 All right, well, we finally have come to what needs to be the last episode on the L5, at least for a while. Today's episode is all about the adjustments you can make through the service menu, at least the majority of the ones that you should be worried about for things like a little bit of color change, as well as mostly your geometry. And before we do that, because I have a feeling that if I just went straight into the calibration section, that it would get pretty boring and a lot of people may turn off the video just after two or three minutes of me talking about the menus. So instead of starting with that, we're going to start with all the testing I did as far as changing resolutions, trying different inputs, and going all the way from 240p to 480i to 720p to 1080i on the 20L5. And then to see what it looks like, what happens, how quick it changes between resolutions. If there's anything you need to know about it to make it properly do that, you'll find that out today. So again, first off, we're going to go through and show all the cool testing. And then I will timestamp the video or, as I say, put a nice section of timestamps in the description of the video, where I'll have the different points where you can jump in if you want to come back and later watch the calibration section. Or again, if you want to know just about the adjustments and everything there is to know, you can watch the entire video and stick around to the end for my final thoughts on it. Let's go ahead now and start the testing off with some analog video. All right, we're ready to start testing now. And one of the first things I'd like to test is all the inputs and outputs on the 20L5. And so we've got the inputs, we've got the Superditz Edo input into RGB right now. So first we're going to run through the 240p gamut of testing through. And just to make sure a signal passes through each input and then something comes out of the output side, the outputs are all run into the 14L5 here. So right off the bat we know that RGB is working. And what we can do is if you look behind me, you can see just the massive amount of wiring that we've got set up here. I do have a multi-out that will allow me to quickly change from what you see now as RGB into another input. So let's go ahead and put that in since we know RGB is working. And then I can come around here and we can change the input. Let's press line A. So line A is working and line A is working there. Now line A is using S video. And so that appears to be working fine. And then next we'll move to the composite input which is line B just right under that. Signal for B now. There we go. Line B. So that's composite input. Now you can use the 240p test suite, which we'll show you right now. We can use the 240p test suite to quickly jump between resolutions, which actually is quite helpful. So this is harder to see. What it does is it goes from 240p and you hit that button and it's 480i right now. It doesn't stay in 480i when you back out of it, but it does show you how 480i would be rendered through composite. Well now we can test the other inputs and other resolutions. So I've got my PlayStation 2 hooked up through Component and it's daisy-chained over to the 14L52. But just so you know, the menu right here is 480i. So we know 480i is working. I've got Gran Turismo 4 in here to test real quick because this game should give us ability to go up to like 1080i if I can remember correctly. Okay yeah, so this will go first off. We know 480p will work, but we can switch over that pretty easily. Staying 4 by 3. There it goes. 480p. And so we know that works. I'm going to go back. Now we're back at 480i. If we go down here to 1080i, that, yep, 1080, 60i. Now our tubes have shrunk down in resolution so they shouldn't even be nearly as sharp. Alright here we go. See we're dropping down into 1080i. Component, 1080i. We've got our lines across the top of our screen so that like I said is going to be there. Same thing, you might notice something at the bottom. And sometimes you might have an insert put in here that blocks that out and just clips on the front. There's little slots on it. It just sits in there. But it will work for 1080i. I mean I don't think it looks that great in 1080i. Wow, so I mean it looks blurry. I don't really know why anybody would want to use it for this. But it can do it. I think you're going to be better off if you're going to try to use one of these high definition resolutions going to 720p, which we could show off on an Xbox game. I'm not really sure if there are any PlayStation games that go 720p. Okay we're going to go back now into our screen settings. And this time we're going to go back to 4x3. We're going to remain in progressive mode this time on 480p. Take advantage of the whole screen here. Obviously this is pretty much perfect for this monitor. 480p, 480i and 240p. It's nice to be able to take advantage of this 480p mode though. This color is slow. Before we put the PlayStation 2 up I'd like to show you one thing. That is that a gun con will work on this monitor. Or any light gun really. You see me? Light guns do work on the 20.05 and pretty much any CRT. It's not flat and high definition only style. Our last resolution we want to look at is just Component 720p. This is Freedom Fighters on the original Xbox. And this will do 720p natively right out of the box that switches right to it. You're getting the same thing though with the shortened screen. What I will tell you is that the progressive image coming from the Xbox compared to say the PlayStation 2. It's just the Xbox's image quality is far superior through Component. But it works. Doesn't look great because you're again condensing your screen size. But that's all the resolutions. Let's take a look at some of the features and controls on the PVM L5 series. Now first thing I want to show is the brightness controls for your LED buttons. Now the first thing you could try to do is if you press control and these appear to be fine where you can actually see the different buttons. But if you cannot see them or they appear really dim, what you could do is locate the up and down button right here. And then we're going to press control and have no buttons on the screen. And if we start to press, for example, up, see how it brightens up? That's how you control the brightness. But if you could tone it down, if it's too bright, you could do it like that. But that's how you get that brightness to tune up is just make the control off and then you press up or down and that controls the brightness of your buttons. We are using RGB for this test. That means we have RGB slash component selected here. We have external sync in use on this side on the left. There are some other things over here that we will not be using, but the most important thing other than your inputs down here would be something like your degauss button and your reset button. And then most of the other things we're going to deal with are going to be on the right-hand side. Now on the right-hand side, we have volume up and down, contrast up and down, phase, chroma, and brightness up and down. So that's our five up and down meters. Then we have a menu button and then we have the word up and the word down and enter. Once we've pressed menu and we have our status screen pulled up, it will tell us what format we are in RGB, what our screen resolution is. Now this and every other PVM will not say 240p, it will say 480i. Color temperature is D65, so if you want to change that to a different color temperature, you can change that in this main menu. And then we've got some other things here we're not as concerned about. If I had pressed down, the first thing on this menu is the color temperature adjustment. So if we went in here and we hit enter, we would take us to this menu, hit enter again, and it will let you cycle through either the D93, the D65, or the user setting, which you can copy from the D65 and the D95 and then you can use these adjust, gain, and bias to tweak that color if you want to have it be slightly different than what the built-in color palettes are. At the back out of any menu, you just press the menu button. Go down again, this is where we would select our inputs. At the top we've got RGB or component, so pressing enter and pressing enter on here, which will light up our RGB, we change that, that's how we change to component or RGB. It must be on this briefcase and then over here on this selector. The rest of this stuff is not a concern. If you need to change obviously your language, you could do so here. The rest of the settings we want to get into are in the sub menu or the service menu. To access that, we need to have this menu pulled up and then we should be able to hit our Degas and Enter button at the same time, one on each side, and as we do that, it brings us to the sub menu or the service menu. We're going to be concerned mostly with our geometry and our horizontal and vertical geometry for the most part. Everything else is in good condition on this, but we'll walk through that in a minute, but this is how you get into this portion. For example, most of these on this side are shortened for what the menu is. This right here is the deflection. That's going to be where you're going to find your geometry settings. So if you go down to deflection and you go to focus, there is some things on here that if you need to change any of these, I highly suggest you consult the service manual. That is not an adjustment you should need to make most of the time. You can make a manual focus internally on the flyback if needed. This is the screen we are looking for. It will say horizontal size, horizontal center, and horizontal position, and markers, and the black section for each side. That's one that we are very interested in, and if we go down, we'll have the same kind of settings for our verticals. And then finally, the geometry setting. This is where you're going to adjust your linearity, your pin cushion, and then your screen lean, your tilts, anything that is a screen bow, stuff like that. Or any kind of curves along the sides can be adjusted by this menu. I would highly suggest again that you review the manual. It gives you a picture of what each one of these exact adjustments does and how you might want to make the adjustment on it, or what exactly to look for on your screen, and if you have a certain problem, which one of these controls will adjust and maybe help you adjust that. I will have a link to the full manual below, and that is going to do it for most of the important stuff that we need. The rest of the things in this menu are important, but they're not really things that you need to concern yourself with for 99% of the people out there. These are factory settings, and if you want to know more about them, definitely refer to the manual. But the main thing in this menu you're going to want to be concentrating on is this deflection menu. Now once you've got your settings changed in here, you can press menu, and then you're back out to just the main menu, and then you should be able to press Degas Enter again and it will go away. And if you press menu, there it is. You're out of it. You're back in the regular menu. We're going to make some adjustments here on this tube using some of the grids here from the 240p test patterns suite. It is adjustment time, and this is the second page on MD Fourier's 240p test suite. The best calibration test suite that you can find for a CRT, especially since it's free and it's for video games. This has a lot of built-in test patterns. Most of these are going to either show us things about our color and our screen geometry, and also things like sharpness, and we'll look at some of the other different types of menus here that you can use to judge your screen quality and make adjustments. This kind of square or rectangular grid pattern is really good for telling us where we are as far as screen centeredness. So for example, on here we have a gap at the bottom, so this needs to come down just a little bit, and then we need to expand it. We're also looking at a gap here and even a small gap here, so we need to move our entire screen to the right a bit, and then expand it out, and we'll try to get that cleaned up, and we'll make sure that if we can, and there's any kind of wonkiness along the edges, that we'll try to make adjustments if it's possible. There is one thing that I need to warn everyone. The CRTs, even these high-end ones like this, they were never guaranteed to give you 100% screen perfection. This is analog video still, and it never can get much better than probably 96 or 97% for like a perfect look. You're always going to find some little imperfection on it somewhere. Usually it's at a corner or at an edge. Just keep that in mind and try to do the best that you can, but here's another grid we'll be using, and we're going to start by adjusting this. And we're going to do, as we explained earlier, pull up the main menu, press the gauss and enter into our submenu, go down to deflection, hit enter, we'll start horizontally, and we need to move some to the right. We're on 85, so to right this, we will hit enter, and it saves it now in here. If you didn't want to write it, you could just press menu and back back out, and it'll jump back to whatever is written in it right now. The next thing we want to do is try to expand it. Let's try some size adjustment. You can use both the horizontal position and the horizontal center to tweak that exact center point you want to set. And right now, my goal is to push all these red lines up to the edge, and then after that we'll expand a bit further, but I first want to get everything to the edge. We've done that with every corner, well three of the four corners. This corner is here, I can see it. Now we're going to move to vertical adjustment, increase the size, bring it down some, that looks way better. But that's how you run through the vertical and horizontal sizing. And then after that, you'll want to get in and check out your other settings such as the geometry. And that's where you could do a linearity adjustment with the top two, or these are all right here are screen tilting and pin cushion controls. That's what this one down here, this one are all those six settings. That's a quick look at the setting numbers we have in here right now. And then if I go back, I'll show you the others so you can get an idea of where we're starting from. And then once I make my adjustments, I'll come back and show you these numbers again at the end and we'll see how the screen looks. Let's run through the final calibration settings here. We've got our scroll pattern going right now, so you can tell it looks very nice. I want to pull up the other test pattern starting with our grid pattern here. You'll notice I did go about one or two scan lines over the over scan line, which was the red border on this screen. So I try to push that red border again about one to two scan lines on each end out so that you don't see it when you play the game. You want to have a slight over scan. And then if I go to that screen, it's just got a larger vertical orientation. So it's going to show you more of a vertical over scan. That's not a very common resolution. The other thing to look at is our linearity screen and then our grid on top of our linearity. But our circles are very round and nicely centered and our convergence looks wonderful. The last thing I wanted to show you were the settings on our deflection. If I go and start with our horizontal settings, these are the horizontal settings for all of the settings on this monitor. And again, this is to refer to if you need assistance and a guide to maybe somewhere to start with on yours. You could probably use these numbers and tweak them some to get maybe a better image on your monitor if you want to try it. Here's our vertical settings. And then finally, I'll show you the geometry settings. So some of those did need to be adjusted. And again, at the end of the day, we've got probably about 95% to 96% if I had to give it my score, which is really high. All right, we've got just one more thing to cover on the 2005 and really all the L5s and even L2s. And that's the option slot in the back where you do have the ability to add one of these great Sony BKM input option cards. And there's obviously a bunch of them for this particular model. This is the full set of them. We've got a couple that do SDI and digital SDI. And then this is the BKM129X, which is the most popular because it's the analog video card that gives you both component and RGB input. And then there's also a composite as video input. And then there's even been some reproduction cards as open source by my friend Scumlos. He has designed some really nice options if you want to make your own card. And then there's, of course, this big boy, which is the HDSDI module, which has a fan in it and it's very noisy. And this is the reason the slot looks to be big enough to fit two cards in it. The rest of these cards are just one card thickness, half as thick as this, but this one's two card thick. And it's the reason that it's wider so it can slide in there and attach to the board through this pin. So there's not a spot to put two. It looks like you could fit two in there. But if you look in there, there's only one side that has a port and it was made double wide for this board, which is again the BKM142HD. So if you do need an extra input, there are options for this monitor. And that's how that works. Sometimes they'll have these nice slot covers. The way you install one of these cards is very simple. Just take the BKM127W, for example. The card has a path to slide on and you just push it in, give it a click and then tighten the top and bottom screws that are attached to the plate. And just hand tighten them. Don't make them overly tightened because then you might need to get them out and change to a new card. And now let's turn the screen on and see how that looks. It should pull up our information on our card right away after installing it. Now you don't want to install that card with your PVM powered on. You want to wait until it's nice and powered off. We'll give it a second to turn on here. That's coming up. We'll go to control menu. We should be able to go down here to our options and it should tell us what is in that option. Okay, here's our option. I had to change cards. Apparently this one, maybe it's not reading correctly. It is just B stock, so I've never actually tested it. This one does say 129X. It's been installed with the power off. So if I go down here and I go in my main menu to this, it'll tell me what that is. The serial number and everything. And then if I go to option A, it should give me the ability to set that. RGB components selection on there too. So that's pretty much how you set that up. Pretty simple. You don't have to do anything to the software. It just will read it automatically if your card works. Well that certainly was fun, wasn't it? We have just finished completely refurbing this Sony PVM-20L5. Now you could get in and replace capacitors, but the warning that I have is that this one can be very picky. So unless you really have an issue or you're a really experienced technician, then you shouldn't probably worry about the capacitor component change. I like to just go in and clean up this PVM primarily, maybe five to ten years from now. Once they start to get some serious age on them, then we can revisit the idea of just recapping one that is working fine if you're concerned at that point. But right now, since these are still in the early to mid 2000 range, they should have plenty of life still on some of these capacitors if there's not a whole lot of usage on them. Because the parts that Sony specifically used in this are going to be way better and higher quality, more likely than the ones you or I are going to be able to find second hand on the market, especially this year in 2021. Alright guys, let me know what you think with a comment below. I certainly did have a lot of fun working on this one, but I'm ready to move on to a new project and we will see what that is coming soon. But for today, thanks again for watching. I'll see you guys next time with some more retro content.