 Hello and welcome back to today's Retro Tech. We're going to be looking at one of my very favorite pro video monitors today. That is the Sony PVM20L5 broadcast monitor. Well it's almost a broadcast monitor. It's still considered a pro video monitor, but it is about the most high tech and technologically advanced monitor you'll find in the PVM family. But I've got one in my shop that I'm going to be doing a future proofing restoration on. There are actually some parts that Sony recommended be changed from their original design. So in with this monitor we're going to go in in another video and I'm going to discharge and take it apart. And we'll look at the parts that need to be changed. We'll change them and we'll put it back together, calibrate it and give it a good cleaning and basically get it ready to be sold off. So just to give you a quick background on this one. It is one that I purchased locally from an X video editor who edited things like where I'm in Nashville Tennessee area and he edited things like country music videos in the 2000s as well as like documentaries and other small projects that would have gone on in town. But this was his personal monitor and he bought it and used it very little. He had other monitors and then it wound up going to a flat screen not not too long after it. So it actually was something that was not really used at all. It's never been shipped or anything like that. So it's a very great condition PVM. This one came from December of 2003. So again a later manufacturer date and we're going to take a quick look at the inputs here. You've got RGB and component in the middle. That's a switchable input but there is only that single input that's on the monitor to begin with and we'll talk about the two option slots in a minute but you can actually add a couple of different BKM accessory cards to your PVM if you need to have additional inputs and things like that. But you've got a single line A that has both S-video and composite in and out with a mono audio. You've also got the line B that is the just composite audio and video in and out. Now I do need to tell you you do not need any kind of terminators for this like the 75 ohm terminators. This is self-terminating so you don't need that for this monitor. The RGB again is switchable here in the middle. You just notice that it starts with green blue and then goes red rather than the older monitors went from red, green, blue on the connection points. This one does have a different setup for that just just in their organization. And then you've got a parallel remote input for like a serial port here. You've got a couple serial remote one in and out if you want to use some kind of serial input device to connect to the communications between this monitor and other monitors and devices. And then you'll see up here where it's got audio option inputs one and two. Now those are the two inputs for your audio if you have cards installed in the slots on the upper side of the monitor which should be visible here very right there. Right above my head here on the left there's the slot covers and so that's where those slots you could take those covers off and just slide in some type of a BKM. So now let's go and actually turn this monitor on because there's something I want to show you just specifically when you turn this on. You'll notice here's the power button after it's pulled you know taken and powered up you just press that and then you press that little control button after it's powered up and it'll bring up your menu which is just a bunch of switches here on the side. So rather than the dials and buttons that you'll see on BVMs as well as other PVMs this goes back to that 2030 setup for the buttons where you've got they able to turn on an LED that lights up and gives you the buttons on both the sides. I've got a lot of different things you could control on here and then at the very bottom is a reset button but this you push the menu button. Now I want you to see first here how this jumps back and forth. This does tend to happen when you first start this monitor up for the first couple minutes on RGB and eventually it will stable out and just stop jumping up and down like that but that's normal with these higher tech L-series monitors they seem to do that. So you'd stop now it may even do it a little bit longer if that input set to component but just make sure that if you are using it that you've got RGB and then you press the external sync button over here under RGB so you have your sync set right. Another thing to note is that down here in the corner you may notice when you turn on your RGB that it says 480-60i and it is still in 240p mode it's just saying the monitor just naturally will always say that and what you could control from these is like volume contrast brightness anything else like phase chroma those are all controls that are built into this monitor so once you get it set kind of with that initial menu you could press that button again and it turns off the LEDs so you don't have those lights while you're using the monitor you could just make them go away or bring them back if you need to but the first thing we're going to do is we're going to look at its condition now before we do these capacitor replacements it's actually in I mean amazing condition I've not even used this myself probably more than a thousand I mean definitely not a thousand hours maybe not even a hundred hours on this particular monitor myself and again the guy who I bought it from did not use it really at all it's what he told me so again the could everything on here is just it's it's beautiful right now and the job's going to be mainly preventative from this point there is a tiny bit of convergence I mean very minuscule in the corners and across the tops and bottom of the screen so that may be just something that we simply have to make a little adjustment on the yoke that I'll show you but that's about the only issues that I saw overall on the calibration just from an initial setting it's already nice and even centered up and again the linearity is very nice and even the grid pattern is very sharp and there's no wonkiness in the corners at all to begin with I'm just going to go through a couple more of these slides I'm sorry the 240p test suite things here and I'm going to be using this through RGB and my super nintendo now what I'm checking for here is a red green and blue and then white screen and black screen test that shows me if there's any purity issues within the magnetism there that's just a quick sharpness test so we could see how sharp it is on this scale this is you know it just could give you a good idea of the actual sharpness on the tube and one of the last things I like to always run through is a scroll test because it's it's there's some things you're just not going to see unless your picture is really in motion the scroll test is nice because you can change the speed from slow to stopping and then slow and speed it up and go really fast there's also a grid scroll test which I really like because again it's showing you more of a pattern that's going across the screen and what it actually looks like so those are some tests that I always try to do to see the overall linearity condition of the screen to begin with I'm going to show you one of my favorite games to test monitors on and that's shadow run for the super nintendo and the reason being is this is a very sharp game it's got some interesting backgrounds and it doesn't have green color in the title screen here which would make it pretty much perfect if it did but there's a lot of stuff on the whole screen where you can see for sharpness and with the different lines that are going across it completely just on this this is just the title screen but that's just one of the good aspects of this game is this title screen it's just very uniform easy to check and see if you have any kind of issues with your screen and I just tried to get as close as possible here to show you the extreme sharpness of this monitor and how amazing the scan lines look so this is like the title screen entrance or before the title screen on shadow run it's got this amazing drop down uh thing here where it's almost the exact opposite of what I was telling you on the sonic scroll pattern this is a scroll pattern down so this gives you both by using this game you get both the patterns of going you know we're going side to side on the test suite and on this one I'm watching the downward movement so I could make sure that there's no wonkiness really anywhere in that picture and to start with this one's pretty good you also get this cool shadow effect where the shadow run will pop up and down the screen and get into its final position before the title screen ultimately comes up and even the game itself when you go through some of the gameplay it's a very good game to judge based on the outline square of the actual game itself while you're playing it so the last couple minutes here are just going to be a lot of gameplay footage of some competitive rounds with the computer on dr mario for super nintendo this is the dr mario tetris version uh so again I want to talk just specifically about this monitor I've got a list here for the caps and then there are actually some other parts it's not just caps that have to be replaced on this monitor you've got other parts in it that are going to be replaced it's got a couple boards when we get inside you'll see how the one problem with the 20.05 is it's really compact inside and there's a lot of plastic holding it together so it's really vital not to just uh take shipping for granted when it comes to a 20.05 whereas a bvm is mostly metal and has a little bit more durability to stand up to a shipping uh whole shipping you know experience these ones are a little bit more fragile and you need to know that when you're either shipping it or just plain moving it around but we'll go through we'll change the capacitors and we'll change those parts and we'll run a full component and uh rgb tests on it and I will also install and show you some of those different video cards because I've gotten nearly um all of them for this monitor even some sdi uh cards so it's uh it's really interesting when you start using some of those other inputs to get things like 720p and 1080i you can use different formats to get that into your monitor besides just component uh maybe just a couple more things to note on this monitor specifically uh again it came from the video editor in town and I was able to get it again a good while ago and I've just not had a little real lot of time to work on it so I'm excited to be able to finally bring this to you I'm going to show you uh just a little bit more gameplay footage here and then I'm going to say hey thanks again everybody for watching today's retro tech um if you have any questions about this monitor you want to know anything specifically to adjust on your l5 leave it in a comment below and make sure you're subscribed up to the channel because these videos are going to be coming quickly my plan is to get started on this full repair tomorrow I've already got the parts here and we'll get it torn apart and get it future proofed because again I mean the the sharpness of this thing is pretty much as good as you could get from a starting point on a monitor and uh the 2005 is one of the best and most popular pvms because of its multi format features its size its picture quality and all around greatness when it comes to analog video but thanks again everybody I appreciate your time today I'll see you next time with some more retro content