 All right, I'm going to do it. I'm going to reveal to you the secret place where I buy the majority of the CRTs, including all the professional video monitors and broadcast video monitors that you see me working on on the channel. And that is eBay. Yes, unfortunately, eBay is the most convenient place to purchase CRTs from, but it is also one of the most painful places to purchase CRTs from. So today I have a couple of unboxings for you, actually a trifecta of CRTs that all were bought on eBay and all were shipped through ground shipping. And I just want you to go ahead and guess how many of those three actually survived that shipping process before we get into it. But that's what we're doing today. Let's go ahead now and start unboxing some CRTs. All right, it's already been a crazy week here. We've got a lot of deliveries coming in. And I finally have a CRT. I've been waiting to get here in the shop for over 10 business days. You know you're in trouble when ground shippers like UPS hold on to your rare CRTs for over a week, much less 10 business days. Now what I'm going to show you here is one of the most disgusting, awful, ugly boxes you're ever going to see a 14M4U Sony CRT PVM packed in. Look at this. Drawings on it. Marmite, Matt, G-Wiz. I just love Marmite. The seller didn't even give me a fresh box. He just repackaged a $500 CRT. And that's how much I paid him for it. A $500 CRT in a box like this. So let's just see what happens. I'm not very confident this is going to survive. I mean, just look at the outside of the box one more time and then we're going to crack it open. There's like foam peanuts on the outside here. Let me get some more drawings over here. Food, fragile. Oh my goodness. Let's crack it open and see what nuts are inside. I've already opened just the top of it and we're going to open these flaps now and we're going to see what mysteries are held within this hideous packed box. Hopefully it's not just destroyed in here. Looks like our mystery is buried within a pile of peanuts. Packing peanuts. Of course, that makes the stuff even more fun. Alright, I feel it down in there. Let's get some of these packing peanuts out of the way. Well, thank God that's done. Check out this box. I just ripped the side, pulled out the monitor. Pretty typical American lazy asshole way to pack a CRT. Use a really old box that's already been beaten to hell and then just fill it with 10 pounds of styrofoam peanuts and wrap it in a single layer of bubble wrap. See if this seller gets a lucky break or will I have to file a return. Of course it's going to be a return. Look at this for brains. Goodness gracious. I knew it was going to be like this. Look at that box. Look at that. Just ruined. Unbelievable. Well, not unbelievable, but look at it. Buzzles bested all the way in. Screw this. This has been such a nightmare of a transaction to deal with. This thing's getting returned 100%. So wow, that's unfortunate. I'll show you some more pictures here of what this CRT looks like, but it's just a mess. We've got a broken bezel at least. We've got broken boards. Real tragic ending, but this one's definitely going to be a return. There's no way this seller is getting away with packing it like this and going to get to keep the money. So maybe I'll get to keep it for parts. Otherwise, they can come and pick all this crap up, but I'm not going to leave you on such a bad note. Let's check out these other unboxings that I did and hopefully they'll end up a little bit better than this poor guy. Well, hey guys, welcome back today. I'm out here in the lovely loading dock and I'm out here for a reason. I actually bought two Sony PVMs recently, and this time we're going for the big ones. So you've seen a ton of unboxings of me working through 14-inch PVMs, and those are about 50-50 on whether they get packed right and arrive, but we've got the even more illustrious 20-inch one today. And this is a part of, again, two CRTs that I purchased, and one of them has already arrived here. So I've got to open it up and see what happened to the CRT. All right, this box is just super flimsy. It's not tough. Personally, I don't think this has a great chance of surviving, but I've been wrong in the past. Let's hope I'm wrong again. All right, going to flip this open, and we have some bubble wrap. Oh, and I see, see down there? It's the back of the CRT. Nothing's broken right here. This is so, I'm so nervous right now. Look at this. Just literally like it's been rolled in this wrapping and dropped in this box. Oh, it doesn't feel broken, please. Tell me you survived. Tell me you survived. Here's the top. Let's look at the screen together. Okay, we've got CRT out. I can't believe this. This is the only reason I was a little bit hopeful. It's the 2030s. I can tell they don't have all the knobs and little protrusions on them, like the other PVMs that are the Medical and M series and other CRTs with all the knobs and all the pull rack mount things. This is just one button, and it has the button. When I bought it, I thought it didn't have the button. Now we do have, look at this, some separation right here. So I don't know whether that was before, because that's right up there against that line. And no, look, I'm sure this happened because of the shipping. Look at that. Got a little bit of separation here, because of course, it's probably been dropped. It was shipped by FedEx. Really, the only thing I can do is hook this up and test it out and see if it does work. So even if there is that little bit of plastic, I can deal with that. I just hope that internally it's going to be fine. So let's go get it set up and see what it does when we power it on. I'm ready to test this thing out. I've got a Super Nintendo over here hooked up, and it's hooked up using the first line, line A, or video one, and it's composite. And I'm not worried about audio because I don't have any speakers hooked up to this right now. I'm just testing single composite video. All right, let's hope nothing explodes. Let's push the power button here. Should hear a gong. Yeah, I'm hearing a gong. Definitely got some static control, line A. Let's see if anything pops up on the screen. Nothing. Oh, hang on. Sorry, sorry, sorry. I'm using this crazy ASCIIWARE ASCIIWARE controller, and it's got about a thousand things pressed in on it. Let's reset that. Oh, look at that. Wow. Okay, so since it's so bright out here, the camera is not wanting to pick that up on screen, but it works. I'm going to let it run for a little while. You can see our T-Mios 240p test suite as it scrolls, scrolls. All right, so I don't know what kind of miracle I have happening here, but this one looks to have survived, and I'm going to let it run for a while, and we'll see if it continues to work. Okay, I'm going to be very curious to see if the second PVM 2030 arrives in this good a condition, because I'm sure it's not going to be packed any better. So let's just see what happens when that thing arrives. Today it's not as nice of a day. A lot of rain out, and so that makes it really much more risky for CRT delivery, and of course FedEx, you know, they're aiming to disappoint here, I believe, because this box looks pretty darn awful compared to the first one. All right, so here it is. I'm not going to show you the labels on it, but the box just looks messed up. I mean, like I came out here, and this is how it was. I could stick my hand in it and feel the PVM. Not a good sign. So I'm going to strip this thing open, and maybe we'll get lucky since it's a 2030 and it's pretty hardy. All right, that box obviously has taken a beating, and I don't see any major d- oh, I do see some damage look down here. We got a separated bezel here. Oh gosh, I knew that we're going to break something. Let me see. Yep, of course, so definitely we'll be filing this for damage because there's broken plastic in there, and just still wasn't a great packing job, but that's disappointing. Let's turn it over and see if the power's on, and see what happens. See, look, the power button's not there, but I knew that was the case on this one that it didn't have a power button. Well, Super Nintendo is connected over here just to composite, and I decided to add a layer of tape around the bezel to hold it together because there is some breakage as I showed earlier, but it's been playing for a while. It's holding together. The image has been stable, no jumping or anything like that. Well, what you see here are rolls of the bubble wrap that the two 2030s were packed in. It was literally two big wraps of the bubble wrap, like brand new rolls, and then a partial roll, just those three. So it's pretty amazing. I'm glad that I was able to recycle this, and I'll get to reuse all this. Got it neatly rolled up here, but the CRTs have arrived. You can see that right there. I taped up the second one, which had the damage to the bezel. I'm still waiting to hear back from the seller on that. Maybe they'll give me a little bit of money back on it. Otherwise, I can fix it, and I do have a replacement button to fix that right there. So that's not a problem at all. But yeah, there you go. 20-inch PVMs that were able to survive some ground shipping, and this is probably the only one that could survive this type of packing. If you're going to ship one that's in the format like the other PVMs with all the buttons along the sides and the bottoms and the knobs and every little hook and piece of plastic on the front there, those don't hold up nearly as well in ground shipping. I guarantee that if there was two 20M2s, they would have both broken from this type of packing. But thankfully, these are saved, and they're going to get a full treatment for cap kits, adjustment, and things like that. But I've already done so many videos on the 2030 that I will link those videos for you in the description of this video so you can see just how to adjust this set, all the special features of the 2030, and things like that. So if you want more information, please do check out the links below. And what do you think? What about the survival rate here? We are at about 50%, because one of those 2030s wasn't in good shape, but I wound up keeping it anyway, even though I could have returned it for a full refund. But that 14M2 for you, that's definitely gone, returned. However, I'm not stopping. I'm going to keep on buying Sony CRTs and PVMs and things like that on eBay. Like this box right here, we have another PVM that I did order off eBay, but this one has arrived in a much tidier box. Now you'll notice this is much smaller than the last, well, three boxes all were, and that's not necessarily a bad thing, but that's probably the only concerning thing. This does have a 13-inch Sony PVM inside. All right, let's see. Okay. So this is much safer of a packing option. We've got this expandable foam that's been used, and what happens here is that foam forms around the PVM itself or CRT or whatever you're packing, really. It's not super thick, but I guess it doesn't have to be. See that's set over top of the front and top of the PVM, and then there's the monitor itself. It's actually in a bag to protect it, which is nice. Here's our CRT. Yeah, the box looks like it held up pretty well. It's definitely a double wall box. See how it has two layers of cardboard there, so that's going to be within spec. Also, the foam here is nice on top and bottom, so this probably would meet all the specifications for insurance if there's any damage, but that doesn't really mean anything. We all know that ground shipping carriers are notorious for throwing these things all over the place. Let's see what our CRT looks like. Okay, that's pretty good. So we don't obviously have any damage to our bezel, and buttons and knobs all appear to be fine. Let's check out the bottom for a second. Nothing appears to be broken under there. It's a good sign. This is in really good shape physically. Take a look at the label here. We have a Sony PVM 1350. It does RGB, S-video, and composite video. I'm going to actually take this one inside, and let's put it on the test bench. We're going for big time, and we're using RGB external sync. We've got ACN, and then we're going to go from the Sega Genesis to this Insurrection Industries SCART cable into that adapter from our modified Sega Genesis right there, and let's just spin around our PVM and wave hello one more time and see what happens when we energize it. This is it. You hear that? I've never heard one make that noise. Let's not let it blow up first. I'm going to have to open it up and see if I can find anything out. All right, check this out. We've got the power supply disconnected from sending power into the monitor, and I've been using my multimeter, and I'm testing the output voltage along this rail right here. The 5 volt A, I've tested it to ground, and it's showing 5 volts, but the 5 volt B is showing 0 volts, meaning that something in that line, most likely the transistor, is blown, and we're not getting 5 volts along that line like we need it. All right, so this is me reading 5 volts for ground A. See how it's reading 5? This is B, like next to nothing. And now I'll check the 15 volt line. 15, that's good. All right, so I found a replacement power supply, and now I've got an opportunity to get stable power into it. Let's turn it on. I'm still getting a lot of disturbing noises. We've got our red, green, and blue lines here, which means we've definitely got some deflection cap issues. We at least got it started, but this is not normal. If I was to put it in A, there's no signal going into it. The capacitors are actually warming up, and the current is almost stabilizing, and that's why we have no more jitters, and the screen is actually trying to expand out here as I continue to let this warm up. So I'm going to let it warm up a little bit longer, and maybe it'll get as close to almost normal as we can see, because I really want to recap this and see how much better it can look, but this has definitely got very bad capacitors in the deflection area. I went through and tweaked some of the geometry settings, and this was about as clean as I could get it without damaging the chassis by pushing it to places it shouldn't go, really. It definitely needs a recap in the deflection area, if not more areas of the board back there. I can actually start to smell some of the capacitors getting warm, and you get that fishy smell, so there's definitely some of them that have gone bad, but the tube thankfully looks nice and sharp, no burn, and this should all be fixable, all of it. All right, so there you go. You get one that's packed properly, but it has a few issues with it, and thankfully I know how to fix all these things, and if you want to see this CRT be repaired, well then please subscribe to the channel and be ready for our live shows. That's the perfect place for this type of repair. I'll go in and I'll fix this. We'll do the cap repair, and we'll find all the bad parts, and then we'll go through and adjust the geometry and make it look wonderful, because this one has a lot of potential, and we'll also repair that power supply and see what's causing those issues specifically on that five volt rail. However, if you don't know how to fix this stuff, that would kind of be a nightmare scenario where you bought a PVM that was listed as untested, and it really has a lot of issues, but thankfully it did arrive safely, so I really can't fault the seller in any way. They did everything they said they would, and I did buy it for a reduced price, so anyway, make sure you are subscribed if you want to see the repairs on the live stream, because again that will be coming up soon. But that is it for mega unboxings for you. Thank you for joining me today, and I will see you all next time with some more retro content.