 What if I told you there was a professional CRT company that used to sell CRTs in the early 1990s and they were using a shadow mass technology and all of a sudden they saw the Sony PVM and they were so blown away with it that they decided to completely end all manufacturing and ties to the shadow mass tube and jump over to the Trinitron and basically let Sony manufacture everything from this point on. Now the company I'm referring to is Olympus. They originally made a shadow mass tube with the help of Panasonic. Here's a look at one of the 13 inch sized OEV 141s and again this is pretty much a shadow mass tube made by Panasonic. If you were to look inside all the hardware in there for the most part is from Panasonic. It's an RGB monitor but all the sudden Olympus switched over and started using Sony's products and that's what we found here today. So what we're looking at is a Olympus 143 13 inch video CRT monitor. Now I bought this and it's supposed to be shipped from New York City so I've purchased this one. We're going to go up now and open up the box because it's been delivered and we're going to see how it came out. All right here's this box we're about to open. I have covered up my shipping address label but I wanted to show you the box so you could see that it came in fairly good condition but maybe the more surprising thing is it looks to have come from Japan and that's just incredible to me that this could come from Japan and even be profitable at the price I bought it at but let's open this up and see what we've got inside and how they packed it. Time to open it up. So we've got a proper box here. Check this out. It is a double wall corrugated box, new box. So that's perfect. That's the exact box you want to ship a CRT in. You don't want to go with a single wall box that won't work. Okay yes cool. Wow check that out. This foam is fitted to go right over top of the PVM and there's the PVM right there so let's get it out. Hopefully nothing happened to it. There's one more piece of foam down there in the bottom and it's that expandable foam. Let's set our PVM down and see what we got. It does have a little bit of bubble wrap. Let's see what the CRT looks like. All right here's our CRT. We're going to do this all together. I'm going to remove this bubble wrap and hopefully this beautiful CRT is still okay. What the heck? Look at this. This is a Japanese version in the world. Oh my goodness. OEV143 that's all correct. Tube feels solid. Okay that's good. Everything looks normal over here. Let's see what we've actually got. This one was distributed in Japan. I mean it's the same kind of model that would have been in the US. Look at this we get a rating from 100 to 240 volts 50 to 60 Hertz for power input. Here's our input board. Oh that looks pretty crusty. Just looking at the input board here. Check this out. These are little characters right from the alphabet in Japan so we think that says red, green, blue, sink. Very interesting. Sometimes these pull tabs will break. That one seems solid. This one too and take a look at the bottom. If we look down there I don't really see any damage down there. That's all good. All right we've introduced power and this is US power 120 volts alternating current. I haven't tried the menus yet. I'd like to see if that is just going to be a normal procedure. Yes so I thought there might be a chance that this was configured to be in another language but that's actually not the case. It's in English. We're in under scan mode so that's regular scan mode. The buttons do appear to be lighting up and working down here. I'll pull my menu up. There you'll see that. All right let's have a little fun today and start by testing with the laser disc player chapter one. Oh my goodness. Look at this. There you go. I mean it looks pretty good so far. Maybe we should check out something a little bit higher resolution. Let's take a closer look at our 240p test suite now and we're going to roll through some test patterns. We have moved over to RGB and the first thing I like to do is run through the solid color screens and see if we notice any discoloration. And here we have again discoloration. Check it out. You can see it very well here. This magenta corner that's a magnetism issue. If you look up at this corner, same thing. Magnetism issue is causing a discoloration in those two corners. There's a degausser built into this monitor and we can try to use that to clear this up but it's just not strong enough to get rid of that. So that's one issue that we're going to have to try to attempt to repair with our magical degausing wand. We are going to try to correct this magnetism imperfection with our degausing wand here. I've got a couple of cameras set up so that this will hopefully work right and look good. We're going to disrupt the colors there a little bit. We're going to go in a larger circle over here. We're going to kind of get close in there like that and as we back away we're going to expand the size of the circle. Now our issues up here have gone away. You can tell we still have a little bit of magnetism here. Now that makes me think that this is more of a polarity issue where I'm getting magnetism from this room. So let's spin this monitor around and see if that makes any difference. So I just rotated the CRT 45 degrees and check it out. The screen's completely cleared up. When the screen faces this direction, check it out. We actually do get some kind of magnetic interference and that could be somehow amplified. Maybe it's amplifying the magnet from under the speaker for all I know but we're definitely getting some interference when it's facing this direction. Now in the monoscope pattern we don't actually see much issue. Now it's not great. The centering isn't perfect. We may even have a slight bit of crookedness along the sides that hopefully can be corrected with just a simple hour spent running through the geometry menu settings and making adjustments to that. The convergence is actually really nice in all areas of the screen meaning I don't see a lot of separation. Normally you might see that at the edges in the corners, a separation of your colors being your red, green, and blue. Now this is a sharpness pattern and it does kind of help you see the sharpness of a screen like this. This particular monitor has a 600 line resolution Trinitron tube in it so the resolution and the sharpness is quite nice on this tube and you can definitely see visible scan lines the closer you get to the screen. I decided to look inside our PVM and honestly this thing looks exactly like the United States counterpart to this. All right this is an Olympus 203 so it's the 20-inch version of the Olympus Sony PVM and this one has been serviced already but it still has an issue and I'm going to show you what that is. First we're going to turn this on. Well I've just powered it up and I hope you can hear a sound where it just sounds like a loud ringing and that's actually coming from this little part here that I tried to cover in caulk before to eliminate the vibration but we need to go ahead and just replace this part. Listen though so you shouldn't do what I just did where I just touched that with my hands but that's one of the ways to find out if these parts are bad if you want to find out which one exactly is vibrating because any of these coils can end up vibrating and causing that noise distortion. Now I went in and replaced that coil this was the old one that was making the noise and it seemed to function properly it was just really noisy so that one's been replaced we're going to turn this on and hopefully we're going to just hear the normal high pitch wine of all the other transformers like the flyback transformer and we won't hear that singing from that coil and you see do hear some of that because you're still going to get that noise from this flyback over here so you're going to get some of that buzz and high frequency noise if you can hear it not everyone can. Alright so first off I checked the tracking on this package and it definitely did come from Japan and honestly I wasn't expecting this to be my first import of a pvm but officially this is my first import of a pvm and for the cost that I paid for this on ebay I can't believe that it was even affordable to ship this overseas to me from Japan but who knows what's going on there so it's really cool to see the Japanese model of these and how it's pretty much the same as the American model and it is always fun to show off the degausing wand and try to get that magnetism cleared up on purity problems I just love using that thing so I was glad to be able to pull that out. Kind of the last thing I want to say here is that it doesn't really matter which one of these monitors you run into the older ones that are made by Panasonic are still really nice but to me the Sony ones are better and they definitely stepped up the technology game this was the era when they were able to add the first menus like the on-screen menus and the service menus used to be able to get really good deals on these because nobody really knew about them or knew that they were the same as the sonys but I think pretty much the time has passed where everybody knows that these are pretty much just sonys with a different label on the front down there and on the back so anyway I hope you enjoyed this video I'm going to finish out today by showing you some really cool footage of an Olympus OEV202 and 203 so I hope you enjoy that and I'll see you next time with some more retro content