 Hey everybody, welcome back today. I have a special treat for you. I'm releasing a Presentation that I made last year. I thought I'd give you a little bit of an introduction to this So this was a presentation that I wrote and it's intended to be more of an introduction Into CRTs, but the first maybe one-third of this presentation really does dive into the history of the CRT Dating all the way back to the first Initial invention of the CRT in the 1800s if you can believe that so there's a lot of good information in here Again, this was a presentation that I did last year and I actually did Published this about a year a little over a year ago. However, the audio quality was just unbelievably bad And so was the video quality. So I actually had a better copy come into my possession And I thought since unfortunately 2020 is here and I will not be going to any conventions At least in the next probably six months. I don't even see any on the horizon. So I thought that it would be a nice treat to re-release this and it's upgraded and Updated format so you can hear it. So again, you've got the presentation where we've got the history And then we're gonna go into you know some basic information about CRTs and then finally it'll end up with The future of CRTs and then a Q&A session with people who are live at the event Well, let me know what you think about the presentation with a comment below and thanks for watching again I'll see you guys next time with some more retro content But anyway, I want to give you a little bit of information about retro tech. This is a company I started almost four years ago now and We originally started Working on gaming consoles and repairs and modifications and then eventually in 2016 I really started to dive heavily into CRT repairs and restoration Last year in June. I founded a YouTube channel, which is pretty much all about CRT restoration and repairs And then since then we've been able to restore over 200 CRTs to date So it's just a little bit about Retro tech and I do actually have a mission statement for this company and it's Resurrecting vintage technologies for the modern world so that's just a little bit about Retro tech and the company and Today we're going to go through this presentation and I'm just going to give you a little bit of highlight here We're going to talk about a little bit about the history of CRTs we'll get into different types of CRTs and Of course current uses benefits why you would want to use a CRT what's good and also a little bit about what's bad about them And then we'll look at what to look for when we are trying to hunt for a CRT Some of the reasons that CRT restoration is Important and then we'll do a Q&A at the end if anybody has any questions All right, so I just want to give you a little bit of brief history lesson on The history of the cathode ray tube so believe it or not cathode rays were actually discovered in the 1850s so this technology goes back in extremely long time and The gentleman in the middle of the picture is Julius Pluker and then Johan Wilhelm Hitroff these two scientists Basically started the whole study of the cathode ray They discovered it and then they shot it into vacuum tubes and watched it project shadows against the tube And that was officially the first kind of CRT Tube technology starting and then you know 40 years later. You've got Arthur Schuster He uses an electric field of current to create deflection Which just means he's using electrical currents to move the beam That's being protruded through the tube and to give you a nice geometrical shape Eventually on the end of the tube the 1897 another gentleman started using magnetic fields, which is actually what is used now in Tubes and then in the same year JJ Thompson Proves that cathode rays are made of subatomic subatomic particles known as electrons So the electron and the shape of the atom was actually discovered through the cathode ray tube in the late 1800s This is officially the first CRT that was ever made and it was again 1897 so a lot happened around this year This is a different gentleman named Frederick Ferdinand Braun. It's called the brawn tube It was a cold tube meaning there wasn't any electrical current actually powering it You'd if you just send your beam of a current through here and he would watch the beam of current go through the tube And it was more of an electric alright. I'm sorry at a oscilloscope. So he's just reading What the rays were doing or what the different currents were doing? we're fast forward a little bit further and We've got John Johnson and then Harry Weinhardt from Western Electric They developed the actual first hot cathode ray tube just means electrically heated and powered and Then it is sold as a commercial product later that year So this was not used for like televisions or anything at this point It's would have been more used for like Morse code technology back in early war All right, so this is the major time then of technological advancement towards a picture screen In this gentleman, I'm not going to pretend to know how to say his name from Japan. He in 1925 He had developed his own CRT with 40 lines of picture resolution Two years later. He's over doubled that to a hundred and then in 1928 He's the first person to ever display a human face on a CRT screen In 1932 at the same time if I were right after all this RCA is granted Trademarks for the terms cathode ray tube and they did at that time begin making and developing a test unit In 1950 RCA released that term back to everybody else that they could use it for their term, but this is a picture of the very first RCA trial set It looks a lot like a record player or a piece of giant furniture And this was actually kind of a weird setup because you could see the round picture face and The way it worked is that picture would reflect off a mirror on that fold-up Piece of furniture and you sit there in front of it and watch it off the mirror Not very effective and they actually weren't even able to get this sold yet the first couple or the first year because the actual first commercial commercially made CRT television was produced by Telefunken in Germany in 1934 this would have been an all-black-and-white set originally and here's some pictures of those original CRTs You know these are huge giant pieces of furniture That just had a nice little screen in them somewhere a lot of wood knobs This was the style of TV back in the early 1930s and mid 1930s And then we're gonna move through some of the early years of CRT television 1935 to 54 is pretty much dominated by black and white RCA continued to hold a major stock and share of the actual market They've made over half the CRTs at this time So back in the early for late 40s and early 50s RCA really began to try to develop a color TV and The way they were doing that is through what's called shadow mask technology And I'm not gonna get too different, you know into all the details in this one about exactly what you know Overly doing with a shadow mask, but I do have some examples of a little bit about how that works This first tube will go in it. That's not on that's just the wood grain is a shadow mask to I'll show you a little bit of difference between that and other tubes in a minute but 1956 to 58 the first few television shows were broadcast in a color format that was acceptable and usable by these RCA screens and then right after that in the early 60s color TVs just took off and This was again this one right here is the very first color Television that was ever made by RCA and pretty much anybody that was sold You can notice it had had a real round-ish picture to it. So that was really popular down in the early 50s A lot of wood Again now we're moving into the 60s where they're starting to get a little bit more of a 4x3 format and more almost straight sides and a little bit bigger picture tube and It's still a lot of wood, but mostly shadow mask technology all during this time RCA is dominating the television market So here's this little diagram of how shadow mask actually works You've got your three electron guns and that's what's given you each your colors red green and blue that Beam of light is shot through what's called the shadow mask You see on the diagram and then that mask is a way to line up the dots and a pattern on the screen And that's how you're getting your picture Is it's just filtered through that and aimed at the screen to make the pictures on the screen and The original color beams were in that triangular pattern and that's pretty important because it wasn't really an effective way to make a color picture and The alignment was changed later to straight three by or three in a row I'll show you that here at the top. That's an actual electron gun from a CRT mask or a shadow mask tube And it's got they moved it to three in a row They did that later to really increase the brightness on the shadow mask tubes And again this whole area where this gun is is in this area Right here in the back of the tube if you're not familiar with it. That's inside that that glass vacuum right there All right, so again shadow mask tubes they were produced for the entire lifespan of the CRT display and You can tell them by I put this picture up. They're actually curved on each side So it's curved top to bottom and then left to right or right to left It's curved on all sides. That's always going to be the situation for most you know shadow mask tubes So after after a little bit of time, Sony is really getting interested in getting into the game of television This is actually their very first television that they developed It was a portable eight inch black and white only screen and it wasn't projection type So it was a transistor television however It was not It was due to it was break down a lot and two years later was discontinued. It wasn't really a good seller But it was their first television. I've got some higher definition photos of that again It looks more like I don't know a spotlight or something, but it was an actual actual first television. So Sony Really wanted to get into the color TV market and in 1961 they started by going to an IEE trade show in New York and the executives were just walking around and they actually stumbled across a booth for a company called Autometric and it was just a small company that had designed what they called a chromatron color tube It used a single electron gun where the three guns were replaced by one And it's shot shot just one beam that was shot onto a vertical Grill instead of that shadow mask and then that was used again to separate the colors out Through a little bit different method, but Sony was really Really interested in this technology of just having the one single beam shot So they started developing the chrome what they did is they saw that and they immediately went into Developing their own version of this chromatron and they worked with paramount pictures during the time and 1964 they did reveal the first chromatron color TV set Later in the year, but it was produced the same year and literally to be competitive Sony sold it at half their cost So they were losing tons of money, but they were they're confident Or they were confident at the time that they could get production costs down and try to make up money on the back end Here's a picture of that early chromatron very first color TV Sony made and Again, this is not a trinitron. This is officially still a chromatron But that's what it looked like. So the chromatron nearly broke Sony by 1966 they were not able to reduce the cost because a chromatron technology was not easy to replicate so More competitors began to jump into the television market. They were all making shadow mass TVs that technology costs were going down Toshiba and Panasonic both jumped into the mark or into the game And they had to buy the RCA license who owned the license for shadow mask so they started making it and so with more competition and Sony not being able to You know balance those costs they continued at a financial loss till 1966 and then Sony executives They didn't want to give up on the search for a good color TV So they kept 30 engineers on staff to just work Non-stop on a new tube So it didn't take them very long though because they used a lot of the same things that they had from the chromatron And they pretty much completely redesigned it and the electron gun was able to still to do the thing We're wanted a single beam separated out into three different colors and then the new Grill was called an aperture grill and It's an electrically charged grill at the front to separate the colors out or to make your picture screen on the front of your tube So that was their big breakthrough. They finally made the tube and it was It was it looks and sounds similar to the chromatron because it's using one gun But they actually just abandoned that technology and had to redesign it that's really the only thing that's the same about it is the single gun and The final product was unique enough to apply for its own patent, which was very important The new Sony son or the new Sony tube was named the Trinitron Which everybody's heard of from the root word Trinity For the union of the three electron guns and a single gun and then Tron from Electron All right, so Sony's new Trinitron It pretty much outperformed every CRT on the market the single laser or the singer I'm sorry. The single electron beam was able to go and burn brighter than any shadow mask at the time Especially since they were still making them in that triangular pattern at this time They also needed a lot less adjustment actually the shadow mass tubes at that time They'd come off the assembly line and they'd have to be individually basically calibrated per set with all kinds of issues, but the Trinitron didn't have that trouble. It was a lot more user-friendly right out of the prediction production facility and Sony dominating the 40 years of CRT production And we talked about the Trinitron and that's what I've got down here It's only curved along one axis. So that's different where it's only curved along the right to left You know horizontal axis the vertical side of the tube is completely straight and flat no curve and It really wasn't until the Sony again got licensing they got a 30 year patent in 1966 And it went all the way to 1996 and that whole time shadow mass tubes couldn't catch up with the technology and really be hugely competitive on a quality standard so it wasn't till that patent expired that shadow mass tubes really started getting better and Advanced a lot in technology. So these are these early Sony Trinitrons some of the first games have been played on, you know, these like That's just the 70s style a lot of wood not really any Inputs yet on your TV. You're still using, you know RF signals And then move on to the 80s now. That's an 80s set down there It's a it's not again. It's a sharp this little wood grain one So it's not but it's the same style as these where there's still a lot of wood grain a little bit of the new You know plastic on there and in 90s the 1990s is really where TVs got into the whole plastic Solid black or solid white other colors And that's just a picture of a lot of the Trinitrons that you most likely would have seen Not the 1990s is also a time when Sony brought their turn Trinitron to Computers and computer screens and started with those high-quality CRT monitors and then of course the 2000s the last generation you have the more Square design still silver and then even started coming out with widescreen high-def Other versions of the CRT right towards the end of like 2006. It's pretty much when they were Abandoned All right, so I just want to go through a couple of modern uses a lot of people know a lot of these things obviously arcade cabinets many of them out there are going to be loaded with CRTs and Retro video games are perfect for CRTs. They're all analog videos anything that puts out analog video Signals going to be best on a CRT in its native format VHS DVD laser disk any of those old movie formats are perfect for CRTs Retro PC if you do anything where you're hooking up a retro old computer and there's even a move more recently to do Modern gaming on higher-end CRTs and I'll show you that at the very end a little bit But there are some CRTs that are actually really well made enough to be able to still be usable today for even modern High-def signals and you can still stream older 4x3 content on to Tubes like this and they'll always probably be used for test signals out of oscilloscopes So some of the reasons these are going to be your best options there's no lag or latency added by a analog television and So you're not going to have any troubles with lag which can be a big problem with Retro gaming on any kind of new modern display you can really have trouble with lag and They're easier to connect retro gaming consoles to they look better you get the real I feel like CRTs have a big part of the nostalgia of playing old games It's just like a warm fire almost you get a little nice feeling, you know just part of the whole experience And it can I put down here that retro gaming on a CRT can be cheaper at the beginning Because once you start getting into it and want to get better console and better CRTs Those start to go up a lot in price Much easier to use a CRT than a scaler there are scalers out there They can help you get from your analog signal up to HDMI But those will either add lag or can be complicated and require firmware And a lot of other things like that and they definitely have some of the best picture screen controls you'll probably ever see on displays and Again CRTs are just designed for analog video and most consumer CRTs and then pro video monitors Which are pro versions of the CRT they can handle 240p and 480 our video resolutions perfectly And those are the resolutions that pretty much all your retro games are going to come out of naturally And that's rear those those two formats you have extreme problems You know if you try to do that in modern televisions, they're not really designed to hold display those older video signals I talked to briefly about some of the higher pro and models that will do a full range from 240p all the way up to 1080i and Then you got digital visual digital videos started at 480p and That is one that can only really be displayed on VGA CRT monitors 480p and up unless you've got one of those pro monitors that that can go through the whole spectrum of Sizes So nearly all flat-screen TVs and monitors don't support 240p or 480i And again, we talked about low quality scalers adding problems And let's talk about obviously the disadvantages of owning CRTs They do take up a lot of power Not it's not a huge amount, but it is a significantly more than your Your regular flat screen does anymore. They're of course big and heavy a large footprint I mean they take up a lot of space if you get a bigger one and then hindsight for the to Match that you've got most most the time you're not going to find a display over 36 inches on a CRT Some people do complain about the 480i flicker on a CRT and that's just where the interlaced picture flickers back and forth Some people pick that up with their eyes and then some people really pick up the high frequency noise through ears Now if you do get older, you can lose that hearing ability so there are some people that can't hear it at all and Most CRTs cannot display digital video signals We talk about that and they're so old now and been out of circulation for so long in production that they a lot of them end Up needing repair when you get them I like to tell you a couple things here if you're going to ever be looking for a CRT What you would want to do, you know, how what's a good thing to checklist to check through first? Obviously, does it work is it turn on and when you get it turned on how does the screen look is it? Everything looked kind of normal It's really important now to focus on the brand if you can because you don't if you're gonna take the time to get a big CRT There's some brands you should look for and maybe some brands you should just avoid What inputs does the TV have or come with? What screen size best fits your situation so CRTs do get as small generally as five inches and up to 36 What year was it manufactured and all that stuff is good to study before him CRTs We're going to talk here for a second about consumer grade Now these are just the inputs you'll see excuse me On a normal consumer grade CRT And that's rf, which is the old screw in Signal which gives you pretty much the worst quality Uh available video and then you've got composite inputs or av which is your yellow white red Uh s video was a big Improvement back in the 1980s ish Early 90s and that was added to most TVs And then the last input added on most consumer grade crts in the united states or north american would have been component and then Earlier crts actually didn't call it component. They called it color stream So you'll notice that if you look at an older tube and it says color stream on it That's just a fancier word for component before they called it component I've got some pictures here this top one right here It's a little bit difficult to see but the third input there is the color stream where it has the green dark green The blue and then the red if you see a crt It's a consumer crt and you're looking for one if you see that input That's probably going to be your best bet because there's not going to be any really fancy extra scaling And that's really when tubes were high highest quality and everything even though you might find a newer one that has More inputs like this one. There's a chance. It's not going to have as good a picture as some of the color stream ones And then let's get into some best brands obviously sony trinitron. It was the king of Sony or i mean of crts the best years to look for Are between 1996 and 2005 if you're going to get one this is a consumer grade again And just some tips stay away from widescreen consumer crts And crts that are again consumers that have hdmi inputs because those actually have scalars built into them that will add lag Kind of like your hdmi wood on an early flat screen or a modern flat screen They just don't do very well and most people are not happy with them There are some really great shadow mask tubes again. This is after that patent ran out on sony Here's two of the best that were ever made. You've got the toshiba a or af series That one right there is an example of it. It's usually silver It comes in a nice 32 inch model there and then the jvcd series was also one of the best This one had tv lines counts or resolution that would rival these pro monitors I don't 750 tv lines a resolution on that one And those ones again get up to 36 inches and have all the inputs that you'd want But what about the best crts that were ever made? So from the 1980s till about the mid 2000s Most consumer or most companies that made higher-end consumer crts also made a commercial grade crt monitor These would have been professional style monitors and they were developed for pretty much three main industries The medical industry Film and tv production and then finally closed circuit television through security monitors And those were all products that each one of these companies generally made Uh these pro crts they did often cost about 10 times as much as your normal crt or television would have They have superior picture performance Completely adjustable and were unrivaled for quality at the time These are these pro monitors are preferred for retro gaming So that's what i've got down here to the side of me On the cart is an example of a pro monitor And the reason it's so good is at the top end it supports rgbs which is red green blue and sync That's going to give you the absolute highest quality video signal you can get from an analog system And many models of these pvms will support Both pal and ntsc video so you could bring things that were outside of Obviously this region and hook them up to this tv or monitor excuse me With no problems it would display the picture now there is something you should know that All monitors dropped the support of rf. So that was kind of what differentiated most of the times a monitor and a television monitors did not usually have rf or Any kind of frequency like that They do have we talked a little bit about the resolution. So this is just a close-up picture of That 240p signal on On a crt. These are obviously a couple of video games. These are pro monitors If they produce this nice you have to get really really close, but they produce this nice scan line effect And what's happening in that picture is it's a progressive picture. So on a tube A tv tube has 480 Vertical lines on it And all that this is doing is lighten up half of them and it's skipping a line interval in between each one of those and creating just a blacked out line So that gives you just a solid progressive picture with no flicker And then that's what the scan line effect comes in and actually makes it look sharper So this was this was pretty revolutionary for video game developers back in the day Because it was kind of a trick. No one really had used 240p like this And they did a really great job of doing it to make a progressive scan for video games So first, let's just take a brief discussion on the two pro monitors that sony made the two families of pro monitors They were all of you or as is the way or as it worked out in the consumer market sony was the leader in the professional market too And they produced the professional video monitor or pvm for short Those were specifically medical security And then smaller video editing so like somebody a lot of news stations used the pvm Because a bvm would have been so much more expensive than even a pvm But you were still able to do a lot of video editing And and use those for color Verifications and things like that They there are some sony medical pvm's that are branded as olympus So if you are looking for a pvm, you can look for olympus branded monitors if you see olympus oev That's most of the time a just straight up sony pvm, which is a different sticker on it However olympus was You or did use panasonic prior to sony So if you run into one from like 92 or 93 It'll look like this one where I have the shadow mask and it'll be completely different tube So just check it make sure that it says it'll actually say trinitron on it still if it's the sony version Sony also produced a bvm, which is considered a highest level a monitor. It's for broadcast video And these were extremely expensive They were used to edit movies music videos tv shows and live broadcast television And the bvms are the best of the best the crts Can offer and they do have some of the highest video resolutions The most supreme picture quality available for retro gaming or any kind of analog video signal And that on the top is a lower end sony pvm and then down at the bottom. We've got the bvm But this is so if you look here, here's just some Common Models you might see we've got different sizes here So most of them will look like this where they've got the knobs and buttons and Adjustments on them, but you'll also get ones like this one down at the bottom corner That are older and they have a cube design and really not very many buttons or anything those ones Are still very good though and very desirable So that's just kind of what a lot of those pvms looked like And if we get into the bvms again, these were generally bigger They all had to have Highly technical control boards sometimes you'd get them and they wouldn't have this control board down here at the bottom Built into them. So there's a lot of these are a lot more technical And a lot more finicky. So they are really great, but they do take a lot of patience And you have to study a lot and you know, they're almost like a like a high-end Ferrari They always seem to need servicing and stuff. So if you're getting into Monitors it's best to start with probably a pvm or something else Before you get into a bvm unless one just falls into your lab But there are two That match the pvms on builds so that 14 m4 de Is very similar to a pvm And not so much like the bvm. So if you see that one or that 8044 qd They're all compact in one and don't have like the video cards and all the different issues So those are really nice And there are some shadow mask again pro crt monitors. These are the companies that made them jvc panasonic ikagami and anyc That one on our picture right now is a jvc monitor. It's hard to see But that one is jvc. Here's some of these models that you'll see these are all standard So they are except for this bottom one. They all just do 480 i and 240p You've got this ikagami down here in the left hand corner jvc, which we saw the sonic picture on and then There's a panasonic version and this xm 29 is Highly desirable because it has a 29 inch screen and it also can do 480p. So it's it's a very desired Pro monitor So there are multi format pro crts and that Just means that they are these are again the best of the best. These are the ones that support 240p All the way up to 1080 i and They do have all the features of bvms and pro other pvms These ones get up to a thousand tv lines and resolution, which is pretty much the tops for any crt They do have a widescreen format in a lot of them And the build quality is pretty much unmatched in these all the parts are for the most part metal And a really high quality Really high quality capacitors and all parts in them is Unbelievably complex and high quality again. I told you they do need a lot of maintenance. They are complex They require external equipment. You can see how this one That you've got here you might find it and think it looks like a great monitor But then you notice there's no buttons on it again See how this one doesn't have any control pad built into it So you actually have to pay a couple hundred dollars more for an extra control pack So most of them are a little bit more Complex and require more equipment and then are finicky sometimes depending on the signal you can put in Now there are a couple of pvms That are really great that are multi format and don't have all the same technical Issues is like a bvm and that's a 20 l or the l5 series It came in two sizes 14 and 20 and that's a 20 inch. That's a really great monitor And then the bvm had two series of monitors that went And did multi format the d series and then an a series and the d series is probably the most highly desired Monitor for retro gaming out there, especially like a 24 inch widescreen or a 32 inch widescreen That's the only time you probably want to go with something. That's a widescreen as if you get one of these And then the a series but the problem with the a series is It was made such at the end of the lifespan that they didn't really make enough of The video cards that support component or rgb So you had to have an external card for that and they only made I could only come up with production numbers of 300 so they literally only made 300 of this video card for thousands of monitors and So just that video card is so hard to come by It sells for sometimes $3,000 just the video card in that monitor So, you know, you really probably have to stay away from the a series And if you're really wanting to go for something multi format, you want to stick to the pvml 5 or the bvm there if you're going to get a sony There are shadow mask Multi format crts meaning the same exact thing they can go up to 1080 i some of them These are the ikigami ads for some again same similar build quality same thing about needing different input cards and calibrations but these ones are Highly sought after and a lot of people who I've never had one of these multi format ikigamis I've had a lot of the sony ones But people who have these say that they're they like them better than the sony. So I know that they're really high quality This part right here that so that's like a that's an auto setup probe So, okay. Yeah, so you can it's a caliber. Yeah, it's a calibration tool for Like white levels and it you just plug it in and run a program It does a few other things black levels it can do quite a few color balances pretty much The problem again though too with that Is that it's hard to find the right auto or the two or I'm sorry the probe probes can be expensive if you buy an original one I do believe there are some knockoffs Yeah, like there are some You know usable alternatives from what I've heard I've never used I've never actually used one of those auto setup probes I've never I've never had access to one and But they are there and you just you know, there's there's plenty of information about If you end up getting one how to use it because they're you just plug it in and plug it in the center and run some programs And the monitor does all the work And here's the jvc ones again. These are very nice if you come across one The good thing about these is There is a guy that they generally have the same issue where there weren't a lot of the cards made for them for rgb But there's someone in There's a guy and he's in oh goodness Not what's the not australia? What's the other one down there? New zealand exactly So he's from new zealand and he's reverse engineered the card on these so you can get a rgb card for these monitors For like 60 bucks from him. So it's you know, that that's really great And this is uh, one of the top CRTs we talked about modern gaming on a crt This is it. This is the sony gdm f w 900 so if you ever see one of these and uh In person and someone's not asking like Over a thousand dollars for it. You better grab it if it's working because these are getting up there to where they're starting to sell for $3,000 or more just because there's not very many of them left They have a 16 by 10 aspect ratio And then there's some stuff on the native resolutions But they just have a incredibly high refresh rate No lag and a lot of people have been starting to use them for modern pc games and not only modern pc games But also hooking up things like Um hdmi consoles is like in pot playstation 4 xbox one and using them on there just because of uh The refresh rate and also You know, the good thing is you can change CRT screens are so good at refreshing so fast That if you are in a game where you're moving across back and forth on a screen, you know, you're not going to get any kind of Jitters or anything you might get on an lcd Or flat panel. Yeah artifacts that doesn't happen with this and you get that full like motion a picture the whole time So people really love them And all right So this is uh some tips on best places to look for a crt if you're looking for one So first thing is always check with your family and friends because I'm sure like your grandma Probably has one of these in her attic somewhere or somebody does this uh wood grain one And you can look at online local marketplaces craigslist facebook Uh offer up etc for consumer crt's and generally find good ones for pretty much next to nothing on there There are social media communities that i've written here. These are two of them That generally do have monitors as far as pro monitors. They will come for sale now It's not all the time But like if you go to that reddit page They have a listing page on there and it's just classified ads Of people in the gaming community that have extra monitors that want to get rid of them Or sell them. So that's a really great one that crt gaming one and then that facebook group They people will go on there and list them It can always go through ebay But that can be you know anything like expensive on ebay plus shipping is an absolute nightmare with crt's You can go to local government auction websites That right there ebid dot nashville dot gov That's the one here in nashville So ebid goes all over the country and has those in different areas And i've actually bought pvms from them that have come from The public library They also come from like uh courthouse situation with you know Trials Again security even like security monitors in jails All those things eventually end up Government waste or government auction off usually on these sites The only real place left anymore to find these kind of high-end monitors in the wild is pretty much Three places tv and news broadcast stations do still Sometimes have basements filled with these crt's you'd be surprised the last load these this one down here came two weeks ago on the cart it was part of A medical load, but also with that load was a crt load from east tennessee from a news station And they finally threw out all their stuff from the nineties so That was one way to get them medical facilities do still hold on to them and then recycling companies And the best thing to do with a recycling company if you try to contact them Don't try to contact them and tell them you unfortunately can't tell them you want to buy just one usually You have to go and buy things from them usually by the pallet you get a better deal But a lot of this stuff you get won't work. They don't really like to Generally mess around with single sales All right now we can move on finally just some crt repair and restoration So i've got some pictures here of electrolytic capacitors that are in really bad shape It's might be a little hard to see on the pictures there But this is generally when you get into a 25 year old machine You can see this pretty commonly where you'll have extremely dirty caps Or on this picture over here on the left you can see the tops of them is starting to peak And bulge that's a sign those caps are dead, but not only that there's always a lot of film dust residue on the boards So what ends up the average Pro video monitor for example that One down there has about 190 electrolytic capacitors just like that inside of it So That's a lot and they don't generally last longer than 20 years So It's always a good idea if you get a monitor for the first time to just look inside And observe the caps and make sure that they don't explode. None of them have exploded None of them look bulged like that Because if that thing blows up and leaks what's inside of it is All over the board. It can be really difficult to clean And then it can also corrode your traces and cause very big problems with other more important parts on the board Because what's what's actually inside of a capacitor is is these old electrolytic capacitors nothing more than fish oil So that's why if you turn on an old machine That hasn't been turned on a lot and you start to smell a weird fishy smell That means you've got capacitor fluid On your board and it's starting to get hot and cook inside there and you're smelling fish oil from 30 years ago start to heat up so Again, it's always great now Sometimes it won't look that bad and you can just get in there And get a lot of compressed air and blow a lot of this stuff out The other problem with the capacitor is in the dust is the dust will build up on the capacitors themselves And if you get completely dusted over components that actually starts to access act as an insulator and As it gets hotter He builds up inside there and it actually wears down your CRT faster All right, so obviously like one of the big reasons for repair and restoration is preserving the hardware and the format So I It's very important. You don't always have something to be able to put these on their native form And that's really one of the main reasons and obvious reasons To restore and keep CRTs around But there's a bigger issue And that's e-waste so E-waste is a big Big problem that we're all going to be probably talking about the rest of our lives, you know This could be any electronics, but specifically CRTs are especially problematic And I'll show you a little bit more on why first off in 2006 The epa designated CRTs Marked for disposal meaning if you say I'm going to throw away my CRT Then that CRT is considered hazardous waste because there's lead Blown into the glass itself, especially in the funnel area That's all lead lined glass so The epa came out and said it was hazardous, but they didn't make any rule Or a law that Said you have to recycle it. They just encourage you to recycle or reuse it But the the actual regulations are very or they vary dependent on the district and the state So some areas it's illegal to dump your CRTs, but like in Tennessee. It's actually not you can just call your local Garbage man, and they generally will just come pick them up And of course you can imagine where they end up if they do that so another problem With all this is CRTs are extremely expensive Hazardous and difficult to recycle Is that picture on the left? It would be a normal recycling center where you can just see they are overloaded with CRTs I mean hundreds there and then this guy on the right It's a little bit difficult to see but in order to break those things down you literally have to pull all the Plastic off and you need to get this tube out of this frame And do so safely And a lot of times this guy you can't tell but he's broken this glass So there's a hazard in that but it's just very time-consuming And a lot of manual labor involved and chances to kind of get hurt Unfortunately most CRTs end up in landfills Uh or even worse than that is they're shipped overseas And they end up part of a dangerous metal scrapping trade And so CRTs There was a time period where CRTs were actually you'd go to a recycler You'd say i'm going to give you my CRT. They say yeah, we'll take it and there was excuse me There's been many times you can go look on youtube and find hundreds of videos of news channels exposing these Recyclers they were actually taking the tubes out of the CRT They'd load them all in c containers and then they'd ship them to china Or they'd ship them to africa And they were saying that these used damaged bad tubes were reusable To get around the paperwork of the EPA So they ended up over in landfill or in the middle of you know pits in these third world countries just being built up But again CRTs are a huge part of this Because the glass is just there's no viable way to reuse that glass if it's busted So this next picture is a little bit difficult to look at but uh It's it's a good example of what really happens to CRT And at first sight it's kind of difficult to see what's going on here But this is a back of a CRT There's the buttons of the CRT And the goat is actually standing in the shattered glass from the tube And the boy You see he's got a little tray that he's carrying all his scraps in that is good That tray is the actual shadow mask From inside the CRT. So he's broken the glass. He has no shoes on he's broken the glass Gotten them the metal out of the glass And then he's filling that up with the components because the CRT it does have a lot of copper in it That's not attached to it that is salvageable and then the circuit boards actually have Lots and lots of gold. So you can scrap CRT scrap Circuit boards if you just do that those are very desirable for scrapping because they have so many Highly, uh, you know expensive metals to get out of them. And that's what that kid will do He'll go do that and then sell those to somebody in his town But the good news is there are plenty of great CRTs available Uh and every retro gamer should own at least one or like my friend here 10 uh, so It's you know, that's that's pretty much it for the uh presentation today Um, thanks. There's my information again And if you guys have any questions about anything I talked about or anything randomly about CRTs I'll be glad to answer anything now Schematics on the whole of our CRTs and for repair those are just readily available. Yeah. Yeah, you know surprisingly Um communities for example like the reddit community, but even other Nintendo age Atari age other People have been doing a great job of scanning in these um A lot of these schematics because you can uh Especially any pro monitor you'll be able to find the schematic for no problem. It's well documented pdf You can usually get them for free off of that reddit page Actually hasn't listed there and even the d-series and the toshiba and a lot of those high-end models I listed If you go to that crt reddit Group they actually have a page that's dedicated to that just the specs and all that um, and even like consumer not always but you can still find them because What you can do with a lot of the CRTs is mod them so you can not only Repair them, but you can tap into the video processing chip on the crt circuit board and add um Add an input for rgb similar to these monitors or like your arcade And it's it's a it's a way of just tricking it But there are like a lot there's a lot of people that do that because it's It's easier and at the end of the day. It's a lot cheaper to mod a consumer set than to buy a You know thousands of dollars on one of these other because you can take like a 27 inch And easily mod that and have a larger screen with the rgb High-end inputs and get that scan line effect um with those So How about you know a lot of these 20 and 30 year old arcade games in here To keep them going what are the things we should be looking at doing or who can do that kind of work Where did the wait till they think yeah, yeah, it's that's that's a great point It's always a heck of a lot easier To get in there and do the maintenance on one of these things while it's still working As opposed to waiting till it fails and trying to figure out what went wrong So for example in a arcade cabinet, there's still a lot of great arcade Parts kind of manufactured, you know So there are kits where you're going to go in and if if you get a monitor and you want to restore the Game you can get Cap kits you can either buy an actual cap kit for your chassis Or you can just go through and either get the schematics for your chassis and build a cap kit out of the capacitors um or Just look at the capacitors on the circuit board and verify what they are So you change those out and generally if you can get a good flyback You can also change that flyback out And then there's like a hot, you know um I can't remember what the high occupant sound yeah transformer. Yeah that one Is part of the kit too. So if you go through when I would do when I do a restoration Something like that if somebody wants all those things then that's like what you do And at the same time clean the board and then Um, that's not really going to affect your tube at all So so you clean that board and then if you have tube problems You can go through and clean the tube There's some technique to like resetting the yoke on there the deflection yoke which Is I don't know how many you know what that might be. Let's go back to that tube picture and Kind of talk about that a little bit because those parts Do take a little bit of trick to fix let's see. All right, so This is this part right here is your deflection yoke, and it'll be all the way up against the tube generally. However, you know That that's the magnet in it that's actually pushing your picture out, you know so I'll be honest with you. I've had some times where I get into a new crt and It might have you know wonkiness or convergence in the corners, especially that's a big problem usually with them And then you get around back and I don't know if you've ever seen the convergence strips Which is just a little usually plastic strip with a little magnet on the end of it But you get in there and it's messed up and then you've got like 20 Strips that some text just kept jamming in there over and over and over again and honestly It's so much that it's like doing nothing. It's just too much to do nothing So um when I get in and I get a part of restoration. I actually there's one screw on this yoke And again, this could be all powered off obviously But you unscrew that just loosen that and then you twist start twisting that yoke because it's been attached to that tube generally like 20 years So you break it loose and then you pull it back on the neck, you know All the way up as far as you can and answer something remove all those strips And then push it back against it and then kind of start over See what you're looking at because again, it's really hard if you've got like corner convergence And again, you go back there and there's 30 magnets, you know, how you what are you really going to do to Fix that I'm adding more magnets didn't work Yeah, yeah, so um That's it now, uh, there are like some really high tech adjustments back here I say they're high tech, but they're not it's just highly complicated. They're actually really low tech because you're just spinning these rings right here and that's that's affecting convergence and stuff see like the There's three sets of rings on that and the very first two Um, they adjust your screen purity So if you have like a white screen on the screen and you notice I don't know purple or a little orange in it Then you move the first two slides back and forth Till that just balances out and hopefully gets white mostly and then the ones behind it control I'm sorry. I can't remember what the exact order is off the top of my head but one controls like the red And then the other controls like the green and blue. So there's only It's that's really really I mean super It's super troublesome. So unless you really have an issue you probably shouldn't get in there most of the time Those are going to be epoxy So unless you just notice a terrible convergence issue, it's really not good to get into those too much But that can be done and that's how it was done originally The other questions Yeah, yeah, that's a good idea. So here's something they are sensitive to temperature However CRTs can still if they're not in operation. They can get up pretty high I'm not exact, you know, and they can even go down to below freezing It's just you got to keep them kind of above 20 degrees and below like a hundred And then humidity will have a big impact on that obviously from it just sitting there Now the today was a really good example because I had some CRTs that I was Pulling out of my garage, right and it's freezing cold and you bring them inside And it's like all of a sudden covered in condensation That's obviously a terrible idea for me to just plug it in and turn it on So you have to like let them sit there and get up to ambient room temperature or you're going to have Huge amount of trouble But yeah, if you they're okay, if honestly if you're not using them, they're fine to be stored for long periods of time They can withstand a high like there is a tolerance Usually it will be in the manual. I'll tell you an exact tolerance on the tube For the actual temperature it can be at and it's generally That temperature is generally less A lower window when it's operating and then higher tolerance or you know, it can stand higher conditions Hotter or colder just being stored so if you do come across CRTs that have been in like a storage warehouse or if like You do have obviously extras and you're keeping them in a storage unit or your garage You're fine especially in our Temperature, but you're not fine if you go out and grab it out of the cold and try to go turn it right on That's not that's not usually a good idea We want it to be over like 40 degrees On the tube itself before you fire it up Yeah Well, I know I like I take that for granted because safety is probably and I talked to Dave a little bit about this if we want to we can try Maybe a repair session Next year where I can open things up and and show a little bit more because CRTs do have some areas that have huge amounts of parent running through them when they're on The biggest thing obviously is the anode cap And I don't even know that I have a picture It looks like there's not an anode cap on that tube in that direction, but it's generally going to be in the top Right here. There'll be a wire big heavy-duty wire plug up there That's that's where the majority of the high current is going through There's also some spots on the neck board that have a lot of current when it's running That's you don't you can shock yourself at You know CRTs You obviously you're not going to do like A lot of the recapping and stuff you do all that when there's no power in it and repair But when you're making all the adjustments, they've got to be running Right because you can't you can't tell what you're doing So you have to figure out how To safely make these adjustments So it's it's really just a methodical process of not taking anything for granted really don't Think too fat you watch what you're doing when something's turned on And now The reason it is safe to work on while it's running is there are isolation transformers built into a CRT So the current Is isolating itself like through a ground loop rather than using you While you're touching it to ground to the Earth so that current's not going to zap you while you're working on it But if you grab The two wrong points You know, you're going to make a new Path and that's the most dangerous shock would be to have Holding two points and have it go through like your heart So if you if you you know the first thing I did for probably the first, I don't know Year was I always kept one hand in my pocket And tried to just work as best I could with one hand Because you're not if you I mean I've got scars all over my hand Where I've zapped my hand on something and and it's just a little zap, but It's not like the big zap where again if you were holding Yeah, you don't want that so You just again have to be extremely cautious I have a lot of Videos on youtube a lot more Detailing safety. So if you're concerned with that, I would definitely recommend watching at least the safety videos And all you really have to do is probably go or look up on youtube crt safety And I bet my video will pop up as one of the top ones because that's one of the ones that people watch the most It's just how to safely get in there And I pretty much in that video breakdown at the back of a crt What areas are are more dangerous than others? But once you get you know, once you learn more about that and just get comfortable It will become a lot easier and you'll realize that a lot of things you thought were scary Are just not not really hazardous Like when when I first started you'll notice a very common issue on crt's Is that yoke will rotate a little bit somehow over time and in your screen won't be parallel straight it'll be cockeyed and So that's an adjustment you're probably going to do most likely you can do it by When it's turned off and turn on and see if it fixed it or you know But you can also do a while it's running and that's just again loosening like this screw On this yoke and literally just rotating that yoke till it's straight on the screen. That's what's causing it It's just somehow through movement or something the yoke just turns a little bit so That but that's that's one that like looks extremely intimidating because it's so close To that anode cap and you're doing it while it's running and there's that's that you know That yoke is covered in copper while they bear wires, but there's not There's actually a small film over those wires. So you can't you can touch it and not get it's not gonna It's it's actually Question x-rays Because I I spent 35 years Five days a week eight hours a day in front of crt tubes. Yeah These are computer terms as soon as the first computer terms seem out there all crt's 35 years up until 2005 or eight or so we got rid of the last ones and That's 20 to 24 inches from the screen and And then multiple ones up to five or six of them around yet at a time and I Agreed an article every once in a while about x-rays and how much radiation It was it was especially programmers back then it was one of the things that The question kept coming up and Apparently that the smaller ones up to the 13 14 15 17 inch diagonal size Um, the the flyback was delivering about 10 to 12,000 electron volts which Down in that range. I think the x-rays were small, but But then when crt started growing up into 30 Of 28 32 and 36 inches The amount of electron volts went up to 20,000. Yeah, 25 over 25 Over 25,000 and that's where I think later on we're reading that The amount of x-rays that that was significant. Yeah, and um So And then I wonder about, you know arcade games because you know here me if you're watching see it wasn't a problem because If you had a 36 inch tv and sitting 10 feet back because the energy dissipated Yeah with the square root of distance. So the energy is going the x-rays are going down like this but the difference is on an arcade game again being the two feet from the from the screen and uh And they're all open frame as well. Yeah. Yeah Yeah, well, I he didn't really have much shielding well wooden cabinets you had those shielding, but yeah plastic Only later did I think they sprayed a metallic foil on the inside of plastic cabinets originally the plastic cabinets were I think just plain plastic and then they Just to keep rf down. I think it started spraying the inside of the plastic with foil on the middle spray middle paint but um, yeah the question again is on um Time exposure to to that if if someone Someone's playing a game though. I mean I don't know how long people play arcade games or sit to be like that close to but the thing is is uh I mean if if you're doing like I was programing eight eight hours a day 40 hours a week that that could add up. Yeah, absolutely There's a lot of um, and that's actually something I didn't mention, but that was part of the hazards There is radiation levels They'd come out of a crt now I don't know they never I never could find anything exactly like saying how How much or how? How much it's making like how much of an impact it's making and I think it's probably something that they just Now since crt's aren't mainstream and part of production anymore that they're probably just abandoning Further research So if you go back and think about the day and age I mean during the crt days it wasn't um ocean wasn't as big a deal and um then people were How just measuring everything there wasn't a mindset to go out and measure as many hazards I mean Spearing That kind of exposure they figured well on the tv said if you're just far enough back you're safe I think that that was it but then they were these exemptions where people weren't people were excited for a long time You know you grew up in a country that's um A little bit smaller in landmass and you are much closer to a television because the living room you grew up in Half the size of what you guys grow up in like the japanese And they they play the video games one feet from their television and their controllers are really small So that's going to affect it. I love a lot more. Yeah But I'm screwed then I don't I don't really yeah, I don't know that uh It's hard to tell because there's so much so much energy too in a tube and then you've got things like You got the high frequency sound coming out too. So you can sit there And I mean who knows some people probably could get headaches and uh, not really I don't I mean, I'm sure there's a possibility of some beauty's Equilibrium, you know getting messed up by crt's possibly Uh, because of just the way there's an extreme amount of energy in them extreme amount of energy coming out of them And then um, there's you know stuff emanating from them I mean there's There's a reason they're hard to get into the back of too because like you say not only is it dangerous, but there's Especially like in those pro monitors, there's lots and lots of shielding extra shielding extra ground loops extra They started adding things like ferrite cores in them, you know to try to limit a lot of this Extra radiation coming from the cables and sound from the vibra, you know power cables So, um, it's obvious looking at it that it was a problem But I just think it was more of a mitigated problem than actually solved I do get the question a lot if I think people will go back to making crt's again and unfortunately, I don't Uh, probably see that as being a real option because You're gonna have one heck of a time getting some kind of government to let you Make more new glass led tubes in the world. I don't know you might be able to go somewhere And the the phosphors are not good for you either Yeah, I bet I know So yeah, both of those Um, it's just I think that like I guess the epa just honed in on the lead What's strange though because I mean vacuum tubes are a distant relative of way To crt The transistors just about put them out of business, but then there's been this resurgence now and the faculties have opened up Yeah, vacuum tubes actually I have seen that where they are building new vacuum tubes So maybe maybe there's some other way they can do it without lead and that would be probably the only option They like to sound Yeah characteristics of the tubes Well, there's there's a belief especially with audio that that like we've passed the point of good audio Like we lost like our newer so there might be the same thing with the video thing where we're passing this age of Just like this analog age and then they're going to the digital age and maybe we're realizing that a lot of the digital age It's quicker It's faster, but it's not always better as far as a purist is concerned Full circle if you can go to the computer museum up there Austin Most people realize that the first computer Was an analog computer the vacuum tubes are usually digital It was an analog computer and there's all real numbers Very voltages represent numbers and No integers or anything So, uh That was our first computer was was analog Not digital Yeah and there's some I mean in theory there's benefits to that especially When they invented the risk processor that was all an integer You lost us Hope was a lot of ability to do With deep competitions Yeah Computations with a lot of resolution Anything else anything Thank you so much guys if you need anything else I've got cards on the table if you haven't grabbed one, please do so again if you want to If you're looking at crts, you can definitely check out the youtube channel and Do a lot of research and again if you have troubles or questions you can email me and I'll try my best to answer as best I can I don't know everything. I mean, I've only been working on crts for three area three years now But it's something that it's a lot of fun and rewarding because again, it's it's like a forgotten technology and You're really only learning. I mean you asked about schematics And that's really the only way I learned about any of this stuff was reading What's called it? You just look up for a service manual on your monitor or television and It will literally give you Every Every calibration tip and things it breaks down how to do it. It's complex worded But it does tell you about a lot of the processes like I was talking about with the yoke and things like that Real quick see if I mean for somebody that finds a medium Wow I mean, yeah, we get in touch with you. Do you take what do you do like we built on? Yeah, yes, absolutely. I do that Especially if you're local or anything like that. That's that's the biggest catch. I actually have people that I have a gentleman from Lebanon the country lebanon and he's yeah, he's like I So he's taking his PVM apart and I have the same PVM in my shop He's sending me the circuit board. So I'm going to have to do the work on the circuit boards Check them on my monitor and then send them back to him and lebanon And work on them that way So there's that kind of an option to avoid a lot of if you're capable of ripping the taking the boards out And put it back then there's always that option, but if you're not You know, you can always bring it here or even if you want to I mean That's the fortunate thing it costs a lot of money if you got to ship one a long way And you're taking a lot of risk by it being broken But it's doable that just adds a lot, you know, you're going to spend more More in shipping if you do it that way than actually I'll charge for redoing it But yeah, so Generally speaking I service 90% of my work is servicing these pro monitors anymore and it's really getting them Certain capacitors changed that are problematic. There's about out of the 190. There's about 50 that are vital Maybe not quite 50 40 but those Once you change those 40 caps out generally and then do a couple of calibrations on it It'll pretty much be set forever because These things were designed to be running 24 hours a day So if they've not been running for 24 hours a day, you can usually tell because the screen Isn't burned in somewhere. They easily get burned if they run that long so If they've not been running that long and you you know, you get one It's it's you know, once you get it reset You're never going to put the amount of hours on it that it was meant to do because even if you I was doing this math for somebody if you used your pvm 10 hours a day For 10 200 days out of the year. You're only putting 2000 hours on it and You know If it was on if it was meant to be on 24 hours a day 365, that's a ton of hours, you know 5 000 a year or whatever um But definitely if you you know and again even that see that's really why I made the youtube channel I hate to say this but it's so hard to get a crt to me um, I try to help by educating other people hopefully on Getting comfortable with repairs. That's why I like I'll do a full restoration on a video where I show everything You know, these are the caps I'm removing. This is how I took it apart. This is how I do this and that because it's It's impossible to find a tech probably And I mean, I honestly know like three in the united states that I trust Enough to send to and none of them are anywhere close to here like new brooklyn new york california southern california and That's like it and then me in tennessee and it's like nobody else is really working on Uh, these things regularly. Oh, yeah. Oh, no, thanks you guys for hanging out