 Hey everybody, welcome back today to RetroTech. I'm very excited to talk to you a little bit more in depth first off about this monitor we're looking at today, the Sony PVM20L5. Now this does represent the very best professional video monitor that Sony made in the CRT format, that being again the PVM20L5 high resolution Trinitron monitor. Now the specific reason that this 20 inch CRT reigns supreme over all the other PVMs is the fact that it will do a lot of different video signals from 240p and 480i up to even other signals like 480p, 720p, 1080i. Now what we've got on the screen right now is 480p through Xbox, the original Xbox in component and the back main input on the monitor. Now the monitor will also accept inputs in the form of composites as video and then RGB sync which can be shared over that single component line and then there is an expansion bay on the back of this monitor that allows for an additional card to be inserted and that way you can have an additional input for something like a secondary switchable RGB slash component input with something like a BKM129X. But again just one of the greatest examples of what Sony could do in the early 2000s. This was kind of a step up as far as a lot of the performance would have compared to a lot of the earlier Sony PVMs and even the one right before this which would have been the 20M4U that would have been the more superior broadcast and production level CRT that wasn't a BVM. Now the one thing you should note is that when it switches from a analog video signal into one of the 720p or 1080i it is going to go into a 16x9 mode and shrink the screen down and when it does that you will lose 200 lines of resolution so it does go down to a 600 TV line tube and then sometimes when you do that you will notice that the red green and blue vertical blanking lines at the top of the screen will show. Now that is normal and it's standard for that to happen so don't think there's something wrong with your monitor if that is showing but it will show in that 16x9 format. Other than that the monitor weighs right at 60 pounds. It also does accept AC current from different regions so it will go from 100 up to 240 volts and it could do 50 or 60 Hertz. It can show NTSC video formats as well as PAL video formats without any additional hardware needed and it does have a mono audio speaker on board. That one's actually built into the bottom of this monitor which is not a great design anyway. That's more of just a test speaker. The monitor actually points directly down so if you don't have any extended or extension feet on the bottom of the CRT then you won't actually get a good sound at all from this single speaker because it's just bouncing back into itself and coming back out the sides. Now some of the problems with this monitor are the fact that it was still a PVM so there's still some plastic inside and again another interesting design feature is there are a lot of air holes on the sides and the top of the CRT for it to breathe but then it's got about a two or three inch gap where it's solid along the entire bottom just about and so what tends to happen is this one for example is from 2002 or 2004 so after 16 or 17 years and it never getting any servicing dust will get into these openings. It will land on parts in the board and eventually it builds up so bad in this particular monitor just because there's no way for that dust really to get up and out unless you clean it out and open the shell and get it off and clean it out. Let's go ahead and turn it off and I'm going to show you the proper way to tear this down so that you don't waste a lot of time or risk damaging parts that are very hard to replace on the shell of the monitor which is a very common thing and a mistake to do. So let's go ahead now we'll start tear it down and we'll look inside and see exactly what looks like inside of this one because I've not even opened this one myself yet. A couple of quick notes here before we completely shut everything off so whatever video format you're putting into the monitor it'll automatically switch to that for example right now the Xbox main menu is actually in 480i so if I put a game in and load it up it should automatically kick into a higher resolution if the game supports it so a lot of the games automatically should kick right into 480p and the monitor should click off in a second after the loading screen or it sounds like it clicks off but it just jumps up to 480 60p so just so you know that it will automatically change over into those formats there's nothing you have to do to the monitor itself one more thing if I turn everything off to the monitor and I pull up the menu depending on what the format I just put into the monitor that's what the menu can come out in so the monitor still it might be in 480p mode because the menu looks a lot more stable but sometimes it'll be in 480i and what happens then is sometimes it'll get flickery and jump around a little bit that is completely normal do not overreact and worry if your monitor does jump around a bit on the the service menu because again if it's in 240p it'll try to jump back to 480i or 480p I can't tell exactly what the menu is trying to do specifically but it doesn't want to be in 240p on this monitor so tries to jump into the other one so it'll flicker a lot but you can still look at it use it and read it and then when you put your signal back into it it should correct itself so if you pull the menu up with the signal actually on it shouldn't be as jumpy all right let's go ahead now and tear down our monitor you're looking at the back side of the pvm and really to tear it down initially we're only going to need one tool and that is a civil Phillips head screwdriver like the one I have here and another thing that you might want to have is some kind of container or something that you can keep the screws in here I like these containers these are just for fishing but they have a lot of compartments in them so I can separate the screws into each compartment that way I'll remember which ones to put in which compartment now one of the most common mistakes when disassembling this monitor and really any pvm or bvm that's in this style it's really only pvms for the most part there are a couple that are bvms that are designed like this but you'll notice that each one of the sides of the shell where the shell on the top the metal meets the plastic there are these plastic rivets now these plastic rivets are very pesky you can actually safely remove them if you could split them in half you'll notice there's a way to split them in half and you pull it slightly you don't pull it all the way out but I've shown that before sometimes when I've had to clean monitors but the problem with doing that is these tend to snap because again they're 16 to 20 year old plastic and unfortunately these are pretty unique and it's very difficult I've never found an actual good replacement for it that wasn't an original stock product so you'll have to go find it from another pvm more than likely if you break yours so 99.9 percent of the time we don't even need to mess with these rivets at all especially if we're getting in here and we're going to do something with the pvm for adjustment if you look at the sides of these monitors you'll notice that there are three chrome screws on each side on the major part of the shell we're not worried about the bottom one down here on this little plate because that's not important but what we can do is go ahead and take these chrome screws out so there's three on this side and then there is no difference on these three screws and then the three screws on the other side so all six of these screws are the same so you don't need to worry about saving them for any reason and not having to put them with the others where some of these other screws will be different sizes on the back plate you'll see that the second but this is a standard design for these 20 inch monitors just almost all of them had these six chrome screws in them there are some other models like the 14 and 20 l2s that went a little overboard and added a couple of chrome screws to it for some reason now you'll notice too when you get back here now we've removed those six screws the only thing we have to do is get the screws off the back here and they're actually labeled with arrows there's four of them and that's it no more maybe different on other monitors if you have a different size one the 14 inch may have more screws in it but not this one just four on the back and so we'll loosen those the two over here on the other side and so those actually aren't different either so now that is really all the screws that we need to remove here and what we can do now is is remove the shell now normally you should stand behind where I'm at where your camera view is but to try to make this easier to see I will stand on this side and work on this thing just trying to wiggle it loose again who knows when the last time this was even opened just pull back back back and then up like that and then you see we're able to leave that shell in a solid piece right here and then we don't have to worry about these rivets we can leave it all in one solid piece like this and just put it out of the way for now and concentrate on the back of our monitor and this is great it's going to show you exactly what I was talking about when I mentioned the dust built up in the bottom because this plate down here while there's a lot of plastic inside of here on this monitor these disarm and piece right here is plastic and so is this piece and then there's a couple other bracers in here that are plastic as well but the main bottom is actually metal probably aluminum or something but some kind of metal and so what happens is like I described earlier dust will build up in this and there's a bunch of dust in here so I'm going to grab this camera I'm going to take you a little bit closer and hopefully you'll be able to see exactly what I'm talking about here might have to bring some light additional light in but if we look down there might be difficult to see let's see if I can get a better angle okay so if I look down in here you'll just see an enormous amount of dust and especially this corner right here because if you look down here these are some of the more important components on here these ICs regulators they they can they what happens is these can short out and I believe it has a big thing to do with the amount of dust that can just build up in here because this isn't as bad as I've seen it I've seen it a lot worse if you go back and see some of the other ones we've worked on it's definitely not the worst but it at the least you need to come in here and clean this most importantly in here when you're concerned with your geometry that's one of the things we're going to be looking at on this monitor you're concerned with this board right here and this is your geometry block so not so much this board right here but the main board that it's attached to if you'll notice where my hand and finger are on the side there's a big heat sink with a much more regulators that generate a lot of heat here's a transformer here's a transformer some connectors large connectors going into the yoke and the power supply so this is going to be generating a lot of heat in some of these areas so these are capacitors we're going to want to take a look at and check but I will tell you that these are some of the highest components highest quality components available that Sony used inside this monitor for capacitors so we're going to be better off testing these capacitors rather than just running in here especially since there's no problems right now we'll want to run in here and test the capacitors and make sure that they're still have some life on them with some tools rather than just coming in here and doing cap kits because I've actually had monitors come out looking worse by changing the capacitors even with high quality replacements that we've ordered before but this is going to be one of the boards we're going to get out it could come out now so we'll go ahead now and start pulling it out we're just going to disconnect some of these things and then there's some screws on here that we need to be mindful of but but getting this out of the way is going to free up some space where we can inspect this board and then we can also get in here and clean off some of these areas around the flyback and this heat sink tube the power supply is going to be in the middle of that monitor also so there are again quite a few connections here we're going to disconnect a ground connection first if I get in there the good news is on this monitor we should be able to easily find where these connect back to you want to be careful when doing this though because sometimes this plastic can be extremely brittle and when it is the actual brace this brace that's moving it'll start to crack and fall apart when that happens you really have trouble trying to keep this board steady just working my way back now these larger connections do have spots on them to check for for for the releasing of the cable from the board I'm not sure why that one is always something you try come on I really don't want to deal with that so we're just going to move on we'll try to get this out of this frame before we do something to damage it so there's a screw there should be three screws for this frame one at the top again these are just philips head screws and the problem as you could tell with these pvms more than the bvms is they're difficult to get in and work around they're not as easy to service as the counterpart would be that being the d-series like a d20 d20 has got a lot more space in it and it's design is a lot more friendly for the service man so that's really appreciated I'm sure by sony tex and if you're getting one and you start working on of you realize just how much more user friendly or service friendly those bvms can be again I'm not sure why but this connection I mean it's being so stubborn I'm going to take it from the top it comes off the top of the yoke over here just unplugging it there I don't know why it's just giving me so much trouble I don't want to don't really need to worry about my goodness we're just going to leave it in there we don't need to worry about it there's not even a component that we'll be testing so just leave it in there but that's unusual I never really see them stick like that all right so that's as far as we're going to get into the monitor in today's video it's needing a thorough cleaning because there's quite a bit of dust and just nastiness built up inside of it so after this we're going to clean it off a little bit more and then we'll do some testing on the components on this board we'll also look at the main board we'll need to remove it so there'll be more tear down in the next video but the more important thing was making sure that you guys get the shell off your monitor without doing the unnecessary removal of those rivets on the shell that'll save you some headache and some time so just do it like that if you need to get inside your pvm for the rest of the video though I want to show you how much dust is in here so I'll let you just see a close camera view of that and then look for our servicing videos to come on the boards inside this monitor I'll see you guys next time with some more retro content