 Here's something you certainly don't see every day. A 32 inch Sony PVM. What we have here is a PVM 30 230. Looks like this one is from June of 1996, which is actually one of the later years this would have been made. Now this was sent to me because it doesn't work and has a problem with vertical line collapse. Before I even turn it on I'm gonna remove the back shell and we're gonna take a look inside. As you can tell it's been sitting here a while. Now that the shielding and back plate is off, I'll show you around here inside this 32 inch PVM. Looking down from the top. There's a lot of room in this one so it's good to be able to work on it, but you'll also notice that a lot of circuit boards, lots of circuit boards, and we're not interested in this board or this board or probably this board for the complaints on the problems. Also probably not this board. If we actually have a problem with the vertical line collapse, maybe a vertical out circuit has a problem or maybe it's down here in the vertical size. Maybe that's more likely the problem. Maybe a capacitor is out or this set is so old. These potentiometers can go bad. Heck, hopefully not this chip, but what we can do is obviously now we've got it opened up. I've checked everything out. Looks good inside. There's a bunch of test points on this board so we'll open it up, test it, see if the video comes on at all. If it doesn't then I'm gonna hook my ground wire here on my multimeter and there's other test points in this voltage or in this vertical path in here where I can test my voltage. Right here I could test for a DC voltage of minus 16 volts. There's plus 16 volts. Those are both in the vertical circuit. There's plus 5 volts. So we'll see if we get voltage on those. Should be able to turn the power on here. All that sounds normal. I'm not using analog RGB. I'm using line A. Oh yeah, we got something going on. See the, is that like an image down there? Looks like possibly. Let's see. If I press start that should change then. Yeah, see it's, there's something down there. It's just the image is all the way down at the bottom. Alright, we're about to run the checks here. I have to have the power turned on to the set. You can see it's still on there. We're gonna, we've got the ground hooked up over here and now we're gonna test the voltages with my Fluke voltmeter. Alright, let's probe some of this stuff. I'm probing the minus 16 volts. We're getting stable negative 15.67 so that's with intolerance. That seems okay. Let's check the five volt line which is right here and see what we read here. Oh, 666. Oh wow, so that's definitely not good. Supposed to be five volts. We're at negative 666. So we have a cursed, cursed deflection board here. Let's see what plus 16 does. Plus 16. Wow, see it says plus 16 minus 1.66. Awesome. So definitely have some issues in this board. Maybe capacitors are bad and maybe voltage regulators have gone bad. There is one over there. Maybe one of those that regulates five volts is no good. We'll have to pull those in C and we'll have to pull this D2 board. I'm down here in the lab looking at this D2 board and my process here is I'm looking at, well there's two regulators, voltage regulators right here. This one says, let's see, that one down there says 78 MO5. So I believe that's just a 7805. Now this one right here is different so let it trick you. Looks like it says 79.05. So I'm going to research that. That's probably just a different voltage amount. Maybe that's why the negative voltage is off. Hopefully one of these ICs does not have an issue because those are going to be harder to find. But if we have a problem with that or one of these potentiometers that should be taken care of pretty easily, I'm also going to go ahead and replace the capacitors in here after I test that and I'll reflow solder because, let's see, I did notice that the solder on this regulator, this five volt regulator, actually looks a bit dodgy. Check it in that. See that? Look at that center rail. Definitely is, I mean the issue could be something as simple as that. Now I've rebuilt this entire board. Well, as far as capacitors go, every one of those has been replaced with an upgrade cap and then I reflowed solder on the entire board there. And hopefully if we're lucky, that'll eliminate the problem. It might not be the only issue. I also pulled both of these regulators and tested that they weren't shorted out of circuit. So they were not shorted. But what we're going to need to do is we'll have to do some further testing if we get this in and it doesn't work because we still have to see if those are actually putting out the right voltage. And there still could be an issue possibly with the potentiometers. But the easiest thing would just be go throw this back in the PVM and test it out. Well, unfortunately, it's just not wanting to improve our situation at all. I've trouble shot this more. I've got all the proper voltage coming into this board, but I can't get these places powered up with the proper voltage from the DC. Everything has been changed as far as capacitor solder. I changed even the potentiometers here on vertical size and vertical center. I changed voltage regulators. I'm going to go and pull this and check some of these resistors out and I don't have any of these other chips. This board may just have a bad chip on here and that would be unfortunate, but it's possible. Well, thankfully our persistence has paid off. I went through and tested all the resistors that were elevated. And believe it or not, I found that this resistor right here, R2558, was reading bad and I replaced it. It was reading just no readings. I replaced it and I'm going to tell you I went ahead and powered it on, but check it out. I can't believe we finally may have our solution, right? Let's see. Check it out. Look at that. We have a full video screen here. I hooked RGB up and wow, look at it. It was just that resistor right there was failed. And what that does is so the 16 volts comes in from the power supply through this cable connection point right here and that's the first resistor to hit the 16 volts. It was just fried. So the 16 volt comes in there and then it hits the voltage regulator and send it off 5 volts to the rest of the board. So that was our issue. And wow, look at that thing. We've got a 32 inch CRT that is now working. PVM. How awesome is that? All right, one of the great things about rebuilding this board is we're getting fresh ability to do convergence adjustments over on this side. And then we have linearity adjustments up here and other geometry adjustments. And so everything is isolated to this board except for one thing. And that is the potentiometer for horizontal side or center. Sorry, that's all the way up here on this board on this other deflection board D one. Everything else that you'll need is down in this area. And the funny thing is, is if you look at this, this is going to be for your convergence on the edges. So this can this specifically has edge convergence controls. And like this is the top left corner, this is the top right top center, blah, blah, blah. And this is just giving the yoke hopefully an extra chance to clear up some of the corners. But unfortunately, if you look inside, the thing that kind of is not so great is the actual yoke itself. It's got a great design, but it's just not powerful enough to really take advantage of all these awesome controls. And I'll show you what I mean. When I break down the monoscope pattern that I'm about to show you here, we'll be working through our team use 240p test suite. And I'm using the PC engine today. And I'm going to show you some patterns that are going to show kind of the drawbacks and disadvantages I found to this to because like the best part about this is obviously its size, the inputs, the high resolution picture, the fat scan lines, and things like that. But there are some drawbacks. Now the first thing I do want you to notice is there are two bands, which actually I can see much better on the recording than I can on in real life. And as cold noses around back in the background, anyway, those bands, I've not found anything that would get rid of those bands, I believe those are the shadows from the wire that holds the aperture grill in place on the front of the tube. And those can generally be in different places on a tube. A lot of times they'll be like right in this area. But this tube is so large that it probably had to have two in the middle. And this is, again, a 30 year old tube. So anyway, if anybody wants to contest that theory, I'm sure others have theories on that line. But from my experience, that's what I'm seeing here. Now let's get into some test patterns. Well, here's this amazing monoscope pattern for the PC engine. And this is an example of kind of stretching this CRT to the most you can really do on this deflection yoke. If you expand this and try to go farther out, expand this horizontally, then what happens is your side here gets incredibly distorted and wonky on this because the yoke does not have enough power to really push and make everything precise up here in the corners. Now you do have the extra hardware that's on the yoke and that's on that deflection board we serviced. So we're able to use that to correct it as good as it looks now. But there's that limitation where the side of this tube, I mean, this is an over, it's like 30 year old technology. But you can see even after fully adjustments, you can't, you can't be too nitpicky the corners here, you got a vertical convergence issue just in this corner. And again, that's even after clearing everything up with the extra convergence controls, I even attempted to add a additional strip, a magnetic strip, and that was making things worse. Anyway, you're going to notice there's edges of the screen that may have this one we have over here is blue a little bit, right? Pretty easy to see when you get really close up down there. And I mean, it's just not going to be able to push that beam to perfection out in these corners. But everything else looks really nice, right? High resolution picture, the center of the screen is nice and converged and has a really sharp image. So that's a little bit of a breakdown here. You know, you want to make sure that you can adjust the linearity as best as possible. You want the lines to be the same length on this so that you have the correct aspect ratio on the screen. But this screen will tend to have some just unused area or real estate over in these areas, because again, you cannot push the image all the way to the edge. Anyway, that's a quick rundown on this beautiful picture. Let's look at some other stuff and you can see this actually in action. Well, everybody, I really appreciate you checking out this PVM with me. It's a rare opportunity to see these in about the last seven years. This is only the second 30 to 30 I've had in the shop. I mean, I was able to save both of them and get them to where they can be actually enjoyed again and used in the homes of their collectors. But this is pretty much the image quality you'd come to expect right here from this monitor. I mean, this is again, PC Engine and we've got the legendary axe just running. And I mean, if you just want to enjoy a game on this thing, it is. I mean, it's a great experience, right? Light guns on this. It's an incredible showpiece for the center of any retro setup, large enough to play GoldenEye with your friends or just to sit back and enjoy a good old game of the eight to 16 bit era. And you can also use this for 480i and it will look great for movie playback. It might look even better for movie playback than just the way it does for gaming here. But I for one just really like to enjoy these things for what they are. And that's an amazing piece of hardware that Sony made back in the early nineties and ultimately was able to perfect in later models. And it's just a testament to the quality and craftsmanship of this device that we can even keep it running and get it darned probably close to what it looked like when it came from the showroom floor. All right, I'd like to say thank you very much for watching today's video and especially for being subscribed to this channel and being interested in this kind of work and saving these old machines. Because really if we don't have any kind of connection to these machines or desire to save them, they would probably just end up being in the landfill at this point. Now, if you'd like to connect with me or other CRT folks, then please do consider checking out the link in the description of this video that will be to my Patreon page. That is also how people get their CRTs serviced and repaired like in the video you saw today about the PVM 30 230. Anyway, thank you again. I look forward to bringing you more content here in the future and I will see you next time with some more retro content.