 Hey everyone, welcome back today. I have a client, we'll just call them DC, and what you're looking at here is just some notes from some work I did, some mostly minor work, cleaning, calibration, minor parts changes, repairs, and that's to five different CRTs. So what's going on today is DC has actually scheduled a pickup for these monitors, and what I wanted to show you is this. It's been a while, these monitors have been completed since mid to late November on all of them, and right now as the filming of this video it is March 2022, so that's four months, and that's a good enough time to have some problem develop. So today we're going to go through and we're going to test all these monitors. I thought it would make for an interesting video, and I thought we could have some fun looking at some of these CRTs. Now the ones that we're actually concerned with are these six on the floor. Now I say six, only five of them were serviced, these front five, so you have four 13 inch CRTs, one eight inch CRT right there, that's a Sony PVM, and then that really old Sony PVM, I was never able to find a stable power cable for it, so it was not hired in the priority, it was just if I could find something. So I was never actually able to get that one serviced or working at all, but let's go in here and we're just going to start testing these monitors. I'll explain a little bit as I test them, what I've had to do to each based on the service records, and why don't we start with one of these cool Panasonic Shadowmask Pro monitors. Okay the first one we're going to test out here is a Panasonic Color Video Monitor, the BTH1350Y. So the first thing we're going to do is I'm going to put the power cable in, and I'll flip it around to the back, and we'll look at the service notes on this one too, but we'll get it hooked up here for an RGB test, and it looks like this one was completed on November 21st, it had a thorough cleaning, full testing, geometry adjustment, and that was majority or that was pretty much it, so no actual component repairs or anything needed on this one. So we've got our RGB and RGB sync support here, and there's actually an audio input, but we're not really worried about audio so much, so we got to go red, green, blue on this one, and we don't have any ability to output RGB from this, it's just in only, so that's all good. There's a switch down here at the bottom to set it to RGB or component video, and so we have it set to RGB, so let's just turn it around this first one and see if we still get a picture. Now let's try to figure out what we need to push on the buttons down here, we've got that for auto and select RGB, and that's pretty much it, there we go, so I'm going to turn down just the contrast and brightness a little bit so it doesn't appear so bright on your screen, but that's pretty much it, let's just look real quickly and make sure that it doesn't look terrible anymore, I mean it's like I said it's been sitting here for a while, and you will have a more of a curved look on this, this is an extremely curved tube shadow mask style, all edges are curved on there, so that does appear different when you're looking at it as opposed to the Trinitrons with the flat edge, so we're left to right center, but you can adjust, there you go, so you can adjust that right here in the front of this monitor, so you can move that over, and this one looks pretty good, let's give it a scroll test and see, these are pretty nice little monitors, I mean they're not like the best of the best, but they are probably similar to like an M2 series from Sony in performance and stuff, the only thing to note is again this does not have a service menu built into it, and all the adjustments are done by potentiometer, this is good to see if just like the linearity looks good, if you have any wonkiness, all is pretty good on this one, so thankfully nothing happened here, but again this is the BTH 1350Y and I just want to take one last look at the back, it is an earlier monitor so maybe more like the Sony 1340 series monitors that were just before when they added things like the service menu and other built-in features, so this again is a 93 model, and you do have more adjustments available down here as far as color, you got focus, horizontal center, width, and height, so there is some additional adjustment from the back here, there's a color temperature selection switch up here, and the monitor does have s-video, composite video, mono audio support, so that's all built into this, all right next up we've got another Panasonic, this is a BTH 1390YN, and this one is actually one that I did a complete full video on because I've just never seen this one in person, and it is a class A monitor as far as like retro gaming stuff is concerned, now it only does analog videos, you're only going to get 240p and 480i support out of it, but it has a like really high line count tube and internally everything's made by JVC, so it's really high quality, if you want to see more on it you can definitely check out that video because it goes into pretty good detail, it's also a lot newer from November of 2001, and if we look here at our input supports we're going to hook up again our red, green, and blue, and this time it goes and switches on us so it's got to go green and then blue and then red on the bottom, and if you'll notice we can daisy chain out of this monitor and thankfully it has a built-in option for termination, so you can leave it open if you're going to have the switch on each color to switch to open, if you're going to daisy chain into something else, and if you're not going to then you need to have 75 ohm termination selected so you can push that over to the right and that way it'll terminate it and you don't need any external terminators, we've also got support here for composite on these two video lines here we've got s-video and then mono audio support, the only adjustment on the back is a focus potentiometer which is at the back of the flyback actually, so if you stick your screwdriver in there you're actually getting to the back of the flyback when you make that adjustment, so let's go ahead turn this screen on and the good thing about this one is since it was made later it does have a full service menu built into it and again it's all metal outside of this bezel now see we're not in the right setting obviously because we've got it in component and so we need to do external sync so there at the bottom it says component or RGB it's in component so we can press right and there we go now we're in RGB mode and you get that familiar face vartimio again so let's look a little bit closer here again if you want to see this full video on this one i'll recommend it because it does show this monitor's really performance ability and things like that again if you look at it straight on it's going to look different you know you're going to get these kind of exacerbated edges because it's curved along the edge as well as the rest of the tube just like a shadow mask so i really thought this was a high quality mostly amazing crt so if you ever see one of these and it's a fair deal don't be afraid to take a chance on one because the resolution is very high if we scoot in here closer you can really see like a definition on the scan lines that you would see normally only on bvms or the really high end monitors so that's that's an improvement this image is a little bit softer on medical units or the lower end unit that we just looked at before this one like a 1350 that we just looked at again this is the 90 series so if you get an opportunity again to find one of these i highly recommend these again full service ability in the service menu so it's it's you know a great monitor so it's still working fine thankfully and all that had to be done to this one again was a full cleaning and pretty much just an adjustment and that's it but if you do need to make an adjustment thankfully it's pretty easy in here well next up we have a sony pvm and it's a 1341 pvm now this one was in pretty rough shape it did not have a sony emblem here and it has been fully cleaned it was extremely dirty when it came in some other things that were noted on the service records it said that a lot of the shells screws were missing so we did have to replace those and add in some screws from back stock now this particular pvm does have a built-in power cable so you do not need an external power cable like with the other monitors that we've tested so far it comes with its own however these are extremely old early on monitors let's look a little bit closer it's got some cool stickers on the back of it all right so this particular 1341 was made in october of 1990 so that's pretty darn old over 22 or 21 years at this point and then it was from new york so it's property of red car ink so that's pretty cool i don't know what that is but i'm sure with some kind of video company or something so there's some little history on this monitor it had to be fully adjusted for geometry sharpness and focus convergence this one's only going to give you rgb down here in external sync no component support on this monitor now sony has built-in termination on this one so even though it doesn't say it there's no selection switch you don't have to put terminators on here and then you get two lines up top for composite video and an s video and a pointless vtr connector right here and there is digital rgb on this and i know some people that like to use this for certain retro computers that output a digital rgb signal that were from the early 90s and late 80s and that works well on this and then finally you got a horizontal center adjustment but that really only works on digital rgb and then a v-hold adjustment so if you have scrolling problems with this monitor check that v-hold there is a mono speaker on here but there's no audio support for the rgb normally except on the 1344 q but there is a hack where you can enable that internally in this monitor oh yeah there's a good banger of a degauss on this one and you should be able to click rgb analog rgb down here and there we have it so um there it is still working good looks fine now if we compare check it out i know i zoomed in on the last one and showed you how like defined that image was something like this where a tube is 10 years older 10 years older tube actually more than 10 years and it's a lower line count tube on this um this particular 1341 is compared to all the 40 series so uh this tube you could tell it's just not nearly as sharp those scan lines aren't nearly as defined and that's really got to do with the age and the line resolution count on there so that's a good example still works really nice and and a good rgb monitor especially if you're looking for something to like start with or it's got that nice sony look to it and it works of course perfectly but you see how the sony tube you know we talked about it being curved on the shadow mess tube on all sides so you can get a straighter edge on your geometry and it actually looks a little bit better when you're messing around with these uh trinitron tubes just because you got the one straight edge on the right and the left this one does have to be adjusted all internally you know there's no service menu at this point in the early 1990s for these monitors so you're going to be dealing with opening it up to make any kind of adjustment but these are solid monitors i really like them and you know the whole 40 series to me is a bit underrated now we've got a sony pvm 8041q this is a monitor i've featured quite a few times on this channel whether it be through unboxings or repairs this one is a great bench monitor to like test things if you're doing any kind of repairs or console modifications people really like them for that because of their size they don't take up a huge amount of space for a crt and then they still do represent or show a good representation of both rgb sync and component video as well as s video and composite video so you've got all those inputs in one monitor again this one even though it was made up into the early 2000s does not feature any kind of service menu so all adjustments are done via potentiometers internally in here and if you just look at the back here we've got rgb hooked up right now but that is switchable between rgb and component you do have mono audio on this and then sync support over here and you can output sync if you need sync for something else now there are battery bays here i've never seen any batteries they're actually good enough to work but there are battery bays and batteries do come up and then under all this there is a dc 12 volt power input so if you're trying to power on using the ac power if that's not working you can come in here and i've seen people use this dc 12 volt make a 12 volt because it's marked down here which one's a positive and negative terminal but make a 12 volt dc power supply and actually run this monitor using that and it'll operate normally sometimes that power supply will go bad on that ac side you have an under scan selection switch here but right now we've got it hooked up for rgb again sony on this model will have self termination you don't have to use any terminators on this one now this particular crt had to be cleaned it did have to have a board repair on some bad issues where it was what does it say here okay it had some bad solder joints which is very typical of this line and then some capacitors that did after you be replaced geometry color brightness adjustment and all this was done back in november but again it's all analog stuff going on here no digital video support no service menu support but just a great little monitor that is very versatile it's durable and you know again it's just great for if you need to test consoles and benches on the bench the line count on this tube is 250 tv lines and so it's still plenty sharp since it's a smaller screen but it's nowhere near as sharp as the last tubes that we were looking at prior to this but it's definitely not as sharp in here you know as one of those high resolution tubes now you can get models that go up to a 450 line count tube and that's the maximum for these well this is a sony pvm 8000 and it is a very early sony pvm this one does not function it's from august of 1983 which unbelievably that's that's the same time i was born so that's the exact same month i was born and everything so i was not able to get this to turn on there are some adjustments you can make via these holes in the back which lead to potentiometers in there on some circuit boards and only does have two line ends for composite video a lot of different power options but they're all these funky uh like ones a charging thing so it might have batteries internally you've also got a weird ac plug that's proprietary so it's not something that you know it's got a charge or operate function so very early battery stuff going on in here on the front we've got a selection for whether we want to use a line a or line b i mean this is like dial stuff from the 80s very early kind of things picture color hue brightness and then a power and volume switch since it did have a volume or a speaker built in it's got a nice dark tube in there um plastic plate over the front very heavy solid state crt here but it's definitely something that's like so early it's kind of outside of my expertise this would have been almost a completely different design similar to the really early on televisions with like video tuners built into them and and all that kind of weird solid state technology stuff that's uh that was kind of changed away from later on as the crts progressed in their life there's a trinitron logo down there looks really cool but just thought i'd show you this one before we moved on to our final sony here in a second right now we're on to our final crt of mr dc and this one is a sony bvm 14 f5u it's a master control monitor so this means you could use this monitor to control other monitors so if you did not have one of the controller units with your crt and you had a bvm you can connect it through its isr board which is this brains board basically over here on the far left connected in through there and you can use the uh the communication and the controls on this to control other monitors and series as well as this monitor and you'll notice we have three bays here for additional cards that could be added to it this one does have its own full video and it had a new tube in it because it had just a ton of hours these earlier bvms up to the d series all included an analog board built into it so you're automatically getting rgb support and sync as well as that can be switched to component so that's always nice with these earlier ones it is higher resolution so it's an 800 line tube in this particular monitor over here we've just got our power and deflection blocks on these two cards so that's all pretty standard this one again is made in uh 1998 january of 1998 and thankfully that means it's going to have a full service menu one last thing you do need to make sure that you have your power cable in here good and that you have your main power turned on before you'll be able to operate the monitor now let's hook up our rgb to this we've got a switch again so it's going green blue red and then sync and also this is since it's a bvm or a broadcast video monitor for some reason sony did not include auto termination on this monitor so you do actually have to use 75 ohm terminators on the outputs you have to install these yourself or your colors will just bleed out and look very bad so you want to make sure to just slip those on the outputs with the corresponding colors and then you're ready to go we'll also put one down here on sync but that's not always necessary the monitor is currently in standby mode you should see the power indicator led down here so that just means that the back power is turned on but the monitor power is not turned on there's a power button up here to turn this on so you got a lot of cool selection buttons up here degauss tons of input combinations and these bvms would have these programmable so you could basically go in here and set up tons of inputs for the way you specifically need them and then once they were set you come in and you could switch through them easily feed different video signals in it has a full service menu built into this that's great also and then we've got our selection over here for testing patterns and tests and also to make sure we're set up right for sync this one had a new tube and you can tell just it's got a lot more of a sharper image in here in the center than of course the 1340 and those other lower line count crts that we've looked at this one's got that higher line count high resolution tube so it's going to have it only supports 240p and 480i so no and no digital video on this one but still it's just a great monitor to have if you if you have an opportunity to get one so if you want to know more about it check out that full video but it looks like it's working fine and thankfully all of them seem to be working fine well here are all six of the crts we've looked at today and the last thing I just wanted to show was all these set up next to each other for a simple reason not to just show how many you know what six crts look like in a row but I wanted to show you the different types of tubes that were even available between the same manufacturer and if some of you can already tell and know what I'm going to be talking about real quickly here but for example when you look back you can tell that the tube down there in the far right the trinitron tube and the 41 is a lot darker than the one next to it on the 1350 and if you compare the 1350 to the 1390 the tube colors are a lot different you see how the one on the right is a lot lighter gray that one has a darker tint to it the sony bvm has an extremely light gray tube in it the field monitor the eight series both of those have dark dark tubes and the one on the left is even darker than the one it's probably the darkest of all six honestly that one on the left now the reason that I was told that there's differences in the colors of those tubes would be dependent upon what your situation is that you're using the tube for now the ones that have a lighter gray tube those are going to perform best in situations with very low to almost zero zero ambient light so an environment where you can control your lighting like inside of a studio environment or some kind of editing van or anything where you can control the light and just eliminate it for the most part those tubes are designed to be in that kind of darker environment so none of the ambient light will you know it would easily more show off that lighter gray tube than the darker tube so the darker tube would have been an option for situations where you were either you know you had a lot of light in the background or around you that you can't control so for example those two down there would have been out in the field somewhere so if you're in an area where there's a lot of light from the sun or you know you're outside or you're in a situation where you have a lit up room and you need to see better the darker tubes would have been a selling feature for these companies to say that you know this was would look better with ambient light as opposed to the normal I think the standard way they would come out would be the lighter gray so that's just what I had always heard about it if you know anything different than that and are for sure on that information share it with us below because we're always trying to figure out what's exactly going on sometimes with some of these things and a lot of times it turns out to be rumors or not true but I wouldn't suspect that would be untrue anyway that's our six CRT inspection today let's get them all upstairs and loaded but I won't make you see that part I'll just let you have one last look at all six of them again if you want to check out any videos that I have specifically on the exact monitor that I mentioned I have a tagged video for I'll include those in the description of this video thank you guys for watching today and I'll see you next time with some more retro content