 Hey welcome back. Today we've got a new deep dive on a Sony PVM. This one is a 20L2 and it's a professional grade CRT monitor with a tube that is 19 inches in size. It is a 4x3 format. Now this one is an analog only monitor so it only supports 480i video and 240p video and any other higher resolution that is not going to be supported on this particular L-series monitor. So this is actually one of Sony's last lines of CRT video monitors that was professional. So the information we've got here on the label tells us a serial number but we also have a power rating where this will accept 100 to 240 volts and it can do 50 or 60 Hertz so it can do PAL or NTSC. Now for inputs down here we have two analog video inputs right here line A and B. Line A does have composite video in and out in the form of B and C and then you also have S video up here. Line B is simply composite and then over here we have our RGB and sync or that can be switched to component video so you can do Y, PB, PR. We also have audio in and out and then another set of audio in and out over here for an option slot which is right here and this can accept one option card. You can remove these shielding plates right here and just slide in a card there that will add an additional input for you. A 20L2 does have a button board area and this button board allows you to switch between your inputs and your option cards and also do a couple of monitor checks and calibrations down here. You do have a full menu in this CRT with a service menu where you can go in and make deeper adjustments to things like color, geometry, etc. and then you do have your quick adjustments here for volume contrast, phase, chroma and brightness. Please do remember if you're using this for RGB you'll only be able to use brightness and contrast for video controls. Chroma and phase will only work for all the other video formats like composite, S-video and component. All right now that I've introduced you to the Sony 20L2 let's see what's wrong with this one. All right guys we've got this 20L2 here and it's definitely got some issues. Notably the colors are really low the brightness is really low and even when we crank it up we can't get a pure image because the blue gun and even the green gun are slightly weaker than the red gun is. Now in today's video we're going to do a capacitor kit on this one and it's not a huge capacitor kit but this is one of Save on Pats cap kits and it specifically got changes for this model that Sony may have come out with in bulletins and that's pretty common for these monitors to have some kind of bulletin update. So we're going to go through we're going to do the cap kit on this but the other thing we're going to do is we're also going to change this tube out. I got a 20L2 tube that was salvaged so we're going to try to swap that better tube out for this one. You can see quite well here that the red is much brighter than the green and then it's even much much more brighter than the blue and that is with the blue and green completely maxed out in settings. Now if I crank up the brightness and contrast I can make those wheels come up a little bit more but that is maxed out completely on the monitor. We're still missing a good portion of our colors down in this way so that's going to contribute to us not having a bright picture and that is a sign that the tube has worn down so hopefully the new tube will look better than this. All right this is not the easiest monitor to disassemble so I'm going to walk you through some steps. I've already completed some things but what I'm trying to do is take the massive bundle of boards out at once and to do that you do have to disconnect a few points. First off there's a ground cable right here that was connected to the main board right there next to the flyback and that needs to be removed and then a second ground cable was attached to our neck board here that needs to be removed and there's also the neck board itself which was originally attached pretty much like this. It's pushed all the way in and then there's our yoke ring similar to this piece right here around here but after 20 years this plastic that was used it always disintegrates so that pretty much just breaks apart on the spacer that's holding the neck board but don't worry that literally has no functionality as far as performance is concerned on the monitor and it's quite common for that to fail. One other thing we'll have to have disconnected is our yoke so that's been disconnected from down here and then there's one bundle of cables in the front here that has not been disconnected yet and that's down in this area and what it is is it's leading from our button board on the front and it follows up and it actually goes under the yoke around this side and I've traced the cable up to this package right here so it goes all the way from those button board and into this board right here with these two plugs so this is one that has to be taken out. We also had to remove the tally light from over here so that that all needs to be removed that way we can get this board out and also this degausser and power button connections were both removed from down here and then there was another ground connection on this side which is attached over here onto the actual shielding and that was removed and that should almost be everything else. We'll also remove probably this one just because this grounding cable appears to go into the main boards so I'll also remove that. After I disconnect all that stuff we should be able to pull these boards out there was one more cable I forgot down bunched in there and it's a red and white audio cable that connects to the speaker on the front make sure you pull that out and then you'll see that our whole board if we pull on it slightly it should move back a little bit forward so that means it's that portion's ready to pull and then this whole portion is coming with it too so we need to lift this off the brackets and first remove these screws which there have already been removed so that can be lifted up and kind of set to the side just like that and that way all this can come at once after we do this which is just discharge this CRT. Alright this one has a bleeder resistor in it so there's really not much danger here for me but I'm an expert and just in case something goes wrong don't try to do this yourself leave this to the experts there you go see there's no charge of any sort and even if I just click the metal from that to there I'm grounding that point out along there I mean that's not the safest way to do it obviously but when there's a bleeder resistor in these there's really most of the time there's no shocking electricity stored up in this but you always need to be aware that that could be possible if you're ever messing around in here. Now that that is completed we should be able to just pull our board right here let's see everything comes out nice and clean and hopefully I didn't forget to disconnect something nope look good so far there we go these are our two primary boards that have been serviced we've got our C board here which is our neck board and that has had solder completely reflowed on all the components and then a cap kit down on it that is actually part of the cap kit is that board and then the other board that we're working on is this G board which it has all the components for both power and deflection on here but I did have the caps removed from the kit here and you can see how they are sporadic between the board these are in the capacitor kit for save on pat and if you are a patreon member you can head over to the discord page and I'll have this capacitor kit listed there so we're going to go ahead now and install the capacitors back in this main board again that's already been done on this board but this board on this G board needs to have the capacitors installed there's the holes on the back and a nice look at that printed circuit board so that's what I'm going to do now I'm going to install those capacitors and we'll clean these boards up and then we'll get them put back together our boards are done now I've got them partially reassembled now I'm going to reassemble them with the rest of these and before I actually swap the tube out of this thing we're going to see if we get any improvement in picture from just the servicing that we've done so far all right we've got our monitor reassembled again all these boards have now been serviced I just like to do this as a test before I actually go and switch the tube to make sure there was a mistake done by me which is a good thing to do but I wanted to show you how we don't have really much of a change on this tube I do think that the green and red maybe a little bit closer maybe the blue came up a little bit that could just be the caps for the color like allowances on those settings maybe they're working a little bit better with new those new caps but we still have this very low color and even if I max that out I can max out the contrast and brightness and get those colors to come up but again this is maximum brightness so tomorrow what we're going to do is we're going to disassemble this thing and we're going to install a new tube and we're going to hopefully see if we can get it to go at its standard setting which is right about there we're going to see if we can make this pattern look any better than this just on the standard setting all right we're fully geared up here to do some chest cam footage we're going to do is we're going to remove the tube from this bezel here on this 20L2 you can see I've already removed our boards I'm going to have got set up over here on my workbench it is just a really soft matte and then some extra cushion go on this tube however that tube is not really going to touch because the bezel should be flat against that yellow padding so I am going to do this just lean that forward and set it like that right there now there are some things I've already removed on this bezel and shell and that's these ground points there's a few around the monitor on each side and I've removed those and then just put the screws right back in the same hole so remember where they go exactly we're removing these screws right here from each post there's four of those and then this should all come right out so let's see if we could do that right now all right we've removed all the screws and now the shielding with the degauser should just slip right up and out of the way something's hung up over here it's there's a ground connection back here it's holding us up right here it's just a phillips head screw there's always something like this on these I'm taking care of this should lift right up and out of the way and then here's our old tube let's get it up and out this way to do this is to grab it by the neck right here lift straight up set that right there for now check out this this is our replacement donor tube it's cleaned up now it's been sitting for years so hopefully nothing happened to it while I was in storage but we're going to move this over and put it in the spot here but before I do that I'm going to clean up the inside of this a little bit just set it down on the posts make sure none of the wires are being pushed down when you're receding this the biggest thing to do is make sure there's nothing like pinched no cables being pinched and now we can secure the four bolts back in the corners and set it back up and get it ready to test all right so we've got her back together everything's set up double checked and I do have rgb and the input so we can test that second the first thing I want to do is a simple power test and make sure everything is okay and again this is the first time I've done this since installing this tube so let's just see what happens okay here the gong of the degauser feel static on the tube and hear the tube energizing we do see rgb no sink on there and I do have the brightness we turn that back to neutral position and it looks like we do have all our colors good let's go ahead and start the tube or start the game down here let's check out the screen now and there you have it so I'll set up and show you some better pictures of this well hey I've made adjustments to our screen and now I'm going to show you just how much better this looks with the new tube and the cap replacement and everything else first off I just want to pop right in here to the color bars and these are the same color bars that you saw earlier look we've expanded all the way into the other region here and this is with actually our settings kind of turned down because if I crank that contrast up now and the brightness you can see how much brighter that is compared to what we were earlier where we couldn't get any of that and then again if I turn it down to neutral on both of those look at that the colors still staying all the way up here in this region where before man it was all the way over here and like maybe at the eight some it was just down in these this area so we have a lot more color now the screen looks really good and as far as the repairs are concerned this thing is good and done and ready to go hey well thanks again for joining me today on this deep dive into the sony pvm 20l2 crt monitor I do think it's a great choice if you have one available to you if you're looking for a pvm and a crt is for any kind of analog video again this one does not do higher resolutions into the digital resolutions you'll need to upgrade and go for like an l5 monitor to do that but if you're just looking for something again that does analog video support and is a crt this is great it has all the great aspects of a crt plus it has amazing scan lines since it's a pvm and it's got that high resolution tube of 600 tv lines so there it is if you enjoyed the video please do leave me a like and I will see you all next time with some more retro content