 Well CRTs have definitely gone through a resurgence as of late and this makes it increasingly difficult to find rather simple consumer sets that normally would be given away for free for a decent price. So I wanted to give myself a little bit of a challenge. I decided to give myself a maximum budget of $50 to find a good unique retro style CRT that had to be working and I wanted to get it online and have it delivered to me in my house. Alright, so enough gibber jabber. I want to show you how the challenge went. I was able to find a CRT for less than $45 shipped to me and let's start with the unboxing of that beautiful CRT and then we'll show you how it came out. What's a beautiful summer morning here in the fine state of Virginia and I've got some nature going on behind me. We will have birds tweeting and all kinds of crazy noises. So please excuse that but today we have an exciting adventure in unboxing and this has of course a CRT inside of it and this is the box just to take a first look at it. The bottom three-quarters of the box looks pretty solid. It is a new box from Staples Extra Large and I even believe yep it says heavy-duty down there so we'll check it out when we open it and see how it looks and I got to be honest with you the poor guy who sold me this must have not really made any money maybe even lost money to ship me this and pack it so I'm really rooting for him and hoping that it made it here safe so at least he doesn't have to deal with it anymore but this one came 180 miles so it wasn't that far from me or 290 kilometers from my friends overseas. This did come from a company called UPS. They had it for a total of two days and went ground shipping so I'm going to get set up on the tripod and we will cut this thing open and see if it survived. Let's use these old-school horror scissors and we'll open up this box. Looks like the CRT might be face down if I'm guessing on the shape of this but who really knows. Now this is a JVC monitor. Okay so along the sides we do have it's a nice idea some crumpled cardboard it's better than nothing here we go so I can feel the bezel it's not much wrapping around this thankfully it's lighter it's definitely packed with the screen down. This is a JVC as I said that is missing a front flap that comes down that was not in the listing it was listed as tested and working everything feels pretty solid on here so nothing appears to be damaged and this is the TM13U it is an NTSC set this one's from April of 1987 60 Hertz 120 volts maximum of 72 watts so still uses a good amount of power we're gonna go over the inputs and test those and everything else about this monitor so thankfully it came in one piece it looks like we're good let's take this down to the CRT bunker and get some tests done on it ready to start our test I've got the monitor set up with a lovely PC engine core graphics console with a cricks cart there now here's just a quick look at our CRT as you could tell we didn't take any damage from that shipping which is just awesome and it's it's fairly dirty so it needs a good cleaning absolutely needs that let's turn on the screen and see if it oh my goodness look at that we've already got volume going wow so this is the first time it's powering on and who knows how long wow so we're running the legendary X here again on the PC engine core graphics and composite video and I've got our 240p test pattern pulled up and we've got discoloration and a purity issue right in here in the center of our CRT and I've zoomed in so you can see the area in the center of the screen now we're gonna try to fix it's got a weird purple hue in there it's definitely a magnetism issue hopefully we can use our degausing wand and get rid of that all right here's my wand and I'm just gonna actually try to stay a little bit towards a couple feet away we'll start from there and kind of move in close look how it really distorts it and back away and cut it off and wow it's cleared it up wonderfully let me zoom in so you can see that because it's it's crystal clear now that entire center and right side where there was that purple hue it went right away now how cool is this I have a composite video set up here with of course the PC engine core graphics console and that's a composite video matrix switcher which it does have a distribution amp and then I've got composite video run from there to all three of these similar yet not the same monitors on the far left we have our JVC can tell how much it looks exactly like these Commodore monitors the shells look at the front of them nearly identical obviously JVC put their logo up here and then kept the plate here pretty plain whereas if you go down here Commodore decided to put their logo and everything down here now this one in the middle is the 1701 and on the right we have a 1702 the composite video inputs on the Commodore monitors in the front along with the audio jack and these adjustments are all exactly the same thankfully the Commodore monitors still have their button cover this has been a lot of fun I'm glad we were able to accomplish our goal of getting again that $50 or less CRT and if you liked this and want to see more comparisons of the three of these monitors and what's different on the insides because I know some of the buildouts going to vary between the three of them then let me know in the comments and I'll be glad to come back and highlight these three CRTs and basically the comparison of what's the same and what's different well that's going to do it for today's episode thanks for joining me and I will see you next time with some more retro content