 All right, so today we're looking at Sony's attempt at 4x3 CRT perfection. That's the Sony BVMD series. This is a D20 F1U monitor. It does not have a controller built into it, so it does need an external controller. So we need to get in here and just give this monitor a checkup and then clean it up a bit. We're going to remove all the shell pieces and clean those here in a second. And then I'm actually going to remove all these boards and cards just to take a look at them and make sure they're okay, but also that'll give me a chance to really clean inside this monitor with those bays cleared out. The only tools we'll need to get these shell pieces off is a good Phillips head screwdriver and a good flat head screwdriver. The flat head screwdriver will be used on the BVM cards. The next two cards are a little bit different. They do have cables running from inside the monitor into the board that you need to disconnect before you fully pull them out or you will damage something. That's these three color lines here and then a fourth down here on this input board and then you can fully slide that out. And then this over here is our deflection module and it has a spot where I believe it goes to the deflection yoke. That needs to come out right there and that's it. Anyway, let's take a quick look at all the video cards. They're all laid out here on this table nicely and they all seem to be pretty clean and they look pretty much fine. They were fully serviced. Actually, I had the majority of these boards serviced by Save On Pat after I went through and changed a lot of the electrolytics myself. I wouldn't have had him verify the boards and service it even further and change these SMD caps. I'll get into that in a little bit. But he serviced this board, this board, this board, and this board. And these other two boards are optional cards so they're just video, additional video inputs. Let's just start with this one down here and this is our primary deflection board. This is a main board that always has to come with the D20F1U. What this does is it's processing and telling everything, it's telling the yoke everything to do and how to deflect the image and produce an image on the screen. And all that information goes to the yoke voltage-wise out this connection point right here where my finger is. But the big portion of things you need to check on this board if you do have trouble are the electrolytics, especially the SMD caps on these two daughter boards right here. Those can dry up and cause all kinds of issues sometimes. So you should always check those and then check and see if other caps in here need to be replaced. So there's been, I mean, most of these caps have been all replaced in this one. And then we'll move on to the next board here which is our primary power supply. This is the board where our power cable comes in right there off the wall and then we have our main power on and off switch. And so that power comes in here and then is sent off into the monitor with all types of different DC voltages and everything that it's converting into in this power supply. So that's sent that power off into the monitor through this connection port right here, a monitor like this. So this one, again, it has been repaired and restored with newer electrolytics or brand new electrolytics on here. And it's looking pretty good, works pretty good. I will tell you, I don't always recommend on these boards changing every single cap if the electrolytics are still in good shape and you have testing equipment to test them. It's not a real need to change those out on these high performance machines. It's better to leave the original ones there. So anyway, that's only if you don't have any issues and you know your caps are good. Now we'll move on down the line here. This is another primary board. This is our main input board on this monitor. Now, unfortunately, if you bought an A-Series monitor, which is the one that came after this monitor, it does not have this input board. And it's a video input board. So you're putting your signal into it and it's sending it into the screen. And again, we've got a lot of SMD capacitors on this daughter board. It's all SMD capacitors. And even some SMDs on the main board that you should check out and replace if needed. And then a few electrolytics over here that can go bad. And again, if they go bad or are failing or falling out of spec on a tester, you should consider changing them. Here is the fourth and final primary board that comes with this monitor. And it is kind of the brains of the monitor where all the logic happens. It is the ISR board or interactive status reporting. Kind of tells the monitor what it's doing, what to do, tells you what it's doing, lets you get into the menus and navigate it. The only thing there is is a coin cell battery. So you can replace that if you think your battery is dead. You can replace that. Also, there are a lot of capacitors on this as well that are SMD and electrolytics. And again, this is one that you should check and make sure your caps are in spec and that they're not out of spec. And if they are, go ahead and change which ones sporadically need that. This just connects into the board. And now we have a look at our optional boards. This first one is the 41D. So we have RGB and component support here, no sync support. So you're just going to get the RGB signal right there. And then we can do HD, SDI and analog video through SDI. And then our final board that's coming with this monitor is, let's see what this one is, the 20D. Again, it gives you three RGB inputs and a couple of other analog video inputs. So in and out. And that's just for more analog video processing. Anyway, that's a look at the cards. Before we stick them back into the monitor, we're going to take a look in the back of that CRT and see how it looks with all these cards missing. Well, now we can look at our chassis, tube and whatever is left in this frame. There are a couple of boards that remain, but for the most part, all we've got here is metal, plastic and our tube. This board though does remain on the side here. It's our PA board. I have talked about it in the past and done some rework on these. This is an overload protection circuit meant to basically limit the amount of voltage that you can put into your tube to hopefully keep your tube from blowing. Because that was a problem where too much voltage could go into these tubes and they could blow up. And that was something that Sony had an issue with these back in the day. This one is an earlier model from 2000. It still has a lot of great life-lifting in it though, not a lot of hours. This is our deflection yoke and this is a higher end deflection yoke. It does have three holes right there that say HTRP, YCH and YBH. And that will help you move along your vertical axis. Maybe that one is a horizontal one over there. Four, convergence, tweaking and adjustments beyond what can be done in the service menu. This does have an incredible service menu for adjustments. Yoke also has the ability to tilt the picture without moving the yoke which is awesome. So if you have any issues where your yoke is tilted you just need to get in the service menu and fix that. Over here these lines go into our flyback and they ultimately go into the neck of the CRT. And those control focus. You have two potentiometers over here for focus controls. So you might want to eventually tweak those a little bit to adjust the sharpness of your tube. Here's the flyback assembly down here. And as I said, this line just leads up over into this. And then you also get leads off of this that go down there and help out with the main convergence control. Let's see. Yeah, see there's the horizontal static convergence adjustment pot right here on our neck board which the rest of the cables are going into. And the neck board sends that picture information and tells the tube what to do when to fire each gun, etc. How intense to make each spot on the screen. And the last boards are these slot boards where your cards go into like your power supply. You can tell that's a power supply plug there and then the one slot here. And then one of these bays will be open because we don't need an extra card on this particular monitor but then we'll have our deflection and then our input board here and then our bay of, you know, a different cards we could put in. Except for the ISR board. That main ISR board needs to go in this first slot right here. And the rest of those don't even have to have anything in them to work as long as you have your four primary boards. Oh, one more little thing down here. This is a connection point where you could connect your controller unit. You can either connect it in the back here with this nine pin connection. Or you can connect it on the front side at the bottom of the bezel, which is the one I use. And it's a different pin out and a different eight pin. Now I'm just going to put all the boards back in this monitor and I'm not going to put the exterior shell on. We'll put the boards on and we'll fire it up, let it warm up and see how the screen looks. Alright, I've repopulated the four primary boards in there and nothing else. Now we will have a spacer that goes right here and then a spacer that goes right here. And then we will input our two additional video cards right here and then I have an additional spacer there. But for now I'm just going to set it like this so you can see that's all you need to function this monitor. And the way to power it on, even without a controller, is to power on the main power supply and then come around to the front. And we'll start to see some activity here, standby, and then it'll power on. You can kind of hear the CRT being activated. You hear that degauss. Now this CRT does take about 30 seconds to activate. Even if you have your controller plugged in right now, as long as it says initializing, it won't let you do anything. It won't let you make any changes. You're locked out. It just needs that initial second to turn on. And now without the controller, it's just in whatever mode it was left in last. So I'm not even sure what that is. But we'll go get our controller ready. We'll let this monitor sit for a little bit, warm up with the electronics get going and all that good stuff. This is our remote that we will be using. It is a BKM11R. And we can use this to do everything from change our inputs to set our inputs to change monitor settings, test the monitor. And heck, there are even some built in testing programs to test the CRT without even importing a video signal. We can use this alone to test it. So we'll run through that after the monitor gets warmed up. All right, our monitor has been warming up for a little while. Let's go ahead and plug in our remote and get into some navigation through these service menus. Now I'm not going to go into the full depth of the service menu. That would probably take an hour or two. Truthfully, if you have this monitor, you need to do yourself a favor and consult the service manual. So you know everything that you're capable of doing with this controller. So as it sits, nothing's being manipulated. The only thing you'll notice is it does have LED lights on the brightness and contrast. I like to keep those in manual mode when I adjust this tube just to keep it lower. I try to turn down the contrast and brightness on this tube just to not really use or add any stress to it. So if we just press our menu button, it'll pull up our normal menu. And first thing we can do is go over to our status. And if we get to this third screen, you can see our hours is 14,068, our software version, our serial number. We can make sure this serial number matches with the other serial numbers on the tube and everything to make sure we have an original piece of hardware here with all its original parts. And we do, all those serial numbers do match. So that's a good thing. Another thing you can do that is important is to set up your input configuration. So you can go here and under input configuration, we're on channel one right now, which it says right here. It's in RGB, but we're not going to run an RGB test. We're going to run a component test. And to do that component test, we'll go over here and do this STMPTE first top one YPPBR. And that's our format. We'll do sync mode, internal sync mode, okay? Because we're not going to do external sync on there. So that is true. We'll want that. We'll want the screen in 4x3 mode and normal mode. Now this first input is set up to be on component with internal sync 4x3 and regular scan mode. Before we try to plug something into it, I want to show you some of these built-in test patterns. To go to a specific channel, just press the channel, but you have to do it in three increments. So for example, the test patterns are up in the 90s. So I press zero first, then nine, then let's try five. Yes. So see, this is a built-in cross-hatch pattern to help judge geometry and to make geometry adjustments on the tube. You can use this to see, obviously too, if you have convergence issues on these lines. But this is the geometry pattern that's built in. Let's see what other patterns we have built in. We'll go up from 95. There's a secondary geometry pattern, 97. Now this is a dot pattern that we can use to check our convergence all over the screen. And if you can line those dots up to where they're white, you don't see any red, green, or blue separation. Then you've got perfect convergence on your screen. So that's what that little dot pattern is primarily used for. 98, we've got another hatch pattern. Let's see 99. I don't think that's anything. OK, 99 is nothing. 94 is a gray scale pattern. So we can check and make sure our beams are not too intense as far as brightness and contrast is concerned. We can use that. And then if we go one down, it's a white screen. But what we can do with the white screen is test all our colors. Because if it's white, that means it's red, green, and blue showing at the same time. And we have our white balanced picture there. So let's try dropping out and just showing the blue. So I've selected and turned off both the red and green. I'll turn them all off and it'll just be dark. I can turn on just the green and test the green and see how intense it is. Same thing with the red. That's a good way to check all the primary colors. And also when you get these primary color screens, it's a great thing to check for purity problems. Because you will see some kind of discoloration in that screen if you do have a purity issue. Now I hate leaving it on this white screen so I'm not going to leave it on that input. And to get back to input one, I need to hit 001. One other thing you can do on here is you can go in and do an alignment change. And you can do further adjustments than this if you get into the submenu on this monitor. But if you just need to get into this portion of the monitor and do some quick adjustments, you can obviously do rotation, horizontal, center and size, vertical center and size. And then you can even do your blanking and stuff like that. Subcontrast can be adjusted in the alignment page too. We've got pin cushion settings for geometry. And then finally we have these four built-in, which is just amazing, convergence adjustment tools that will allow us to do the vertical convergence on the top, the bottom and the center, and then the horizontal static convergence all from software built into the actual BVM. So you can do most of that adjusting on this monitor without even getting into the top or the back and messing with things. If you need to do further menu options, then you need to get into this extended menu. And you have to put a password in and I believe it's 111. So it's 4-1s is the normal standard password. I just got an extended menu. The most important thing on this, except for maintenance, is to check out this VCR mode. If you have any sync issues with a console or a VCR pretty much, but primarily consoles, like some of them put out a funky sync. If you have a sync problem where it won't sync, try this VCR mode, turn it on. All you have to do to turn it on is hit enter and then you go up or down and hit enter again to turn it on or off. And see if that helps clear up your sync. That's what it's meant to do. And if you need to go into maintenance, you got to put that password in again. So put in 4-1s and it takes you to each individual board. Let's see the eboard might be. Yes, the eboard see has further adjustments available for geometry mostly. See how we have extra linearities that weren't on the other and aspect ratio stuff. We got all kinds of different additional horizontal pin cushion and adjustments that you can do in this monitor. Look at all these different adjustments that are available for just your deflection. It's a lot. I've got a GameCube here. We're going to just turn the GameCube on. We'll start out in 480i. Everything looks good and normal here. Now if I hold down B as this game loads, it should give me an option to possibly go into progressive. Let's see. Yes, so right now it's in 480i mode and then as I held down B as it loaded, it gives me the option to do a progressive scan mode. Now when I do that, you see the monitor kicks out of 15 kHz mode and goes into 480p or 30 kHz, sorry. Anyway, now we're in progressive mode. The monitor is a lot quieter. It's running at a higher frequency and we're looking at a 480p progressive image here. Let's see how Luigi looks in this. I love the way that this monitor really plays back 480p. That's where it shines. I've got the 240p test pattern pulled up. Unfortunately, my camera is not going to be able to do the justice that's deserving of this monitor because it looks just fabulous. It's so high resolution. You get really thick scan lines. I'm sure you can see those on the screen. Our TMEO's head looks beautiful with all the scan lines there. You're definitely getting a wonderful scan line image if you're just concerned about that with 240p on this monitor. I just wanted to show you some other stuff here. We've got our old fashioned grid. Again, you can see just how great this tube looks. Linearity is pretty good. We are a little bit over scanned. This is a pretty good indicator that the tubes, I mean the green is a little bit higher, but the tubes in pretty good even balanced shape and you could turn the brightness up and it will stay within white balance. Here's good old monoscope pattern. I do think we need to expand it a little bit horizontally to get that image or shrink it down vertically to get that aspect ratio perfect. There you have it. That's kind of a first level overview of all the hardware inside the Sony BVM-D20 F1U monitor. Again, this one is going to go to a new home so it'll be a while before I probably have another one of these to feature. I wanted to give this a good lengthy look before I let it go. I don't really know what else to say about this monitor. It's one of my favorites that Sony ever made. I still love that they maintained that Trinitron tube of being angled on one edge and they didn't go to a completely flat tube on this monitor like they do on the D24. And as far as like again 4x3 for anything that's in that format, it's going to look fabulous on this screen. Personally, I like the Sony more than the Shadow Mass in this level, but that's just me. So that's up for you to decide and to pick which one you like more. But they're both great choices if you can get a multi-format in this size. But this specific BVM by Sony, they really did a great job on this one. And I really love the thing. Thanks again for watching everybody. I'll see you next time with some more retro content.