built into them, and you don't have to get into them and turn anything. We'll go through those checks here, but we'll just pull up some things right away so you can see what we're dealing with here. On the first grid, you can see how we've got it curved a little bit here, and we've got this black space here, so we're going to need to horizontally shift this picture to the right, and then we're going to need to shift it, we're going to need to turn the yoke a little bit so we can get it back lined up straight, and then we're going to have to do an adjustment to these corners to try to get that straight as best as possible, and we'll try to see how good we can make this look. Another couple of things to notice, you can't make this look perfect. Even in the manual, I'll tell you that these CRTs are only made to display about 93 to 95% perfection on the signal that it's getting, so it's never going to show a perfect signal at this point probably anymore. Unless you have a brand new one or a later model PVM, these earlier PVMs from the 90s and late 80s, they don't have the kind of hardware that the newer ones did that were well into the 2000s and had a lot more technology built into them. It's still a great monitor though, and it's going to be good because it works great and made it here safely. We're going to show you again how to take it apart now and we'll start with the locations of the screws on the back. Okay, so back around here to the back side, there's actually only five screws you need to worry about on this. Now obviously I'll have to take my speakers off, which is just those knobs there. But I'm going to take this phone and I'm going to just squeeze it on there, and there's one of your screw holes right there. And they have nice arrows on them. There's one back here, under your switches, and then there's, on the same side, there's one down there, and one down there. And those five screws are all we're going to need to remove, and they're just normal screws. We're just going to need to remove those screws and we'll be able to get the back shell off of this PVM. Now something to remember too is that the PVM, when you take the shell off, you've got to have it unplugged. You need to have all your cords unplugged and just have it all out of the way so you can get the shell off nice and easy. And also have a nice little shim that's about two or three inches big so you can set it under the PVM and keep it nice and level when you get the shell off because it'll just want to lean backwards. So we got the monitor turned around back here and while I just take off of this stuff and get working on it, I just thought I'd go through some of the other things that are really important about this monitor. Now again, we said that in the 1990s and that was because it was just really something that was mostly used for medical procedures. A lot of the times when I run into these they come from hospitals where they had some kind of ultrasound or surgical device machine attached to them and obviously technology progresses, they got rid of these but that's what these were originally used for was that. And then again, a lot of home editing, home video editing people that did this job in the 90s part-time or full-time would have bought these kind of monitors they would have been in the thousands of dollars originally and just they are a great piece if you're trying to play retro video games or retro movies anything that needs or has a lot of video signal. I do a lot of things with retro computers on these and they are just great for that. I'm not if you get a screen and obviously you want to be worried about the screen condition because there are some things you cannot fix especially if you don't know how to do things like change capacitors and I really recommend that for anybody who's not really experienced because some of the boards inside here really are thin and you can damage them very easily and then you have a hard time having anybody come to work on it for you. But again if you're going to do laser discs, VCR DVDs anything that's in a 4x3 format looks awesome on this it does great scan lines it does not go over 480i it does say digital RGB but that is a digital RGB that is very rare. I've never seen anything that actually does it but there are things that put that signal but that's not the kind of RGB where it's 480p it will do 480i signals it will not do 480p and it will not do component so it will do the RGB but no component RGB sync on green or RGB regular sync and I'm going to go ahead and take the screws out now and then we'll show you what it looks like with the shell off and we'll go from there. Okay so now we're back and I've removed all five of the screws and the speakers and all the cables and we're going to get in here but I just want to show you this thing I've pulled the shell just out slightly and you'll notice there's a gap here this is just my little shim thing but I like to slip this in here and just get it under the frame of the EVM that you'll see back here because this case actually holds it up a little bit it's a little bit better now that I've got this out of the way but then you just take your power cord slip it slip it through your opening back here put that aside and wow right there's a lot of electronics compacted into a small space which is what you'd expect but they are very workable and I'm going to show you the areas that we're going to pertain to today to concern ourselves with the geometry since everything else seems to be working pretty good our geometry adjustments are going to be made on this backboard here this area right over here to the left of the front side of the screen there's going to be potentiometers and they're labeled on the back here I'll come in closer and we'll look at those but those are going to be making those adjustments for the geometry there are some important things on the back of the on the back of the this board here and that is there's a little thing that's got a potentiometer here it says sub-bright that's going to be our screen brightness on the basically the standard setting whatever the lowest is that determines the lowest or the highest it goes that's your initial setting and you can change that setting in the front and there's some other color adjustments we're not going to mess with those today we don't need to do that and then we've got a screen button down here which is another thing we might need to adjust that's just another brightness kind of deal I don't think we'll have to mess with that really but that's there now this thankfully was moved to a better place in later monitors but on this monitor it's absolutely terrible and it could be something that she actually needs to change a lot on it it affects the convergence lines if you see that you're having color separation where your lines look like you can see they're not all come together like the grid we showed if it's not all a white line or if you see like a yellow and a red then most likely all needs is a little bit turning to an H-stat we'll probably have to adjust it but on this particular monitor you can't do it without go round and out we'll talk a little bit in a minute about dangers here but that one is the one that you actually need to turn the monitor off it can stay plugged in but just turn the power switch off let it shut off twist it a little bit, turn it back on, look at what it's done and unfortunately with this that's the best way I've come to you do that but that one we need to be done down here there's some more things that would be the focus adjustment right in here it's really easy and thankfully you can reach all of these adjustments without really even opening this board up and you can just stick a nice little screwdriver in here turn these potentiometers while the screen is running you can look around front like we'll do and you'll be able to change all those geometry settings shift the screen over and get it looking nice it's just this stat button is a real pain if we have to adjust it then and the same thing goes for the yoke adjustment this one's getting a slight yoke adjustment so we're not going to take it all apart and do a big yoke adjustment because that's not necessary but what I am going to do is I'm going to pull the screws out of these boards and they'll open up and give me more room and I'll have it powered down okay so we're talking about the yoke adjustment yeah we're going to have the monitor powered down for that yoke adjustment and we'll turn it slightly back to the right position we'll turn it on we'll check it and then go from there it might take a couple times but we'll do it that way and then we'll close these sides back up put the screws back and then we'll just work on the geometry after that with the potentiometers now it's going to be safe to do this with it's running for the potentiometer and geometry change there's no way you would know what your adjustments are doing you have to just trust yourself that you're not going to do anything just have confidence in it get the right tools which are some very tiny flat head screwdrivers that will fit in these holes and safely turn those potentiometers you don't want to get the wrong size and jam something too big in there and damage a potentiometer so you'll get in there with the tool and you just need to turn it and that's it and you swatch what it does on the screen again the H-stat is just something you want to have the monitor powered down turned off for and the yoke will actually have it unplugged for the other stuff we can safely do with just turn the potentiometers and we'll just work on one hand at a time that way we don't have any current run through our bodies and not even a risk of that but a lot of this stuff is low voltage anyway 5 volts we're just going to stay away especially from the cable in here that leads into the back of the CRT that leads into the flyback and anything that's connected kind of on that lines and around the power transformers which we're not really going to be near running through those lines those are the higher voltage lines and it's probably fine but we're not going to really go near touching that just because we don't want to mess with it because that's the only thing that's really dangerous the other stuff will shock you a little bit if you do something wrong and ground out against metal and maybe an end on one of these but that's only low voltage you'll just give you a little zap and that's it it's nothing that's going to be worried about but anyway after all this we've gone over a little bit on our time so this is going to need to go to the second episode we're actually going to get into having the monitor turned on with a couple of those 240p test sweet screens and we're going to flip through those screens we're going to do the adjustments and we'll walk through that step by step and it's going to take some time but it's going to be something that's going to be helpful for everybody I do want to make a quick note about my video quality on there this is done with a very old Samsung Galaxy phone this is my first video and if you've heard things in the background or any noise that's because I'm doing this for myself and in my garage and I don't have a high end camera or anything but if you like these videos and I do a couple more of them maybe we can invest in a higher end camera and keep them going but I will be glad to take any suggestions please know that about the camera and sound situation for right now and please tune in for the second episode of Retro Attack where we've been doing the exact calibrations you came to see thank you