 Hello everyone welcome back to an all the new episode of Retro Tech and today I've got a new monitor that a patreon supporter brought by to have serviced and I thought I would make a video about it because it's a little bit of a different monitor than I normally get to work on it is still a Sony this one just happens to be a PGM so first off this was how the monitor came to me and the condition that it was in to begin with and these were basically medical grade monitors specifically for hooking up to a computer that might be in use in either a lab or in the actual hospital room or test room wherever you may be using some type of a computer back in the early 2000s this would have been attached to it now the best information on this particular model is here after doing some research online there's a listing for one that's all details on it prior listing for this monitor it's a PGM 100 P1 MD hospital grade computer display the PGM is a lot like the PVM and it just means pro graphics monitor so this monitor doesn't do a whole lot of it doesn't have a huge number of features or anything yeah what you'll notice on here is that it has a frequency support of 30 to 65 kilohertz and then if we just look down a little bit more we'll look at some of the features of course it's a Trenetron tube so it has superior picture performance high contrast fluid resistant design which I'll show you in a minute that's actually just talking about the outside shell of this monitor and lockouts feature of course we'll talk about that in a second and then it does comply with a lot of requirements for being in use in a medical facility there are actually specific requirements as far as power consumption this one is switchable between 100 and to 120 volts and 220 to 240 so there is that on the power supply details again this is generally comes with a 15 inch Trenetron CRT P22 phosphor picture the resolution I have highlighted here it's either 640 by 480 or 1280 by 1040 or 1024 excuse me those are the only two resolutions you're gonna see on the monitor but you can switch between them the color temperature there are two color temperatures already programmed and then there's a user setting that you can change it has RGB inputs with sync that's split on vertical and horizontal which you'll see momentarily and of course there is audio on board it comes with a mono speaker just like the PVMs if we take a quick look at the back here's some of the information you see right on the back here this one is from April of 2001 and Milo the man who owned this monitor he actually had two of these so I agreed that we could get one really good monitor out of the two so as I went and headed set this up to test this is the cable input it also has an output to daisy chain this monitor just something but it just takes a standard power cable like any PVM and then it does have a mono speaker and audio dial is over here where you see this triangle and then you've got RGB and then HD and VD those are your two sync lines so it doesn't take just RGB S you actually have to have split sync and then it will not accept 240p natively it only accepts 480p and up to the maximum resolution this is how I hooked up the monitor to test it I don't have a whole lot that would have really been able to test this that well except for this this is an old computer that I have from 2003 I actually bought this from a gateway store and it still works great it's a 2003 model just tower PC I'm gonna try some doom on it I did use this extra on box which allowed me to turn that signal that comes out of this CPU I only have a video card that does a straight VGA and I didn't have a VGA breakout cable so I fed the VGA source into this splitter and then I was able to split out RGB and then the two different types of sync that way I could get the monitor hooked up to this computer and we could see what it looks like for the first time of turning it on you see that just feeds right over there it's the input on this monitor and the good thing about that switchbox is I was able to run a LCD test to make sure that the computer was putting out a good picture and right away I turned it on I can tell that we have a problem with brightness the first thing I wanted to go is check the color temperatures and it just looked like we were missing one of those colors I had a feeling that since the the screen didn't look really look robust now thankfully this would did turn on the other one that was the second monitor the screen was actually quite burned the pictures quality on it was not very good so we wanted to use this monitor and this was the tricky part we talked about the lockout and the shell having resistance for fluids so this shell on here is very tightly put together you've got four screws to one on each side in this corner down here and then two on the back of the monitor but then in the front of the monitor at the top of the actual plastic I was not able to easily get this unhinged or opened and I wanted to be careful I didn't want to destroy the plastic on something that was this old again 18 year old plastic this could easily crack and that shell would be very hard to find so I was able to get the second monitor that was a spare parts open I did have to crack the plastic a little bit but it showed me how to get these monitors open and if you look here where I'm pointing my fingers there's actually this little hook and it attaches itself to the underside of the back of the plastic there's a little dot on there that's kind of like Braille one on each side there's two those that's what's locking the top of the screen in shell in place so you have to be careful when you're trying to get that open now that I had the monitor open I wanted to try to test a little bit turn up the screen brightness and mess with it here's a couple potentiometers in there that were able to make some adjustments just for screen brightness that's what I did first but I still was missing a color and that was telling me that probably something was bad on the original CRT neckboard and that had a lot of components on it so rather than go in and rebuilding the board completely since I had a second monitor that I was allowed to use for parts I took that other board out of that other PV or the other PGM and I swapped those boards and that way the other board probably the original board probably has a bad capacitor or maybe some other type of IC or something had gone bad but I was able to just get this out now there is that little plastic piece around the neck where the back of the CRT actually the gun goes right into there that's the only thing that you need to pop out so you could pop in the new neckboard and again this is one of the things that I like to do if I have an extra part that's going to save people on repair costs and a lot of time troubleshooting so the quickest thing here was just to be able to swap this part out with a backup part and we'll get it all hooked back up in here in a second and see what the results are on screen now just be careful if you're ever inside here this is a delicate area since it's right near the electron gun and all the fragile pins around the tube you know you don't want to definitely crack that because that'll ruin the tube entirely so now that we've got it re-hooked up I've hooked everything back up and we're gonna get on here and turn up some of the brightness again and right away I could tell that the colors came through I think we were missing the red on this particular monitor so right away I just fired up some doom and this is just a demo of me playing through some doom but this monitor is very great for the purpose of using it to play these retro video games if you've got an old PC that you want to use and you don't have you know if you want to keep the Trinitron theme or if you run into one of these then it's a good buy it's a good monitor I will tell you I have been researching kind of some values on this particular monitor there's only really one for sale or in the United States right now and it's for sale for $300 and it doesn't fully work even now it doesn't appear to have screen burn but probably needs some capacitors replaced in the power supply so that was a retro game this is a little bit newer of a game with a higher resolution so you could see just to interrupt myself here on screen you could see the graphics and how it handles a little bit newer of a game but I really enjoyed this monitor it was my first chance to work on a PGM there really is a lot of hardware inside a PGM and it's more of a confined space and also with the solid design here on this plastic you notice it can build up a lot of heat and dust so the ones that I had I had cleaned it thoroughly but there was a lot of dust built up in it and I inspected everything because the capacitors are from the year 2001 and it's not too long for them to still be in good shape for a while so if nothing's wrong with the screen which nothing was we we just kept the same capacitors in for now as requested by the client and the last thing I do is I will add a little bit of silicone you see that white silicone right there to keep the neck board from moving once I put it all back together and then this is just a walk through on these potentiometers so first we have this one on the side of this neckboard right next to the neck of the CRT and if we turn that you know we can control some of the controls like screen convergence that automatic screen convergence horizontal static convergence and then we've got of course convergence rings and then this up here where I'm pointing at this is your G2 voltage so this could turn up the amount of voltage you have going directly into your tube so if you have an older monitor you can always increase that a little bit and it will make your monitor a little brighter of course it does sometimes burn out your monitor but if you can't see it you need sometimes that gets tuned down that's a lot of times when you open up a pvm or pgm or CRT that particular potentiometer will be on the back of the flyback but this one only has a focus knob on the back of the flyback but it is accessible in this side vent on the side of the monitor so you don't have to actually take that apart to access the focus knob in case you just want to make a focus adjustment or if it comes out of focus you could do that without actually opening the pgm completely back up and the last thing to do was reassemble it and that's pretty much it so the last thing I will say about this monitor is it was extremely loud you could see the condition here where there's not a lot of airflow even on a pvm or bvm you'll get more of an open slot design on the sides top and back where there'll be a lot more air flowing through it this one has to have a fan a lot like the early computers and I don't know if I could even hear it on the screen but that's the fan the fan is extremely loud at times and it gets really warm quickly but it's a necessity for this monitor or I'm sure that it would short out or something would short out from over time of a solder joint drying out or something so that was the one drawback you may be able to find a quieter fan as of now that could be replaced in there I went through and heavily cleaned it a good thing is there's a lot of nice geometry controls right on the front because each time you switch between resolutions on your display and whatever program you're running you may run into something where you want to just center the screen and that's really easy to do from the front buttons there and you could also change your color setup right on the front as well as your brightness and other contrast and things like that so all around a perfect monitor to go and play some old doom like this or any other type of old school computer game that you might be looking for and I totally recommend getting these if you find one I will say one thing again about price I would say that one that's in a working condition like this one that's been tuned up and look at at least $400 for something like this I feel like if in like an appraisal setting where it's in really good shape and has been set up tested calibrated will work for a long time now if if you go in and had to get a capacitor replacement or you went ahead and did some capacitor replacements on this it would increase the value but you're also increasing the cost because it's it's a lot of work to safely get into this and I honestly wouldn't recommend taking this monitor to anybody that's not done monitor work for you in the past just because I'd be afraid the biggest problem was actually getting the monitor open without hurting it and I would have not even been able to do that correctly without having the old broken monitor pretty much repair parts monitor that Milo had to try and replace those parts with and also fool around with it so again that's my little overview of the pgm 100 again medical grade professional graphics monitor from sony trenetron tube I thank you very much for watching please make sure you leave me a comment or question if you have anything about this particular monitor and I'll see you guys next time with some more retro content