 Hello there everyone, I'm of course Steve with Retro Tech and today I've got a special just Q&A session for you guys. I thought I'd have a cool backdrop with the 20L5 and the JVC component setup here with the two TVs. This is of course the JVC DSeries 36 inch and the PVM 20L5 and I wanted to go through a lot of the questions I've been getting over the last couple of weeks because I've really been busy, I'm sorry I know I've come out with a lot of videos and I get a lot of questions after that and I don't really have a lot of time right now to do it because Retro Tech's just kind of a side thing currently and maybe eventually we'll get to what we can do later you know as far as channel growing and maybe a Patreon account eventually to help with really quick service you know if you need specific service on your monitors and help specifically because I just don't have time to sit there and just do it. A lot of times it takes me a couple of days to get back to a lot of questions. So today I wanted to say of course thank you for hitting us or hitting me to 1500 subscribers now we're almost to 1600 somewhere in the middle there. The channel's been around for a couple of months, maybe three months and some of the videos have really gotten a lot of good feedback so as long as it's still helpful and I feel like I can help the Retro Gaming community or even just the Retro Technologies sector I'm glad to do it so enough of that let's just jump right in here and get to your questions because I got a couple pages worth I'll try to time it out this video might be a two-parter but let's just go ahead and get started. First question now this is a question I got asked a couple times and I finally you know I figured it would have been asked last time but it hadn't been asked to this point have you ever been shocked and if so what's the worst shock you've experienced? So I have been shocked I've been shocked a couple times I've never been shocked directly from the energy that is stored in the back of the tube so on the opened back CRT you've got the anode cap which goes directly into the back of the CRT we've seen it a lot in videos and that's if it's turned on then there's especially energy going into that tube and it's building up inside there and that's why you hear like when you turn on it takes a second for the phosphors to show it's just that electricity builds up in there and if it's been off for a long time a lot of that discharges out so that's where a lot of that electricity is stored it comes from the flyback directly but I've not been shocked by that directly because I've always been very cautious around that the things I have been shocked by is grounding out a board component either with something I'm touching on my other hand which is a bad practice of ever using both your hands on something it's never a big zap it's like a little jolt the worst I ever had was most of the time I mean I might get a little zap working on a neck board or something while it's in operation and that's not nearly bad the only time it kind of hurts is if you're touching something else and it goes through your chest then that hurts but again nothing dangerous nothing that's put me even made me really stop working but 2030s the Sony pvm 2030s are the worst to work on I don't think you can adjust the convergence potentiometer on the back of the neck board just by hand you have to make some kind of tool because it is so hard you have to do it while it's turned off and turn your monitor back on and off and on and off same thing with the yoke adjustment on that monitor it's brutally awful and it is so tight in there you stick your arm in there and it shorts out against the metal frames or the the the boards in the area and so you'll have a shock go through your hand and I did have a cut on my hand one time where made my hand pull back and I caught it on the side of the frame and it scratched my hand pretty bad and that's the worst shock most injuries and this is not just for me from CRTs is from lifting them improperly or overlifting them too much and hurting your back I've definitely hurt my back more than that hurts worse than the shock because the shock goes away pretty quickly but I've never been shocked directly from the bad part of the flyback CRT or the anode cap I have talked to people and read about people that have been shocked and it's pretty bad but it doesn't actually you know I've never heard of anybody again I've never seen anybody directly dying from it if you if you find the information please post it below all right so let's get back to these questions that was kind of a long one to start with but you are much like sorry if I don't know how to say that but it's a question here I've got a couple of 20 L2s or 14 L2s that have been in storage for a while and they've developed some faults one is geometry is off on the right hand side and anyway there's a contrast problem with the grays on the other one do you think this might be a yoke adjustment on the first and a recap might help if the first thing you want to do when you get a monitor is open it up inspect inside and see if there's a lot of dust again so clean it out if there is a lot of dust if you get the monitor and you're familiar with tearing it down and doing a recap then you could and then you just avoiding everything else you can then go into the calibration steps next and that will probably be the best procedure if you're not if you don't have the right equipment and you don't have the experience to recap a CRT I don't recommend you do it you kind of just have to live with the faults maybe that are in it and do the a much adjustments that you can from its current state because not all the time it's not all the time that a capacitor goes bad and it could go out of spec a little bit but then you can use the geometry settings to put it back in spec sometimes and that's why you have a lot of settings on the PVMs and the BVMs available so that you can adjust those settings and get it back into a spec so my thing is if you're comfortable and you want to tear it down and go ahead and do the recap that's going to be the best thing it's going to add a lot of value to your PVMs when it gets once it gets finished because it's a fully refurbished PVM at that point it's also going to eliminate any future problems you'll have that come down the road possibly and you'll be able to calibrate it after that and get into its best shape but you can go ahead and you know if you're not that experienced with that stuff or you have a hard time finding anybody in your area that can do a recap by all means try to calibrate it as best you can through the service menu and the other adjustments we've tried in my past videos Bob Woggle asks how I've heard that using a degauss coil on a Trinitron has potential to damage the drill the aperture drill is there any truth to that it wouldn't seem likely since it has the external degausser and the inner one but I'm no expert so I've never actually heard of that a degausing wand or degausing coil actually causing any damage to a CRT it's not actually the degausing wand doesn't send out a huge signal that would be damaging kind of sends out a constant vibration in a certain pattern so that while you waving that wand it just spreads out your electrons more and you back up and that's it's just a process so I don't really think it could damage a CRT I've never I've never seen a warning about it and I've used I've got a really high powerful wand I've used on tons of CRTs and I've never had to do anything negatively to it so I would use one with confidence if you need one OJ Taylor asks hi I have a 20 M2 MDE I'm happy with the geometry except the corners are slightly bowed outwards and he says he's wondering what ideas he would have to fix he said he's tried to use the pin settings on the 24 and the 240p test suite he's tried to use this pin settings in his geometry but he's still having issues sometimes you can have your capacitors go out in your deflection board on your pin settings and then you make an adjustment and it just doesn't make the adjustment or if you make an adjustment the adjustment goes out of whack within an hour or something it can just happen and that means your capacitors could be failing it also could be checked the convergent strips in the corners and wiggle them a little bit before you remove them and reseed them those are the strips we've done a lot of videos on those strips but those could be an issue but he also said here that he's using his pvm for 480i content which doesn't seem to show as much geometry problems and I will note that you're definitely going to see a lot less geometry issues on a 480i signal on your pvm than you ever would on a 240p signal 240p signal just shows everything it's it's not laced over or filtered it's all straight up what you see is what you get and the CRT is going to draw it however the best the CRT is set up so if you're only using 480i content most of the time which again CRTs are great for that's what we're playing on this loop right here is 480i content through component through a ps2 that is you can see just a lot less worries on anything geometry wise on the screen so that I wanted to point that out so it was a good comment and question okay let's continue here where did you get the calibration tool and this is from digital dirigitables you're running and thanks so my recommendation if you're doing 240p I've used a lot of different consoles but in my videos you'll see me using this the SNES and this one is a SNES junior model and what it is is basically it's the one chip model and it had to be modified I did use Voltaurs mod board for this the higher end 7374 chip is in there which is supposed to give it extra clarity it's been recapped and then that console is running through a straight up c-sync scart head into the monitors usually or I'll use components sometimes this one also does s-video and composite too so if I want to test those other inputs I'll still use this because again this gives me the best 240p signal out of anything I've tried and then the cartridge is the SD to SNES cartridge with the 240p test suite loaded on here and that's just a ROM that I've linked to in many videos it's very popular very good I've used other consoles to calibrate with and not had the best success when you switch to another console and even with this you're going to switch over to other things and it won't be perfect you'll have to over scan you'll have to move around the vertical and horizontal horizontal geometry sweeps on your screen sometimes just to make sure that you're fully capturing all the picture and you don't have any black lines on the sides of your picture quality on your screen so that's the that's what I use and that's what I recommend if you're doing 480i content I would recommend using probably a high quality DVD player and some kind of high quality DVD that you get even more test patterns than the 240p test suite has and those are pretty cheap there's a bunch of them on eBay and Amazon that are just DVDs that you can make and get for relatively nothing okay I need a good screen name asked JVC TV question I was at Goodwill a few days ago and found a D series in mint condition hooked it up and everything looked amazing and of course I walk away and had heard a couple say it was just working basically he left to get his truck and within 15 minutes it was gone and he's still been looking at some other CRTs that are consumer level CRTs and what would my suggestions be for consumer CRTs I've got the JVC I've also got a Toshiba that's great my biggest concerns with CRTs first off is I don't even look at them if they're flat screen usually and a consumer grade I want it to be in the 4x3 format always I want it to have the curved screen pretty much always if I can get it like that and I'm looking for things that have component input and that's just the start and then from there I'm gonna look at what other things it has as far as size and then the screen quality you want to test it out and just see make sure it works and see how it looks right away if it's nice and bright and doesn't need a lot of adjustments then usually I feel like it's a good worthy investment I would never spend probably right now over $50 on even the highest end CRT maybe a hundred if it's something that you really want it's in great condition but even one day these things are gonna be harder to come by and they're gonna be desired from people so like he said even people that are just looking for a cheap way to do TV because you can run things into this that still as long as it downscales to 480i then it's something that's good and it's great for retro games and relatively cheap if you're especially if you're trying to get into this hobby and you can't I recommend always get one of these if you're gonna start rather than just jumping right into a PVM because those are so much more expensive and they require a lot more tedious work you have to be sure that that's what you want to do and speaking of expensive F3 real warrior asked how much do these go for nowadays he was talking about the 20L5 and I just thought I'd go with that and other PVMs you know 20L5s are on eBay all day for $1,200 pretty much shipped that's a decently working condition one I don't believe that includes the ones I've seen on there they don't ever seem to show pictures of the inside I'm not assuming that they're cleaned they may be calibrated according to the 240p test suite but you just have to ask the sellers I feel like this 20L5 if you can get one for a thousand bucks or less and it's working great you fix it up clean it up test it make sure it's good I feel like that's a good investment I feel like honestly this this monitor could still go up to easily hit $2,000 again on the price market on what it's worth other PVMs you're looking at the three to $600 range based on the quality of the screens most of the time the 600 line monitors their quality you got to think about shipping to shipping is a real challenge and probably biggest way you can save on a PVM is if you can avoid shipping because it's almost $200 to pack and ship a 20 inch PVM safely from most areas just in the United States it's about $165 to $200 total to pack and ship it properly so that's a that's a good idea on the prices there okay KWK box 20L5 monitor is a centerpiece of all gaming it uses component and lower it's close to perfect I wish I had an hours tracker in the BIOS though so I want to bring that up because yeah there is no BIOS hours tracker in any PVM that's a BVM only thing I think that's because the BVM probably has a bigger OSD or operating system and it was included in that and even though the 20L5 is extremely close to a BVM in performance I feel like that's something they probably just left out because it's pretty much the same exact operating system menu as a 20L2 let's keep going here Revolu would you be planning on sharing a capacitor list needed to do a recap on 20L5 he's a lot talking about that and then some other models named too but not really seeing anybody have a L5 cap list readily available so eventually I'm going to do that but you can see my 20L5 doesn't need it so I've got three other monitors that need to be internally repaired two of them need full cap replacements so the first one I'm going to do is an Olympus 14 inch monitor and that's going to be exactly equal to the Sony 14M2 and I'll go through the whole process of from taking it apart to recap to putting it back together and calibration on it I'm going to restore it fully and it's going to be another centerpiece kind of item but I do plan on doing the L5 cap list cap replacement but that's a really tough one I hope you saw my last couple videos looking at the inside of the 20L5 there's a lot of tight spaces in there and it's just something I have to take apart fully and be safe with so I'm not going to go ahead and jump into it so I can clear out some space and get ready to have the full amount of time just to work on that one once I get the others finished the other two recaps time will work on that okay so let me just check our time here for this and I'll take and we're going to do one couple more and then we'll go and I'll have to break this up into another video probably tomorrow where I'll just put down another 15 minute or so video going through all the questions Alex Jenkins I had a great conversation with Alex Jenkins first off he told me a lot about his dad who used to work in the CRT business kind of as a customer service and field rep engineer that went out and would service monitors in the field and set them up and it was just a great conversation I think it put a lot of passion into his love for CRTs and I totally get it I think they're a nostalgic piece of history at this point and I just love that story but he also then had some questions about the 129x the 129x is a BKM Sony input card it works in the 20L5 it's what I'm using right now to do the component loop so it does component in RGB and it's additional it goes in the slot in the back of this monitor also goes in 20L2s 14L2s 20L5s but there's some BVMs it works in in a D series D9 D14s and I think that's about it the bigger D series needs a bigger card so it's a pretty good board that goes across it has still some value so if you see one grab one and you would want one on this monitor it's not going to give you any more resolution than the other input would but it is a secondary input and adds a good secondary input in case you do component and RGB from the same monitor and then Retro Gaming Boy gamer boy left a note about the 20L5 how it supports 1080i that's amazing I say yeah that is pretty amazing I showed the video yesterday or two days ago where we showed a demo of this thing going it all the way up to 1080i that is incredible Scott hey fail a sorry if I say anything wrong my 2030 is from the early 80s by the way I think most of