 Hello everyone, Steve here back with Retro Tech and I've got another monitor ready for us to take a closer look at and today we will be taking a look at the 54Q series. So this series came out in about 1995 and it was a huge revolutionary step for the PVMs line of Sony's monitors. This particular monitor was the first to introduce the service menu, well this line of monitors. So you've got the 54Q which is this is the 19 inch 1954Q. This one is from 1995 and this one had a medical unit brother almost and that's the 1953 MD. Now if you're in other countries it might be 2053 and but that was the medical version of this monitor so this was kind of a representation of a PVM that was made for other uses besides medical so they separated the medical unit and then they had this unit for maybe video editing or some other type of work that didn't involve medical equipment specifically. So again this one had the very first example of the on-screen service menu with the geometry settings you can you know adjust on screen in front of the screen rather than turning potentiometers in the back of the monitor. So let's just go ahead and get right into this thing. I want to show you some of the specific features as well as what this particular unit did differently. So first we're going to go ahead and take a look behind the monitor and see some of the hardware. Shielding and you've got your power supply board over here now on the left and then all the regular yoke settings but let's take a look down here specifically at the deflection board. So we've got our flyback here and this is still an overall so there's the bottom one if you turn it up it'll actually make your screen kind of blow out and really bright white and you might even see some lines show up or vice versa if it's too low it'll just go black. So if you're seeing something on your screen and it's not working sometimes you actually need to make an adjustment on there but the problem is here it's very hard to access back here you don't have a lot of clearance I'd probably say less than two inches. So the one on top of that is your focus. There is one more potentiometer that's behind my colored cables right here that's this one and this you can't see it right from this angle so let's lean forward a little bit. This potentiometer this will again that will adjust your screen center. Horizontal you know what was going on inside there and so if you have where your yoke is really loose then most likely this screw right here has become loose and just needs to be tightened up so just be very gentle tightening that you can even loosen it a little bit first and then if you loosen it it actually loosens up your yoke and makes it easier to turn to make your adjustment. So just wanted to show that that's pretty much standard on all these monitors. I do want to try to keep these convergent strings in place because they were set originally professionally and that is one of the hardest things to adjust on a monitor's convergence I feel. So down here talking about convergence we're going to go and look at the neck board closer and you'll see another potentiometer right here and this is going to control our overall screen convergence so if you have colors that are separating all across your screen you can turn that convergence potentiometer and it'll line it up. Those are the only potentiometers that are going to be in this monitor anymore and everything else has been moved to the on-screen menu. Just a quick run-through on the back here this this is something that should be noted if you're looking at this particular monitor. For some reason on this one they've got three standard lines where it's A, B and C. C has the S video the other two are just standard composites and then you've got one RGB slash component input so this this will use RGB or component it'll allow it it's switchable on the front but you can't use both simultaneously because you have to either come up with a solution to change the signal and then change the setting on the monitor which is doable. Now please note it's just got one input here some of the 1953's actually have two inputs for RGB and component which is really nice which would have been at a different button setup these are this is also the first time you're going to see these particular knobs added to the CRT in the monitor. So first let's take a look at our button setup down here we've obviously got our power button which goes in and out like any other and if we get a power signal we get an LED indicator there now if you see this remote if it says an orange light shows up here then there's a setting where it's on remote settings and you just want to try to turn that remote setting off that just means that it's someone at the past was using it in remote sequence with other monitors and maybe had a remote control unit controlling a lot of the adjustments from somewhere else. First we've got our volume knob and we've got a contrast knob and a phase of chroma brightness and aperture so just to note settings such as s-video and even component then you'll be able to use chroma and then phase and aperture are really more for composite signals trying to clear them up so they might not do anything on some of the other buttons and talk about it. So you see obviously up top it says line A line B and line C and then under that it says RGB component SDI line slash RGB and X sync so if you just saw what I did so example whatever is lit up is the line you are on so if that's the only one lit up that's the A line that's the B line that's the C line there is no SDI card installed in this monitor but from the manual it says there was an option to add that so that's not going to be very common I've never seen one come with the SDI but that is what that means so most of the time you're going to ignore that one but for example to get it in RGB you have to first have it on A and then you have to go down here and you have to put see what says line slash whatever RGB for example that means you have to push that RGB to turn RGB and then you need to if you need X use the sync you'll have to have that pushed into so this example is a setup for RGB if I was using component instead I could use the same setup for that if I did not need sync for example then I could turn the sync off and I could use my component and my line button and that would be the only one pressed in so just keep that in mind that's how you use your setup for your inputs the bottom down here has our degauss button which is just a standard degauss then there's some other calibration tool setting so you've got a blue only which if you press it will only let you see blues which kind of shows up as just grays and that helps for a grayscale calibration of colors we've got an under scan mode that allows you to go to an under scan size on your screen and then so if you're not if you're seeing something and your screen looks small check and make sure that's not turned on we've also got an hv delay which is kind of for if you want to separate your sinks and you need some kind of sink I don't really use that normally but that is what that does and then you've got a 16 by 9 feature which like I said this was for use in video production more so this is a 16 by 9 photo it'll actually squeeze your picture down which is pretty useless but that's the way it goes and then you're going to insert enter the menus here by using this menu button let's back out and take a look at the screen we'll still go ahead and go through the patterns for you of how to do it we're going to go back to our test grid and we'll start from here so I will kind of turn off or try to turn off the inputs if I can so you can see the menu better but again we'll press menu on here we can set up our promo we don't want to do that that's done with a light probe I believe and then everything else the user configure that's where you might turn on your remote settings but and you can do some other smaller controls but the this one is pretty important so we talked about in the past adjusting your color temperatures if you want to adjust your gains and your biases so your gains are going to be like your color intensities and then your bias might be the grayscale of each color so the game you know if you need to do a little color adjustment you can go in there but this is the actual color temperatures again we got the 6,593 that's in nearly all the other monitors I have it on the 93 because that's my favorite and same way as the other menu to get into the sub menu we're going to press degauss and enter at the same time while we have that up and let's go through our settings again this is so if we go up and down we press menu to go up we press enter to go down and let's go I'm sorry menu to go down so it's the opposite of that menu press that to go down and enter to go up and we're going to start here and look at our settings the first let's just concentrate only on the first 17 settings because those are only those are the only ones that are going to be of most importance here for 95 percent of the time making adjustments on your monitor the first one for me I'm using 60 hertz frequency so I don't need the 50 I need to get to the first 60 which is my horizontal frequency and that's my centerness that is the center horizontal adjustment on my screen so if I press up I increase that value and my screen goes that way if I press down my screen value goes that way and if you notice here while you're moving this you'll see let me show you an arrow block that will point to whatever setting is set in the menu right now so if you need to make a one-time adjustment for a single game you can do that and then press the input your on button again it'll take the menu away and you can just use it temporarily and you can turn the monitor off right now or you can press degauss and it will actually send it back to whatever setting is stored inside the menu if you're making a permanent I'm sorry if you're making a permanent setting on here then to write that setting you're going to hit the enter button when you've made your adjustment you hit the enter button I'm sorry not enter you hit degauss you hit the degauss button you'll see it display right on the screen and if you hit it again you'll see a star show up next to your number right here right above the right you so you hit that twice quickly it writes that into memory and that's how you make an adjustment and keep it then you can go up from there and you can go to the next setting which is video phase which is a little bit it's just the same thing as horizontal frequency you have a lot of control over your horizontal centerness on these monitors so you can get it dialed in correctly and same thing to write it and change it it's all through up and down arrows and degauss twice to write your value and if you don't like a setting again I said you could get out of it and hit degauss and it'll go back or just turn it off and turn it right back on and it'll go back to the original settings pull your menu back up and start working again number six starts our vertical size on there and then our vertical center is next so you can see that move down the screen and up the screen and then our next setting is the again horizontal size and okay so now we're going to get in here to our corner adjustments first we've got pin phase and I'm just going to show you that's this ninth setting here you can see what that does that's more that hexagon trapezoid where we're trying to get the uh the screen moves this way towards it and backwards so if there's something really crazy look on the screen check this to try to get it balanced out correctly next we have pin amp which is your whacked out screens in the corners where it looks like a globe or the opposite of a globe uh so if you see something like this consistently at the corners you can tell that you need to make an adjustment in your pin amp so these were all settings that were in the previous model to this but you had to do them through potentiometers and a screwdriver in the back of the monitor while you were trying to adjust it up front so this one has a lower pin amp setting that allows you to do the lower curve as well as the upper pin above that number 12 so you've got the complete control of the corners it's not as uh the L series has more settings where it can let you get in the middle so sometimes on these monitors it's very difficult to get things in this area and this area and vice versa to get them perfect they're always going to look a little bit wonky uh I mean just a little bit so just keep that in mind with this because that's not something that's controllable that is controllable in later models of PVMs now we're going to get the sexy setting which is just a weird little thing that lets you control your center whether it's not lined up for some reason or you're trying to help center the lines down uh from the corner and that's the sexy setting uh vertical linearity so let's change to a different screen here for second and look at these circles linearity there's some monitors will have two linearity adjustments available this one only has a single one where you can go up and down in that linearity to try to help and you're trying to make your circles as round as possible you don't want any ovals but that's the goal of linearity is to try to help you get all your circles here lined up in a circular setting and then our next setting of importance is our vertical bow and then we have a lower vertical bow and finally a vertical angle so let's start working we're going to need to do the rest of these settings from the other screen vertical bow let's go ahead and just show you that that's just a lean on here where you can tell I'm doing this from one setting to the next so you can see how it uh it shifts that screen and that's that's what that one controls and the next is lower vertical bow so this is just working on the lower end of the screen you can see your corners moving so if one of them looks crazy you can move it around that way and the last is vertical angle which is the angle of your access point so you're you're turning that one way or the other on its axis like if you're if you're looking this way if your screen's looking a little crazy like that that's what that adjustment is so again you have to go through and try to use those settings that's about 12 or so that you will be able to individually use for the actual geometry on your screen on this model of pvm then you'll have to use a combination of all those to try to clear it up as best as possible and again if you don't like the settings turn it off and turn it back on and it'll give you back to what you were it didn't write you know your your other settings so that's something that you need to think about on there while you're working again this one does need a little bit of adjustment still but for the most part we're going to get out of this stuff and there you go so it's a very great monitor 600 tv lined rgb component a lot of inputs and it was an advancement for pvms but that's just kind of a close look at how to get it adjusted correctly your screen quality everything else is pretty much standard to pvms i hope you enjoyed this video and please be on the lookout for future features on single monitors as well as other crt content please give the video a like if you enjoyed it and have a great day