 Hey everybody welcome back to Data Retro Tech. I've got a lovely set of Sony PVM and CVM CRTs here with me that we're going to be looking at today and the main monitor we're going to be going over is this Sony PVM1271Q here in North America. There's also another equivalent to this that's in other regions and it is the PVM1371QM model monitor. Today we're going to go through some of the unique features on this actual CRT and also we need to first say thank you to Alex who was kind enough to drop by my shop in Tennessee last summer in the summer of 2021 and drop off both these monitors as donations for us to look at closer and according to him this RGB monitor is operational and works fine. I've honestly never tried it so today we'll get in and finally look at both these monitors. I'm sorry for the delay Alex but we do appreciate your contribution to the channel and the show here especially in the form of these donations so we can all take a look at first off let's talk a little bit about this 1271Q 1371QM this does feature a high resolution tube it's a 13 inch display area first off you'll see a layer on front of the tube this is actually tempered glass it's not plastic and that's again a protection measure we'll take a closer look at that when we look at some of the buttons and setup on this monitor but just notice that first off the tube it is advertised in the Sony manual as being different it says in the manual that in composite video mode it will go up to 550 TV lines of resolution but if you go up into RGB mode it says 600 lines and then it even says another page in the marketing says 650 TV lines so I'm not sure the exact line count on there could be 600 could be 650 depending on how the hardware winds up and works it also supports multiple broadcasting standards in the form of in both NTSC's PAL and CCAM and one of the unique older features on this monitor is the automatic frequency control which is controlled with a button down here it says fast and slow mode according to Sony the incoming sync timing error compensation speed can be set to fast or slow this can assist in monitoring jitters from a videotape recorder and the normal mode is when it's set to fast mode so normally unless you're trying to test your sync problems with a specific videotape recorder you would leave this in fast mode now as far as the size on this CRT goes it does weigh about 32 pounds and that translate to 14 and a half kilograms so again we've got the PVM right here which is the 1271Q and then over here is the CVM and if we just look at the front of these a little bit closer we can go through some of the differences on just the front of the monitors again here's our PVM and CVM monitors on the right hand side we've got our PVM 1271Q and the difference here first off this one has the nice swing down door still installed and this one does not now this one again is a color video monitor and you'll really notice a difference when we look at the inputs but obviously first off we've got a different build out and buttons and the reason being is the professional video monitor over on the right has more support for different higher resolution inputs and for color correction and other video editing modes this particular monitor we're looking at actually did come from a TV station it's still got a tag here for FKTV I'm not quite sure what that means but I do know that this one was in Texas so if anybody knows what FKTV is or watched FKTV this may be a monitor that was used in the mid 1980s this one does have a display down here in the corner and so does the other but this will display what line we are using what our format is on video whether that's PAL, CCAM, NTSC or NTSC 4.43 and then we've got our switches down here this will let us go into CCAM you have to do that manually if you have a CCAM item and then we just have our vertical hold adjustment in case we have vertical scrolling problems we have a volume potentiometer and then we have a hue color brightness and picture adjustment pretty standard for a TV or PVM during this time period we do have a scan mode so we can have a normal screen and then we can understand this picture just a bit and then we've got again our switch over here for our timing on that frequency control switch and then a power button over on the right hand side by comparison here if we look over at the CVM just for a minute we can take a closer look at what's under the button tray you'll notice a number pad over here this is for changing our channels we can change channels on here this has a UHF and VHF tuner in it so you get tv input for regular tuner vtr for videotape recorder and line so you're just going to have composite video input rf and then vtr and we've got some picture controls same thing color hue picture brightness sub volume where we had our normal volume potentiometer we actually have a sub volume right here and then we've got our regular volume controls up and down over here now if we do take a closer look at our bezel this tempered glass is meant to be a protective layer but if we look closely we will see that there's actually another sony emblem behind there so if this first layer was scratched or broken or damaged all you would need is a flathead screwdriver over here and you could unscrew these screws on this and actually remove this tempered glass plate and sony even had an adhesive that they put this emblem on and behind it you can see another emblem on the actual case plastic of the bezel so that you wouldn't lose your emblem if you did take it off it's kind of funny too on this one it's a little crooked so they didn't even install this overlay correctly because you could see the one behind it it's kind of leaning a little bit downwards if we swing this crt around and take a look at the backside of it you'll notice some familiar inputs of course this is going to be a b and c style monitor and so up top we've got our two video inputs line a and line b with a b and c connector and then if you'll notice right under those connections we've got switches built in for termination and 75 ohm terminators so if you had these switched on they are going to automatically be terminating 75 ohms and you can turn them off and then it won't have any termination and you could daisy chain out on these normally now the issue with this particular monitor is these these switches will not will not budge and this even is a little wiggly up here now not all of them are wiggly like that but just those are wiggly this one's just been not kept and cleaned in service i don't know if it's ever been serviced so it's going to be interesting to open this one up so we have audio input and outputs also on here and that's another thing we've got like a build up inside these outputs on the audio where it's got either rust or maybe some kind of bug got in there and formed a cocoon or a nest and this is our rgb and then this one comes with a computer input also similar to like the 2030 or any of the 30 series 31 series crt pvms you might find a computer input like this for rgb so we've got the computer input and then we've got our bnc style inputs also for rgb and external sync and we're in the same situation here we've got these switches will not budge i've tried to move them even i'm afraid i'm going to break them off if i try so we're going to have to add terminators to some of them where the termination's not turned on and then that should be what looks like to be the sync the blue and the red and the green actually has the terminator turned on so we probably shouldn't put a terminator in there and the other things on the back of this monitor first off i do think that there's been some servicing at some point done to this it has an internal power cable and this one looks to be newer or different than a standard power cable from 1983 it wouldn't have that tag on it more than likely so that's something that proves this maybe has been opened before and worked on and we do have some small holes here where you could insert a screwdriver and adjust your drives for red green and blue and also probably the biases for those also can be adjusted with the screwdriver right there you've got six potentiometers that can control your color the last thing i will mention here is this was made by sony obviously in japan in march of 1983 so this monitor is actually older than i am uh let's go ahead now we'll fire it up we'll get some video going into this and we'll see how this rgb input looks 38 years later i've got my rgb cables set up here and we have rgb in and then as i said i had to put the terminators here on the red not on the green since it's switched on we'll try it without if i have to add it we can blue has a termination so does external sync and then i did adapt my sound into this and hopefully we will get some sound out of the speaker but i'm not positive those inputs and outputs on the audio are going to work now let's test this out i do have a sega genesis with the triple bypass mod in it we're on line b right now let's switch over to our rgb make sure we got internal sync turned off it's on external sync oh so we do have picture coming up here it does look a little bit dark all right first things first let's turn on our 240 piece test suite and take a look around a little bit that's our under scan mode that's our normal mode interesting okay computer doesn't do anything the hold yep that's working let's see if we turn yeah we do have some picture controls obviously this thing needs to be calibrated but we can tune the brightness up and stuff it doesn't look that bad to be honest with you it looks pretty sharp you know the screen doesn't look completely awful considering it's from the early 80s but we obviously have some adjustments we can make we need to move it over a little bit we need to fix our aspect ratio we need to stretch this vertically a good amount and then we may even need to check our static convergence i think that looks like it's blooming out a little bit if i zoom in a little bit more let me turn that down maybe you can see kind of what i'm talking about down here you see how we have red and green and blue separation here along the side and that actually goes in towards the center i can still see that separation towards the center so we can make a horizontal static convergence adjustment to this we're going to open this up now we're going to remove the shell turn it off and then we'll look at some of the internals on it and see how they look this monitor normally has a total of eight screws in it and they are in some discreet spots first off there are four on the back that are pretty easy to see around the input board and then there are two on the bottom which i'll show you have to lean this whole thing up and get to these there down here i'll show you those closer in a second and then the other discreet ones are up here in the handles there's a screw right here on each side so just remember you do need to remove all eight of those to get this shell off all right let's take a look inside here and see what we've actually got going on and this is a familiar sight from the 2530 we saw that we'd had this same style of resistor kind of assembly here in the flyback and this one has it split out even more where you've got the probably resistor in here and here it's a two piece rather than a single piece and this can be spun to change our horizontal static convergence and we had discussed so we'll try that out here in a second let's take a look at the it's just covered in a layer of little funk black dust dark dust looked down in there in the main board you get all the build up in between the components we should definitely clean this thing up probably fold this assembly and clean it and over here first off i guess we could take a quick look at this input board it's got this plastic covering telling you what's going on on the outside and what the inputs are but if we look inside that's the physical input board and the circuit board and it does probably some maybe video processing on this board too that's what i'm going to assume just by looking at this because these are picture control stuff it's not the potentiometer is down here like this is a sub bright control over here and then we've got sub contrast sub color so this is the video board and the input board kind of together i'm going to assume that on this monitor this is pretty much our deflection block down in here our high voltage and deflection block and then over here it's probably the power supply that's over here on the side and it's covered in this protective shell isolated kind of and then down here we've got kind of a daughter deflection two board let's see what we can control in here i don't know if those are marked or not but there's two potentiometers right here that i'm not sure what they adjust let's see if we can look deep down in there and see any of the adjustment potentiometers i'm sure there's something down in there to adjust our deflection probably way down in there somewhere i'm not entirely certain again this is my first time actually working on one of these older style monitors i don't see any real potentiometers in there to adjust there's another a couple adjustments here and obviously before i just spin these since they're not clearly marked we will get in here we will get into our service manual and see what each of them says to do and how to make adjustments for things and again it's probably those four hopefully it's these one two three four five that we can make our main adjustments off of and then we've also got focus g2 screen color and then hstat we can control up there this is an odd one look i don't see look at this designed by sonny no no like convergence rings i mean that's a set of what i'd guess to be purity rings and i wonder if this one's just missing it or if it was a design to try to set a standard and not have different rings but that's kind of interesting doesn't look like the rings fell out there's a lot going on in that yoke pretty powerful yoke right there and i'm not even sure what this that's an interesting one too i've not seen that design from sonny on the yokes so a lot going on in here a lot packed in here got a conversion strip that probably needs to be reset there's a purity magnet just a lot of cleaning that needs to be done let's consult our manual and then we'll come back and hopefully figure out what our adjustments are able to what adjustments we're able to easily make with this stuff all right folks here's our monoscope pattern again we're going to try some adjustments but i will have to warn you i went and looked through the entire published manual online for this and it looks like this particular manual is missing for some reason the deflection block not only pcb breakdown but it's also mixing recommendations on how to make deflection board adjustments it's just not in there there are convergence control adjustment methods as well as white balance methods but not much else so we're going to go ahead and just spin these potentiometers and see what happens normally i wouldn't recommend this but since we've got this donated to us and we're going to use it for the name of science we should go ahead and do that just so that everyone else will know what these controls do the first one i'm going to spin is going to be the one closest to the back of the monitor it's a white potentiometer and let's see if spinning this one actually does anything if it does not then i'm going to try to leave it in its normal position that way we're not going to cause any voltage issues in case it does control something like a voltage and i'm not seeing any anything really happen on that let's try the one right next to it the second one yeah again nothing really so we're going to leave those two potentiometers in their normal positions and then we've got another little one right down here that we'll try to spin if i can get it down in there it looks like i might have to get a different attachment for that but i'm not getting really any adjustments that i'm looking for the next thing we've got is closer to the monitor there we go look at that so we've got a horizontal adjustment there that's actually good to note so we'll show you which one i'm looking and spinning in here right now so hopefully we can get kind of our orientation on our screen centered and maybe this one next to it will help us with our vertical i'm not certain let's have to see yeah so we can get that centered but we don't have a size potentiometer control on here to help with our size let me see if i can find anything on here that will help us with their size maybe it's this last one that i'm not able to get into and now that one's not not giving us any real reaction either so i've got these two but i'm not really certain why i'm not seeing any other controls maybe they're behind behind this uh board here and we need to take a look at it i'm not i'm not completely certain i've decided to flip this down in its face so i could get a closer look at the bottom side of the board and see what some of these potentiometers actually match up to according to the board here we've got afc down here by this potentiometer and that should be our frequency control we talked about so that's not going to give us probably any help for vertical and then the other one over here is an arrow from this h frequency that's another one we horizontal frequency we really don't want to mess with that it's not going to give us anything vertically so the only one i see is there's another one up here uh behind some of this stuff right down in there and hopefully that will give us a vertical control i'm not sure it's unmarked from what i can tell but it's over here all right i'm going to put my glove on and attempt to spin this last potentiometer i found and this is really really unfortunate that there's not a whole lot of documentation on here but we are going to spend this and hopefully we will get an expansion or the monitor might turn off i don't know i'm going to just turn this thing off and now i'm going to spend the potentiometer with the monitor powered off we'll turn it back on and see if there's any difference i'm not going to get down here and electrocute myself just to be seeing what this silly monitor does when you turn a potentiometer and this is a problem we're going to run into folks with a lot of these old devices where the documentation is just terrible on them and unfortunately we're taking it for granted because like this one we think we have a published manual yet yet we don't really so we're going to go and spin it a little bit and see what happens let's just see what happens this could fry the whole thing put the current wrong but i doubt it we'll see still powering on see if we notice our vertical size get any change uh not really not really at all is it i'm not even sure what that potentiometer does or is supposed to do it could be dead could not be dead again the other ones do not say that there's one more potentiometer up there good grief and it's damn near impossible to reach i don't understand who designed this thing but something tells me they didn't work for sony very long after making this one all right um we damn it we'll just jump in there we'll try that last potentiometer it's something that i'm obviously going to have to do while it's turned off because it is way up in there let's try it and see what happens turn the power off and we'll get back in here and again if these work or do anything i will definitely get in here and show you what i'm spinning on the board and we'll see this one i mean this one is like way up here i don't even know if i can show you it barely with the camera all right we'll do crank like that to the right and see if that does anything still not noticing really any changes let's turn it off turn that one to the left so we just turn it to the right so now we'll go back try to swing it the other direction and see if we get anywhere goodness this is this can't be the right stuff because nothing should be this difficult to adjust your service i've never seen anything like that so i wouldn't imagine i wouldn't imagine we're doing the right thing here huh well maybe we are look at that that's a way bigger one holy crap all right let me try to let me try to expand that a little more because if it's going to the left and it's getting bigger then it might be the right one well we're definitely better it looks like maybe we're just going to be stuck at that for maximum screen size just which is possible and now i'll just attempt to spin this down in here and again maybe we could spin that while it's running and see if there's any kind of reaction while i'm doing that hell can't get that in there to spin it this is one of the most awkward spots i've ever seen and i don't want to damage something else or you know that's it though look and that's as that's as big as we can get it that's kind of sad i was doing one last inspection i found three more potentiometers in this side here and it's very awkward to get to them and i do need a flashlight however i wanted to show you if i if we get in here and adjust these will it do anything i think we might have actually found what i needed to basically adjust there was something adjusts the size and stuff it's again these are very awkward i'll show you the method i'm using to get down in here and actually adjust them but for the most part this might be done with oh look at there this might be done with this board basically moved out of the way our input boards but that definitely caused our size to expand a lot so let's go down so that's our size expander right there i'll show you which one it is it's the closest one to us it's a white potentiometer at a 90 degree angle and i'll show you which one it is that's our vertical let's see what the one behind it does so what i can do is adjust these and then i can adjust the potentiometer on the other side to get us back to center but here's the second potentiometer let me see make sure i'm actually spinning it i am and that one doesn't seem to be doing anything and that's where it was originally so i'm not seeing much of any adjustment from that one but i definitely see from that other adjustment that we've got our vertical size set i don't know about horizontal size though what about this one got one more potentiometer over here let's see if anything happens when we spin it at all this is the closest one to us so if it controls the size horizontally then we would be in good shape again i don't know what sony was thinking trying to make these they must have made like specialty curved tools to be able to do this or they had a complete crazy process to get in here and adjust this stuff this is not easy to adjust but at least it is adjustable so we did find where we could adjust and let's see if that does anything i do not know i'm spinning that one i'm not really getting anything either so but the good news is we found that vertical size adjustment vertical center so i'm gonna let's see take this down maybe like that that it's pretty much center on our picture well sony definitely made an oddball here with this early pro video monitor however since we've found the controls that help us at least expand the vertical and horizontal size on the screen it's actually going to make it pretty useful it does have a good sharp image on rgb and again it is very limited though because it doesn't have all those extra things that you will have in later models of pvms to help you adjust things like pin cushion settings and linearity and other you know tweaking of the fine-tunement in the corners for your pvm or bvm this one doesn't have all that but it does produce a pretty good image for something from 1983 i don't know how much i would recommend this monitor to anybody unless you're just getting a killer good deal on it because again it is so difficult to adjust and as you saw in here we do have vertical controls on this side we have vertical controls on this side now the ones on this side are very easy to get to but over here it's just like a mess of hidden wires and stuff to get through to actually access those adjustment potentiometers and i'm still wondering if one of them doesn't adjust horizontal size maybe something else is for linearity or a pin cushion and those pots or the actual caps around them are maybe dried up so this is one that you definitely have to have service it would cost a lot of money to service this one because again this one has caps that are almost 40 years old in it so a full recap on something like this is going to be a lot of work and a lot of labor and then you have to factor in a lot of a time spent professionally adjusting it so it's going to be kind of one of those CRTs that if you just get and want to like practice and learn skills on it would be perfect for that and otherwise i would just keep it as maybe one to put into your collection but not one to use day to day it's not going to have as good a performance as later models but it's still a pvm still does rgb right out of the box and can look pretty good so what i'm going to do now is i'm going to finish up the video i'll show you some things on rgb on the screen and if you have any questions about this pvm please leave those in the comments below thanks again for watching everybody i'll see you all next time with some more retro content