 Hello everyone, welcome to RetroTank Academy and today we're taking another look at a calibration. Today's going to be a special episode because I'm going to be using the 20L5 that we've been talking about and I might throw this video in there with the 20L5 videos but it's not really going to be using or calibrating the 20L5 today. Today we're looking specifically at colors and I've got this smaller, it's just a regular 8-inch, it's from 1999, it's 804 to Q and it is again just a smaller Sony PVM but it's got some major color issues in it. I want to talk a little bit more about colors and how to calibrate for that. Also these techniques are going to be used on pretty much any kind of CRT as far as the terminology and the adjustments we're going to be making. Now this one has potentiometers internally in it that I've pulled open. I'm going to show you those potentiometers and we're going to go through each setting and we're going to show what it does in the screen here but the 20L5 is pretty much set and rather than go through and try to manipulate the settings to just make it look bad I thought we'd look at the one that's already got an issue with it. So first off let's go ahead and talk about the tools we need today. If you don't have to use potentiometers and you're using a monitor that's more modern you can go through the service menu. I'll make a video about that but specifically today we're going to be using potentiometers and we need a good set of screwdrivers. I recommend getting yourself some there like this. These are just I've got a bigger one there and a smaller one here you can get flat or Phillips heads and this is a good one too sometimes and it's actually just got it interchangeable parts but you want something that you can access easily small. These are I think they're called eyeglass screwdrivers not this one but the other ones are. So you're going to need those to manipulate easily manipulate your potentiometers and get your color dialed in. So let's go ahead and I'm going to pull the camera now closer to the smaller monitor in the potentiometer section and we're going to talk about the adjustment specifically we'll be making today. Okay so let's scoot in closer here to our board and I'm doing this freehand today so I'm going to try to make it not jerky. So we're looking at here our color potentiometers this set of eight and really these bottom four we're only going to use one of those to control our color that's this far left one it says this sub hue that actually keeps the tent of our whole CRT it's either going to be a reddish tent or a bluish tent depending on how we turn that. Also down here we've got some gain controls you can see they're marked we've got a blue gain and a green gain and then we've got a cutoff control which is a green cutoff and a blue cutoff. You'll notice there's no red cutoff control here and there's no red gain control now there is a red there are some red controls around the front of the monitor that I'll take you to next but we're going to start using these to make most of our adjustments these five the two cutoffs over here and the two gains and then this hue but also this potentiometer over here it manages to control the screen color too and it's marked with some other I can't really read it over here it says matrix but I believe it says RGB color on the other side I can't really make it out because it's blocked out by some plastic but I did notice that turning this potentiometer actually changes the color but most of the time when you're looking at colors you're going to be looking for something that says gains and cutoffs and sometimes it can say biases and things or hue is another setting but mostly gains and cutoffs and this is a smaller monitor so its board has to be moved away from the neck board a lot of the times these potentiometers will be on the neck board specifically for your monitor. Let's go ahead and while I've got it the camera here let's look at the front of the monitor on this little one and you see I've got a second set of controls here and like I said there's a red a green and a blue and then I've got some more gain and some bias over here which bias again cutoff is another word for it so we're going to be able to use these there are more potentiometers in here that may help us adjust a little bit more beyond what those smaller ones do on the side something that you will want to use here is this blue only gun that does help you when you're calibrating colors because it shines just one color just your blue color and you can tell on the screen when it's not looking right when you push blue only it shouldn't look quite like this for example this is another thing I want to show you on here that I've got two let's do blue only so there that's a good example blue only on a properly calibrated monitor should show gray colors like this and you can see right here we've got too much pink and red naturally on our gray screens so blue only helps you get a gray screen only and that blue gun shoots and gives you that colors but just so you know colors are very hard to calibrate just based on having one monitor so if you don't have a second monitor that's like a calibration monitor to show you what good color is it's very tricky and very hard to get something set properly let's also talk about what we're using today to calibrate this you can tell some of you might have noticed this I could ask this question a lot but this 240p test patterns 240p is going to be the most once you get dialed in and 240p everything else seems to fall into place especially like 480i isn't nearly as finicky as 240p that's going to that's going to be everything's perfect on your rgb in color and geometry whenever you do it on 240p it seems to translate better out to the higher resolutions but again we've got two one calibrated correctly and one that we're trying to calibrate so we need to have that set up like that I'm using again the super nintendo with rgb mod and on the 240p test suite I want to use this actually I like this color bar here because it gives me the colors and it gives me four colors here it gives me the scales and I get an orange up here so I can guide off of and then I can switch over and get rid of the text and just have this grid pattern it's a very good one to color calibrate another one is if you're having trouble you can use the gray bars but what I like to use is this white rgb screen so what you can do here is try to get these screens closer to an actual color you can start with black and see it's at a good black position so red's not far off but green is extremely off blue is not far off white is extremely far off so that's what you've got there to work with white green and blue so you can do that to do a screen you can get this gray ramp also to help because grays are going to be a good tail as you adjust these things you won't be able to see a lot make some adjustments but you won't see a lot of the things easily on a screen with a lot of colors like something like this it's going to be easier to see what's going on if you have it on a single color what I'm going to do now is I'm going to switch the screen over to gray and we're going to start turning some of these potentiometers we're going to start with the cutoffs we're going to start just turning them up and unfortunately this is a very tedious job you just have to kind of do it and see how it reacts compared to the bottom screen and then we'll just kind of see how one looks compared to the other and it would just be more adjustments more adjustments more adjustments I'd like to start off with our color bars and there's a lot going on on this screen but it does give us a lot of good to look at we're going to try that uniformly you can see down here this is our goal and this is where we're at so again I'm just looking at these potentiometers in the back I'm going to show you what some of them do I like to start with the cutoff side so if I take this blue cutoff and start to turn it you see how these colors start to show up now with everything turned down we should have a mostly red screen which we do so it's good to take it and turn these cutoffs green and blue up a little bit now see look at that when I turn that green cutoff up a little bit more and then I turn the blue cutoff we're starting to get a little bit other colors involved in there which is good and then we're going to go to the gains after the cutoffs and kind of follow in line with that and that just kind of brightens up our colors a little bit we've still got an overall red tint to that screen now it's starting to get a bluer tint but I still see a red tint okay so again first I went with the blue and green cutoffs and I adjusted and now I'm doing the blue and green gains and I'm adjusting but I'm still not getting things exactly right so then I want to go ahead and start adjusting this hue and you see what that does that again either introduces more red or it gets it cooled down to a blue and I'm still having some issues where my whites over here not exactly coming out white everything's looking a little red and blue and so now I'm turning this other one that's a screen matrix where the RGB's potentially over to the left just to see if that's going to help any so I turned all the way down that gets completely rid of the red which makes me think this might be a red gun on control we don't want to have too much red in there so I just have to keep fiddling with this and sometimes I come in here up front and then I'll start I can start tweaking these see how you add more red gay now you don't want to add I mean unfortunately that's what it is it's just too much doing this by hand I'll add a little more blue and some of these are not going to have a huge impact on the screen if you've already turned it some something else to note you're going to have to change these for each setting so if you do have a problem and it's a different input you may have to change if you're not using RGB but RGB is really the best to calibrate by because everything else has filters and things so here's the issue with this monitor I don't know one of these guns is not fully working right because I can't get the color to adjust correctly perfectly which is probably why I'm having these color issues to begin with sometimes you can only get something so good let's try some of these sub brightness and I've got a sub color setting here that brings out my color intensity and I'm not so I'm not losing my green there but it controls my other one so it's making me wonder if there's something up with the green controls because it's just not as bright as the others and there's some screen brightness okay so that's a little bit better but I still feel like we have some kind of an issue internally with this thing because of that there's not there's not a whole lot of other adjustments you can make to this that's going to fix that at all I'm just adjusting the brightness on the flyback a little bit here and then I'm going to address the convergence try to get it lined up but you see we still got a tent something's not exactly correct on here but you do have that's how you make the adjustments so you could have a number value on there if you have a if you're making an adjustment on this monitor but if you're having trouble where it's not completely getting right like let's look at a different screen you might be able to see what I'm saying it's just a little bit too bright and so we got the screen sub brightness just too high so there's a sub bright potentiometer that's not that's our color and then our brightness is working but again see I can't get the colors just not perfect it's just not there's not enough something in there it's just not it's not if I get it and I get too much red out or too much green in it so but you can see how tedious it is because there's no exact there's a factory default setting for some of these monitors but not all of them and if a color starts to go bad you might either have to do a capacitor replacement on your control your color control board or your neck board or it might be problem with your tube where you're actually losing a color on your tube and then things can really look wacky see to me it looks like we're not getting enough of certain color here and I'm feeling like it might be the green because the green controls aren't as aren't as robust as the others it's a green control I'm turning and it's not really making much of a difference but you can get it better you can get it usable but you can also see just you know you can't just this one's just not going to get there I don't think well I hope that that kind of explains a little bit more I do know it's still a big tricky thing get into colors you've got to try to take advantage of the color temperature settings that your monitor has where it'll say 9300 or 6400 on a color temperature setting if that's possible use that to test and see if your screen looks good as far as the color is concerned otherwise you have to get in and try to mess with the gains and the biases are cut off potentiometers less changes and so again the best screens to use for that are going to be solid colors let's go ahead and look at those solid color screens one more time just to see what we're looking at see I'm still not getting a good white screen black swine red's not looking and see the green again there's something going on here with that green because green should not be white like that it should be green so I'm not quite sure what's going on with that green it's showing me that there's maybe no green coming through because see like that's very minimal that should have a huge impact on that and that doesn't either this is just interesting so that's what I think I think this tube might have lost its green color because nothing adjusts that to make the green look any better so that's a good way for you to be able to test what colors aren't working right because look the rest of the colors do show up blue that's white black whatever I mean red will show up if I turn the red up I know that because we've had already all kinds of reds today so there we go now let's try this again let's see see there's that green it's just not green and then that makes everything else not work right so we're not getting a good white screen because we're only getting blue red shot through there probably so if you see something like this then you can tell hey I've got a deeper issue where it's not just a color problem but it's actually a problem with one of my whole color lines it's out of the colors and I'm coming through the tube or there's a problem on my board so but that's a good example of how to trouble shoot through that color there's no exact rocket science here it's all about adjustment patience and just keeping with it I'll probably do more discussions on color because it's just such a complicated subject I hope that this is at least helps you understand a little bit more I have a video that I made a couple months ago going through some of the menus and on not this monitor but the 1953 MD which worked for 20 m2 or anyone around that era that has that first sub menu I went through and showed all the color settings on there so I'll leave a link to that at the bottom here but again if you did find something helpful in this please let me know and please leave a like I appreciate you spending time looking at this a little bit more in thorough depth with me have a great day and thanks for watching retro tech