 Hey everybody, welcome back today to Retro Tech. I have got an extremely special treat for you today. We are going to be looking at one of the smallest CRTs that Sony ever made. Now this is a little color television. It has a screen just over three and a half inches. The actual model number on it is the KVX370. And again, this is an extremely rare little unit. So I'm really happy to have the opportunity to show it off to you guys today. So what we're going to do now is we're going to take this over to the workbench. We're going to try to do a little bit of troubleshooting on it because it does not work. And we're definitely going to be tearing this completely down and taking a look at what makes this so special and why it's different from a normal CRT or a normal Sony Trenantron tube. You'll see all that coming up in this video. Thanks again for watching. Let's get into it. Well, hey, check this out. We have a Sony Indexotron. And this is quite an interesting little TV set. If we look under here, we'll see some information on it. This one is from January of 1989. And then this one is not powered by any internal power supply. It actually has an external power supply. And it is run on 12 volts. That's a 15.6 watt max. So it only needs 12 volts of DC power. And on the back, we've got composite video in, mono audio in. And we should also have an external antenna input right here. So you could get old RF channels with this. This is where our 12 volt DC power plug would come in. And so as of right now, this does not function. At least that's what the owner says. Now, if I think this is, yeah, check this out. This is a cool little feature. So these little TVs, Sony love to put little kickstands like that. Here's the internal antenna. So you could have an external antenna. And it's got an internal antenna built into it. We have an open here so we can set our tuning on our channels. And then we can also move it over to TV if we want to try to use the AV input. And then there's a time set here. It's got an alarm on here. So again, it is like a clock, an alarm clock, and a TV built into one. We've got some color and hue picture brightness adjustments here on some wheels under this portion. There's a headphone jack right here. So it's a very nice, cool little unit. And I've never seen one. So today we're going to take it apart and try to get it working and see what's going on. Now, in order to start our troubleshooting before really do anything, we're going to move this aside and look at the power supply for this unit, which is this handy dandy little thing right here. It's got some ventilation right here on top. And this could snap onto the actual television set and be released by this little hook here. So it could sit there and be stable on the back. And then this would plug into the back of the TV. It's a proprietary Sony power supply. So it's good that they have the original one here. And it just plugs into the wall and it takes AC 60 hertz input, 23 watts. And then it'll convert that to one amp DC 12 volt if it's functioning properly. So again, the model in the power supply is an AC 123 watts, because I'm sure that these would have had issues on their own and probably needed to be replaced at some time. So the first thing we're going to do is we're going to check this power supply. And that should be pretty simple because this should output 12 volt power DC power. And we can test that with a multimeter. And if we look here, it even tells us that the positive end is the outer barrel. The center is the negative. So all I need to do is plug the power supply in, which is already plugged in. And then I've got my handy fluke meter here. And this will help us read the DC voltage and see if this is putting out DC voltage and how much if so. And that should be a pretty quick test. So all I have to do is go negative in the center, right? Okay. And then we'll test the positive end. And we'll see. And we are outputting DC voltage, but it seems a bit high. So it says it should be 12. And it looks like we're outputting 19. So that's kind of interesting. I've not seen that before. So maybe there's an issue with this power supply where we're letting too much power through and it's not actually sending the right amount through. Here's this disassembled power supply. And from the look of things, we've got our power coming in from the wall. And then on this red or this orange and white cable, it splits off and it goes into our transformer unit here. And then it comes over to this section where we've got diodes and a big filter capacitor. Now honestly, this is a very old capacitor and the solder looks pretty shoddy on it. What we can do is we can use my GME meter over here and we can test to see what kind of reading we get on this capacitor to see if it's even a good capacitor. Good on the ESR meter. See if you see it sits there and I put it on the positive and negative leads there. It discharges the capacitor and over here, it's on 0.1 which is 2.2 k. It has to be 0.1 on the ohm meter and that's still green. So the capacitor is probably not our issue on the 12 volt step down. So maybe we need to check some other components. I will go through here and reflow the solder. Make sure that's not an issue because it looks pretty nasty. And then maybe we could just reassemble this and try it again and see if it does any better. And check this out. This is a, you know, late 80s capacitor from Nippon Kimming Company. And these are considered good high quality capacitors. It's 85 degrees, 25 volt, 2200 microfarad. Now this is a modern one that's even better rated at 105 degrees Celsius from Nishikon. Same exact, 25 volt, 2200 rating, same style. But look at the size difference. The height is the same almost actually. The Nishikon is about a couple of millimeters shorter. Not much. But the big difference is check out the diameter. Holy moly. That is a lot smaller and I'm sure this is a much more efficient capacitor. So even though that don't want test goods since I've already got it open, I'm going to go ahead and install this and we'll see if that helps at all along with reflow on the solder. The power supply has been cleaned up. I did try to go through and check some other components with my meter and I couldn't really tell anything that was obviously messed up on there. Again, there's that new capacitor. So let's just plug this thing in without reassembling it. Now this is an ESD pad so it won't cause any kind of short to happen. And then we'll see what kind of reading we're getting from our barrel right here. It's 18.5. That's kind of interesting. I went down a little bit. All right. I've removed my shell only on this little TV. And now we can try to look this over some. The owner had tried to do some work on it. But if we're just spinning around here, all that happens with this outer shell is it just slides off after you remove three screws. And there are some push tabs. You have to push simultaneously on the bottom to get that open. But it's a very tiny, tiny tube in there. Check it out. Down in there, tiny neck board. And then there's these D boards, which I'm assuming are deflection boards, maybe other things going on. Since they're like D6, this could be other things. But they're labeled like D2. There's a D3 board up here. So what I'm going to have to do is pull all these boards out and get them away from the television. Now this looks like a tuner unit right here for the tuning. And then if we look down here, this is where our power goes in. So that's down there. That could be a tuning unit. Also, see how our RF tunes in there. I'm not sure then this might be something else. What I need to really do is just slide these boards kind of out and seclude them from the rest of the CRT. Wow. Check out this tiny tube and flyback. So this flyback cap is under an inch in total diameter. And I mean, the entire tube is only about five inches from the back of the neck of the tube down here up to the back of the screen. So that's pretty, pretty tiny. There's a little deflection yoke here. And then again our flyback and then I do not see any kind of, oh, yeah, there we go. There's some convergence rings or purity rings. I'm not sure yet. We'll see what the manual has to say. And there's our tiny little index tron tube. Very cool piece of hardware. Now here are the boards. They all do break out like this. And hopefully we can check these out because they do appear to need some servicing. The solder looks pretty terrible on them. And then we've got a neck board right here, our input board. And then the top portion, which had to come off, which I'm sure has those controls in it. Wow. Here is our index tron completely taken apart and disassembled. And this tube on this CRT is one of the most unique CRT tubes that I've ever seen and that you will definitely ever likely see in your life. This is a Sony, again, index tron tube. And from looking at it, it doesn't look too much different. If you look at it, for example, from this side to any kind of trinitron tube. If we look at this electron gun, it actually is quite similar to the electron gun and all the other trinitron tubes that you would find from this era. We even have some aquadag applied to this side of the tube, which this all would look normal. There's an anode cap spot there. And then the tube screen kind of looks normal, except if you look over here, it definitely varies a bit from this side to this side. And that is what is making this tube the index tron is the difference between this side and this side over here. So as this TV is in operation, there is a side on the tube that has actually no aquadag applied to it. That's no internal aquadag. You see how that silver lining kind of stops right by that label. This whole half right here is just translucent glass. And you can see how it reflects on the back of the aperture grill that's right there under the glass. See how that's only painted up to that point. So normally this would be entirely painted. You'd have this aquadag along most of the back and edges of this to block out light that could transmit through the back of this tube. But Sony purposely made this translucent so that when this tube is set up in the actual video monitor or television, what it will do is it'll be translucent on this side over here where the index tron is. And that is so Sony can send through the messages that were either related to the alarm clock or whatever. That's how they would shine through the screen here. And they were transmitted on the back of this via this orange translucent screen here. So this would be behind here and then Sony would have programs that would again tell you, I'm guessing unfortunately, I don't have this working. So I don't know exactly what messages would have been transmitted on this. And maybe if anybody knows they can add that below. But that's how this would work. It was translucent so that you could shine light through the back of this tube. And it would actually transfer and show into the screen and viewing area. And I can actually mimic this with this little flashlight here. And see as that turns on, see how the light, you can see it reflecting inside of there. But if I do it on this side, it's just going to bounce off back to the flashlight. And we won't actually get any of that light in there. So if we try to do that from this side, you see how, see how that beam of light can be shined and actually it can almost reach the entire screen viewing area. But especially this side over here, it's translucent. And you can see that. Now if I move the tube over here where the aquadag and normal side is and pass that on there, see that same exact thing. But you're not seeing any of that light transmit. You can see it down there at the bottom when I get below the tube. But that wouldn't show because boards are normally there. So this side over here is a normal tube for a CRT. Yet over here, we have this completely translucent tube. And that's the big difference technically from the indexotron tube and a normal Sony Trinitron tube. Very interesting. Again, this is quite small. It's a 3.7 inch viewing area and just an amazing piece of technology. I cannot imagine how difficult it would have been to not get any of that aquadag or painting on this portion of the glass. That would have been very precise tooling to do that. And it's a very amazing, skilled engineers working on these tubes. I've had an opportunity to inspect all these boards. And I've come to the unfortunate conclusion that these, or this particular CRT will be a very unlikely save. And the reason being is not that it had originally failed and then was just left alone. The problem is many times people have come into this CRT at least once or twice and attempted to do some repairs. And instead of actually fixing problems, they appear to have created a lot more issues on these boards. And it's to the point now where a lot of this would just need to be undone and then rebuilt. And then there's a lot of pieces missing here. And then there's some weird bodges that have been added. And this is just an example right here of this weird, I have no idea what's going on in this little thing. But you can tell where it was once attached to say this point right here. And for some reason someone added this. This is not a factory addition. A lot of the solder on here was bad. A lot of these points where someone actually came in and recapped it. I mean, to be honest with you, these boards would completely need to be resoldered. And then we'd have to figure out what the issue was that originally caused these bodges to be in place. Because I'm sure something shorted out. As I went around and inspected even closer. This is the other side of that weird bodge addition. You'll notice down here there's this SMD resistor missing right there. So that's missing. It's an issue if I look over here towards this chip on the D1 mainboard. It's very corroded around these parts. But the worst of all is again we have just missing pieces here. Tons of missing parts. These ICs look like they're really in bad shape. And have some major corrosion on this solder. And this solder is really, really poor quality at this point. Some of the interesting things here. That's our flyback cable right there. So there's not a traditional flyback. It seems to be encased in this plastic, or I'm sorry, it seems to be encased in this metal shielding right here. And then so this is the main board. And then under that board is another board where you connect in. And this has the RF input. The power input has another side that goes on over here for some adjustments and picture controls right there. So that is the board that when it's put together sits under there like this. So it's a very jam-packed design. That's for sure. So what I have to do now is pretty much reassemble this thing. Because again we're not going to be able to repair it unfortunately. Just due to the sheer amount of damage and amount of workmanship that it would cost to put into this is just right now it's beyond what anybody would want to put into it. However it's a very cool piece of hardware and definitely great to see in person. And I would keep it and maybe keep all the boards. And then I don't know one day if you came across another one try to find it. Because this is better as a parts model unfortunately. I mean everything at this point could need rebuilding on something like this. The problem is when you run into something where it's already had a rebuild attempt done to it. And that's done more damage than good. All right now I need to put all this back together. And I'm going to show it to you one last time. Well here's the index tron pieced back together. And I wanted for my final kind of breakdown on this CRT to show you just the size comparison to something that's a little bit more modern. This is my Sony alarm clock dream machine. Now it does not have any kind of you know CRT in it. And it's just a power backup alarm clock. It has a lithium battery in it. But I just couldn't help think about like how similar in size these were. It's just amazing to me. They're nearly identical in size. I mean Sony obviously had a little bit bigger footprint with this index tron. But isn't that amazing? And to me the styling is I mean this is a little bit of a progression. But I still like how Sony almost maintains you know kind of a look throughout its history where you can tell these products are somewhat related obviously. But maybe see like the feet thing is installed permanently on this. Whereas the index tron you know is optional. So that's a little bit cool. So definitely kind of a design upgrade. I'm sure that there was at least some influence from these devices as it went on into these devices. And this one this alarm clock came out about 2007. That's when I bought it. And this beautiful little CRT unfortunately will not get to see it running. But definitely a bit older. A really cool display. And I was able to get some interesting information about this index tron. And how basically that light would light up. And there are imprinted phosphors in here. And on the screen that as you light them up with a certain lighting it shows through the picture. So you would still be able to see the picture in the background. And it would just overlap that with some data. Whatever data you wanted. I'm sure for this it would be for example your clock time the channel possibly. But more likely it would all relate to that alarm clock. And that should be it. So that's a good look at the Sony index tron. All right. So even though unfortunately we were not able to get the index tron back online and get really any images of this. You can go online and look up index tron CRT tubes. And you will find some information with some photographs of how the index tron technology worked. Because Sony was not the only company to try to make this kind of tube and sell this kind of application to customers. So there definitely is some more information online about this index tron style tube. Hopefully one day we'll get one that is serviceable so that we can actually see one in action. But sometimes you just got to take what you can. I'm happy as all get out to be able to just even document this broken one. And that's all that we're going to look at today. Thanks again for watching. I'll see you all next time with some more retro content.