 Hello again, welcome back to another deep dive featuring the Sony PVM 1344Q CRT monitor. I'd like to go over some of the cool details on this old school retro CRT because in today's environment this is still a lovely machine and it has so many great uses, especially for anything that involves analog video that I really think it deserves a little bit of attention. Let's start with some features on this monitor. First off it does have a better than 600 TV line display tube. It's also marketed as being a super fine pitch Trenetron tube inside and really all that means is that's a selling point where Sony would explain that they had a super fine pitch in their Aputure grill which was part of the Trenetron technology that was different from any other CRT during this time period. Now this PVM was manufactured in 1993 and this was right during the time when Sony would have still had their patent law in place for the Sony Trenetron meaning they would have not given anybody else the rights to really make a Trenetron tube and then they would have sold it on the technology based inside of it and that is the single gun technology where it has one single electron gun and then the specific Aputure grill and a tube also is only curved on one side as it's not curved vertically like you would have in shadow mass tubes during this time period. Alright so before we get too much further on this monitor we're going to open it up take a look inside do some servicing and then we can move on to some of the amazing gameplay footage I've got for you. One of the first things we're going to do is remove our shell here on our PVM and that is to remove four screws on the back side and then you'll have three screws on each side normally they're all Phillips head screws remove those and then we can remove the shell please please whatever you do do not try to remove these rivets right here and remove just the shell and leave this plastic backing that's not a good way to do that. Now we're ready to remove the back shell now this one has probably not been removed in a while so I'm going to get it to the edge of my table here so that this plastic edge piece kind of hangs over a little bit that way I can wiggle it loose a little bit from that bottom we'll slowly back it out. Alright we've removed the shell and we're going to get in here and inspect inside this a little bit closer and to be frank with you this is actually one of the cleanest Sony PVMs from 1993 that I've ever opened and seen especially considering that I don't believe anyone's ever really serviced it so my assumption is this one was not something that was heavily used and it was obviously not used in an environment that was dusty or anything so that's really really a good sign for this machine at this point and I just want to show you some of the important stuff inside this monitor first off if we look down here we're going to get close to our flyback assembly over here and that is an area of high voltage and then over in this area I want to just point out some parts that will generate a lot of heat and those are good areas to inspect so obviously over here is our horizontal deflection area and then there's a ton of transistors and regulators down in there you see by that potentiometer and those coil inductors over here these this area on this board will generate a fair amount of heat as it is in operation and then if we look on the power supply this is another area up here that is going to be our hotter area and we're going to get a lot of heat from those resistors and parts generating our and converting our DC current and things like that around to the monitor so those are all good areas to definitely take a look at and inspect but if I look in here at these capacitors they all look great I don't see a lot of wear and tear on anything it really just needs a little bit of a cleanup this is our vertical deflection circuitry around here but the more important thing again is this deflection adjustment area and we've got potentiometers down here and if you closely see we have a we have a key here on the side that tells us the small arrows will point to which potentiometer does which we've got horizontal size under scan horizontal size under scan vertical size pin amp pin phase vertical picture bow vertical angle vertical linearity I know you can't see those they're blocked by that piece of plastic here but that's what they say and then you've got vertical center maybe horizontal bow video phase and then there are a couple of other potentiometers inside here that you may have to adjust there's a horizontal center adjustment and this is always in the worst spot I'm it just has to do with the circuitry most of all and it's less about convenience this is your horizontal center potentiometer that's really one of the hardest things to adjust on this monitor is just that little potentiometer because you have to stick your hand in the high voltage area other adjustments we've got our color and video processing board on this side of the monitor and then we've got a subboard the vboard here and that allows you to adjust things like colors pretty much just blue and red and then your sub brightness now the other things to always consider is your neck board you see we've got our focus potentiometer on the other side here in our screen which is our g2 voltage and that's just your brightness now sometimes these controls will be on the actual flyback assembly somewhere but that's not the case here the biggest thing to check for on your neck boards are going to be pretty much in my experience it's going to be cold solder joints especially on these connection areas and up along the back of the neck board it's always worth checking and doing a good inspection and reflow and solder on any points that look shaky for example you'll get places over here where you could eventually have cold solder joints so you see how that solder is starting to give that ring effect right there that looks like see this looks like someplace that uh i'd recommend probably considering reflowing solder on this neck board before i close this up i'm going to recommend that to the client because this could eventually develop worse and over time and that that will cause the monitor to just pretty much turn off you'll turn it on you won't get any response if one of these goes cold then we have our rings of doom here and who is the lord of the rings i'm not sure but whoever can conquer these is the lord of the rings as far as i'm concerned these rings of course control screen purity and then convergence for our blue and for our beams here that's how you line them up this one was set at the factory and then epoxied into place and hopefully that's good enough we also do have some convergence strips in here that were set by the factory and here's a purity magnet on this side and then down on that and we have a purity magnet just to help balance the purity there's some dust on the tube and other components but not a whole lot now this contraption over here is on these older sony pvms it is the resistor assembly high voltage resistor assembly and this part unfortunately can go bad on other models of this monitor it seems to be pretty stable on this version but it's a this part altogether is just a pain in the neck thankfully sony got rid of it later down the line because it's a proprietary part and once it went out of production it pretty much became impossible to find so if it goes bad it can pretty much screw up the whole monitor alright guys we're going to remove this neck board just so we can get a closer look at it and i want to show you some of the potentiometer is just a little bit closer and then i'm going to personally inspect it a little bit more and probably again flow the solder reflow that solder on some of these points and we'll get this board service and it'll be good to go for a long time we're just going to disconnect the wires on here and slowly pull back trying to keep those pins straight and that's really all there is on this particular neck board now fortunately this plastic stuff never really never really lives it just imagine it manages to always fall apart so you saw how calm and everything i was on this plastic when i was removing it i didn't do anything aggressive and it's still just starts to disintegrate over time there's a closer look at these two potentiometers again you've got your screen slash g2 voltage adjustment and your focus adjustment and then finally we've got horizontal static convergence adjustment which i didn't show you earlier and that will help us align our beams horizontally across the screen when we do uh check our convergence all right everybody this is the board here just show you a close-up again of my biggest concerns are just around points like we have here see like the solder is just appearing to start to wear out check out that g1 see how it's just starting to look like you know after a couple more years especially if you use this thing a lot there's a good chance that you could get a cold solder break on there we're going to go ahead and reflow a lot of the major points here on this part and then all our major uh transistors on our board will probably touch up and then we'll go and check out our connections and we'll retouch up the solder on this and especially on our two adjustment points let's do that now here's our finished neck board that's been serviced and it's been thoroughly cleaned i just want to show you some of these points closer and we can see the beautiful solder that we have now on this neck board especially at these connection points going directly into the tube and that'll be good for a long time and everything on this end of the board has been reflowed and closer look at these connection points nice solder on there and all the resistors caps diodes etc transistors all's looking really nice and clean and now since that's been serviced we can bring the monitor back in here and reassemble it and start testing and adjusting it all right reinstalling our neck board is pretty simple on this monitor all we've got to do is make sure that we connect it correctly and we've got a couple of cables to do that first we can start at the bottom connect the cable that communicates with the main board and then you've got also a ground connection over here on the opposite side and before you connect the last connection up here to the corner let's go ahead and reseat the yoke on the tube itself and i've lined up the holes you can kind of see sorry if you're losing focus there but what i'm going to do is there's a center point on this neck board right here and you pretty much can sit your thumb there balance the board and try to push it till it gets all the way seated and that's safe and a nice effective way to do that then we'll connect our last cable and then our cable management stuff over here we've got some clips and hooks we can replace and put back into spots let's go ahead now and power the monitor back on hopefully we did everything okay and we'll see there we go we got a green power indicator down here in the led it sounded normal and now our screen is coming into view and there we go we can see our team eos lovely face and the 240p test suite all right so what we're going to do now is i'm going to let this warm up and to warm up i need to let it run for exactly 30 minutes and then after that i'll go in and check out some test patterns and see if we can make any adjustments it looks like just right away we might need to move this vertical positioning up a little bit expand that maybe and not much else though it looks pretty good maybe a focus adjustment to our monitor has been running solidly for about the last hour and it has been already adjusted i went ahead after it warmed up and got into this test suite and i'm going to show you some patterns in a second but if you need help adjusting your monitor i do have another video i'll tag it up here in the corner you can go check that out and see me adjust each one of those potentiometers individually and see how it looks on the screen but for today we're going to look at the test patterns and the most important test pattern to look at is our monoscope pattern from Keith Rainey first off you'll notice we do have a bit of an over scanned image and that is to give it the perfect aspect ratio as well as expand it out as far as basically it can go horizontally and then it has to be stretched vertically to match that four by three aspect ratio and that can be checked by simply measuring each side of this cube here and then the same thing with the larger box that is in the red you can press the a button and dim the white lines and keep just that you can again check those make sure they're all the same relatively the same size and then you've got perfect aspect ratio for the most part i'm going to give you a little bit of a rundown here in a minute on the buttons because if you're in rgb mode like i am in right now some of these buttons will not do anything for example if you press blue only or hv delay those don't work at all in your rgb mode you have to be in one of the other regular ntsc pal ccam modes online ab or y slash c slash s video and then you can use your blue only or hv delay now under scan will work and again that's helpful to check you can adjust understand values if you want to all our colors kind of set pretty well there is a shaded box in here that has three individual cubes and you want that to be just very barely visible in the best case scenario which it is here on this tube and that probably won't even show up on the video screen if we look at our linearity it's difficult to see the linearity on the regular size screen but you can go in and check it a little bit closer on this under scan screen and you can see how all the circles match up and are and are pretty round i like to check this screen the white black red green blue screens just to make sure there's no purity issues that's really good to check for that see if we have any kind of screen tearing or if the linearity shows on this it shows really well if something just doesn't look right this is a good test pattern and then we can switch that to have it go vertically instead of just horizontally and check to see if we have the same issues there and it looks like we have a pretty good dial in screen especially for something this old and manual from 1993 so we have a line a that does composite and a line b that does composite and then this is that yc or s video input along with the vtr input right over here which is pretty much a dead technology that no one uses anymore there is no output on this line so you can't daisy chain anything out of the s video but you can daisy chain out of the line a and line b composite mode and even your rgb or component video mode can run a daisy chain out from this to another device and get signals that way the monitor is self-terminating so you don't need any 75 ohm terminators on it there are a couple controls over here on the right hand side and that is first the color temperature selector we have 6500 and 9300 and then under that we have our selection switch to switch between component video or rgb where right now we're in rgb and finally here this is a v hold adjustment and so if you get this monitor and turn it on and you have scrolling vertically where the screen is just scrolling vertically up or down and won't stop adjust this potentiometer wheel a knob right here and it will correct that if you like this episode please make sure leave me a like and if you have any comments leave them below and also if you want any more additional information on this style of a pvm and how to make adjustments check out those linked videos i'll have them in the description for the video so hey enjoy the rest of the video with that gameplay footage and i will see you all next time with some more retro content