 Hello again everyone welcome to another episode of Retro Tech. Today I'll be looking at the 20L5 Sony PBM and going over specifically how to calibrate geometry on this monitor. Before I did that though I wanted to give a very thankful and special shout-out to my friend David Crowe. David did a fantastic job for me. I didn't ask him to do this but he made this fabulous background for my SD to SNES and it has my awesome logo on there. I love it and he emailed that to me today and I said man that's perfect timing because I wanted to throw it up here today on this video. We're gonna go through this monitor and we're gonna go ahead and calibrate it. So the first thing I want to do is pull up my calibration software or my screen generator whatever you use to help you calibrate. Now as I said in the past the 240p test suite is perfect for calibrating these monitors under most situations and the reason being is 240p has much more let's see well the way I want to put this let's see whenever you do something on 240p it just translates better in 480i. So 480i is a little bit more forgiving so whenever you get something set up for 240p it's gonna look you know you can't it's harder to calibrate something up to 480i because of the screen flicker or this you have a solid screen and so the best thing to do is to use something that can give you that 240p signal and that way you can use that to calibrate. Now something else people have been asking about is other things besides this you can use anything you want to calibrate really as long as it shows you a solid picture that you can go from and make adjustments to and see because if you don't you need something but you don't have to use this if you don't have it but this is just easier to use or even a DVD of some sort that generates these kind of patterns but again I don't know of one that will do it in a 240p only resolution most likely they'll put it out at 480i or 480p or something else so again use whatever you have convenient I recommend this for the Super Nintendo again so I've got my pattern here pulled up which is my great pattern again so let's take a look at what I'm gonna be doing here and what I want to do on this monitor first off this monitor has the control button over here that we've talked about in the past I'm going to press that first so I need to access my menu so that should be done by pressing the menu button first and pulling up our menu and then hitting the degauss button and enter simultaneously brings up our submenu it's very hard to see the submenu on this screen so as I said we can get to the screen up and you see here is our first thing says signal so we're not working on color today not on this monitor there is some tools you can use to actually color coordinate there or calibrate this on its own pretty much it's like a auto calibration but I don't have those tools but what we are going to do is use our up and down buttons here and we're going to look at something else we're going to look at our deflection okay so we've got our deflection stuff here we've got our horizontal raster and our vertical raster and I know we've talked about this many times before and I've gone through this but the raster horizontally so let's start with the horizontal raster we've got our H size our H center and then these left and right black black black right and then horizontal position and then these two things sub left and sub right so on this menu for our geometry we can pretty much eliminate most of these things where we're only going to be concerned with trying to use this horizontal size and this horizontal center most of the time and if our center is not helping us get to where we want we could try this position setting to get us and this is going to shift our whole screen left and right the way I calibrate my TVs I do not try to worry about getting that line directly on the edge of that screen I want to go and get that line a little bit outside of this viewing area so I want to have my calibrated screen at the end of the day I want it to be larger than the actual pictured area so all those imperfections along the sideline of and the top of the picture area I want that whole scan lined or you know picture resolution I want that whole part basically chopped out so I don't have to look at it I just prefer to see as much of the screen as possible and it's the best way to do that it's just slightly over scan your picture so think about that at the end of the day when you're using a horizontal size and centering and the grid is perfect for that that's what we're going to worry about horizontal again horizontal size horizontal center and horizontal position okay so there's another one down here for vertical same thing here vertical size of vertical center so again we're not worried about these settings we just need to consider vertical center and vertical size and it's the same thing as before we'll try to slightly over scan that picture and we'll have we use the grid to do that and what I'm going to do is since you won't be able to see these settings I'll try to tell you what setting I'm on when I have the grid pulled up and then we'll run through and we'll shuffle some settings and show you how it works because not only are you going to try to calibrate this thing but you're going to want to put a little bit of time into just testing all the different settings that you use to make sure that your capacitors are working inside the monitor and that way they're actually making an effect on your screen and working properly and you'll be able to notice it because you can't hurt the screen by just using it and scrolling through the settings and making expanded and even if it's not correct you'll you're going to want to test that so you can get it back to a good screen so again I'm sorry to just sit here and have a boring boring boring screen for you but right now it's just some things we got to run through so down again and menu and then the next thing is the geometry and again we've got vertical linearity we got to we got a s linearity and a c linearity so this monitor again has two linearity settings we can change our trapezoid our pin cushion settings which is these four pin cushions pin cushion settings and then this pair of control this is all our corners and our screen size wonkiness this is all the settings we're going to use every single one of these to sharpen up the linearity as well as the corner geometry as best as we can thankfully this kind of a monitor really does not need to be opened up to be serviced if you're just trying to get a geometry fix or setting put in place and then the rest of the settings at this point should be not part of this example for today so ahead and do some horizontal stuff which is pretty self-explanatory again you're not going to hurt anything by doing this so you know if I just press that setting expand it out and then I'm going to just go down just to make sure that it's working properly and you kind of see your corners better now while I'm working on the calibration today I'm going to actually under scan it slightly so I can see those lines on the side so this is actually where I'm going to set it for today and then I hit enter and it writes that setting if I don't want it to enter and hit the setting hit menu and go back and it'll take you back to that same setting and it'll leave it on whatever it was before you made that adjustment so you can't lose your adjustment just hit menu and go back and start over if you're concerned about that thing always remember you know if you want to what number you're starting with so let's go ahead down and go down to horizontal center and we'll see about moving that up and down a little bit see if you can see that see you can just hold those buttons down and let the guy slide across the screen nicely you can see you got no problem so again I've got some space on both sides which is optimal for this test when I hit enter and go back to the screen writing that and that's all I need for the horizontal you know there's all those kinds of things we're not going to touch those rest of the settings for this test let's go to the rest of vertical vertical size now we're in the vertical deflection so you can see the size go up and then it comes down and so again I'm gonna try to get that lined up to where I can see the red and a slight bit of black on there hit enter to right I'm gonna go down to the center setting and then I'm gonna go up out of the way and then I'm gonna come back down and get it right where I want it so I can see everything and make my adjustments and that we're done with this and again when I'm done with this the last thing I'll do is I'll expand that out so the geometry settings are going to be pretty much the same way you can start with whatever you want it depends how you skip your screen looks to go to the linearity test though I recommend coming down and pulling up these kind of circles because the area is going to show you really get the best option so I'm on 15 right now in this first one and let's just hold that button up and see if you can see how those circles kind of move a little bit there we go see how they spanned out and the goal of this is to actually get circles here not just so I'm gonna leave it on 15 but we're gonna go and try the other one we're looking to make these as round as possible we're not trying to have any oval shapes so you can kind of see if I go up and down there it makes them oval so those tough ones are really nice and round so we'll have to try to use the other settings so you go back and forth on these two and try to get your stuff rounder see I feel like that's a little bit better I feel like if I go up on that it makes those circles a little wonky so that helps some okay those are your two linearity settings you need to do those together to make your circles come back so the next thing is the trapezoid setting on here it's the third one down let's go ahead and get into it hopefully we can get something going with it real quickly let's go back always do the grids for these that's the bigger grid but the smaller grid I want you to be able to see this again this is the trapezoid setting so I'm gonna just scroll up on this and you can see what it's doing it's making the tops and bottoms go back and forth proportionally so you're gonna want to try to just line that up as best you can I was on 27 originally but I didn't really like that setting so let's try 22 and that's it for the trapezoids that that does that access lane that you can do like that you're just trying to get this thing it could take hours of doing this just just trying each combination of moving around things so you get it exactly the way you want it there's no magic formula and generally speaking any kind of menu settings that were factory set will not be much of a help at this point because we're looking at a monitor that needs and somebody asked me about that if they thought the factory settings would help and it's a good starting place but you're generally gonna have to move and change your settings there so again that's side pin and I didn't like that let's go back up on that a little bit so you could see how you you just hit that it goes out and again this these this monitor has really good controls over the deflection okay and I've already can tell here that something's not looking that great but you see how this next one right under it actually controls the next spot so sometimes what you got to do is try to get everything even if it's curved a little bit kind of on a same curve because then you can change the overall whole whole pin cushion setting and change the whole screen so it's really gonna be hard to do this and not run out of time on my video but so I'm not gonna sit here and try to make it perfect on this video I will do this without the video on and get it cleaned up but I just want to make sure everybody kind of understands how this works so they can try this at home because even though mine might look this way I it could take me hours or you know not it probably won't take me out more than an hour total at best or worst to fix this to the way I really like it but you can kind of see just you know hey that makes the thing the screen that shifts your top so if you have a top that's shifted over and that helps straighten that out so that's one way to do that that's the side pin BAL okay para control this is the second to last setting on the monitor and let's see that that's the screen lane so you could see the diagonal screen lane on there now this is not this can't if you have a yoke problem this won't help you this is just if your lines don't look straight on your screen now I can tell that this thing I've kind of gotten it maybe a little worse than it actually was when I started as far as the side controls so please don't you know I'll come back later and show you this when it's fixed up but for now I want you to understand how these settings work and again like I just hit menu there and go back and it'll take you back to the old control or what adult settings so the very last thing is the side pin another side pin and I'll just scroll in that on that and you can see again this thing gives you an incredible amount of control over the side pins where in other monitors you might have just been able to control just the corners but on this later end monitor they actually made it where you had one two three four many of four different settings to control something that was only controlled by one setting and prior monitors so that's why this thing is a lot better than the older monitors and the 20L2 any of the L series will have the same menu set up so the techniques will work for that monitor as well and even though it doesn't have the same line count and even though it doesn't take the same multi-format signals all the way up to 1080 like this one does and only goes with the 480i those lower end L series monitors they are still really good because they have the same amount of geometry control okay to finish this video out I just want everybody to know that please leave any comments or questions you may have about calibrations I know this video is kind of just straight into it and mostly calibration talk but I kind of felt like maybe that would be helpful we'll do more stuff with this monitor more service work and things in the future but I want to say thanks again for supporting the channel please hit the like button and share the video if it was helpful and as always thanks for watching Retro Tech