 Hello again, and welcome back to Retro Tech. Today, we'll be covering a brand new monitor that I've never had the chance to review before. And it's not one that often comes into my shops, obviously. So I thought I would give you the opportunity to get a behind-the-scenes look at the monitor itself. I'll talk a little bit about the job I did on it. But first, I'd like to just introduce you to a little bit of marketing material from today's featured company. And that is Ikagame. Ikagame, I think is how it's spelled, or said. So anyway, the one we're looking at today is this one on the right. And that is the TM20-20R. And it is an analog-only monitor from the early to mid-1990s. So you're only going to get 240p and 480i support out of this. But the cool thing is it is a shadow mask tube. So you'll be able to tell slightly a difference between this and the normal Sonys that I cover a lot more often on this channel. One of the things I will bring up is that this has a unique pullout board that you can use to adjust your geometry and things like color and stuff. So that's really cool for an old analog, mostly analog monitor. So let's go ahead now and get into the behind-the-scenes footage of this repair. All right, so here is the actual Ikagame. This belonged to my friend Adrian. And you saw some of me repair some of his other monitors in the past, including a 14-inch Ikagame. He had two of these that he brought into me. So I thought it would be a good opportunity to show you these. Now these didn't actually need any component or circuit board work, really. Just a cleaning, calibration, tune up, and overall check out. So that's what we did for him. I will let you see how metallic I want to say this monitor is. It's extremely well built. It's got cast iron in it and a lot of steel in it. So it's very heavy duty and very solid. So you're definitely going to feel that. For example, this 20-inch monitor weighed almost 90 pounds. So very heavy, very thick, heavy duty. Here is the deflection board. Now you'll see a lot of these little potentiometers on here. This one's for horizontal hold, side pin cushion adjustments. So not only do you get to make some adjustments with the pull-out board I'll show you later, you also get to make adjustments directly to this board through these potentiometers if you need to. And if you have any issues with your deflection, you can go in and recap this board. Now this one had, I did test some caps. They looked to be in great shape. So we're not really going to go in and add the extra expense of recapping something like this. At least not the time being, the current condition is pretty darn good for something from the early 90s. Now behind that was the power supply. See how that's bolted into that large heat sink and onto that large plate metal. That's right behind that deflection board. So they're going with more of the modular card design similar to what you're going to see in a Sony BVM. This is the other side of the monitor. There were five slots here for cards. Four of the five slots, actually it's more than five, but there's a couple that are double numbered so they're only specific things. There were four cards in it. And so if you get one of these monitors, it doesn't turn on for some reason, go back and reseat those cards. And that's a pretty common issue. If those cards come dislodged, they can prevent the monitor from turning on. So maybe you'll get lucky and just re-plug them in and you'll get a monitor that works and turns on. So just showing you a little bit of the behind the monitor here, just so you could see how the flybacks separated on its own and it's built onto the back of the PVM, or I'm sorry, the monitor, not PVM, the Ikigami. And then the flyback has controls. There are three different focus knobs, which is a lot for a flyback. Most of the time they have one, sometimes they'll have two, but I've not seen one before three focus knobs. So that's kind of interesting. There are some additional build-outs. You can probably add to this monitor if you wanted to. But this is the pretty standard setup, which is just three composite video inputs with relays out, and then you've got an RGB input, which surprisingly can be switched back and forth to component input if you want to. Here's a look at the menu or the button bars on here. And I told you about that pull-out tray. You just push in and the tray pops right out and you've got all these really cool controls. I'll show you briefly here in a second what you can do with these controls, but you can do everything from color setup and other things. There is, you see this probe in thing right back here. Let me show you. So there is a probe for this. You could plug it in there and it's a light probe. Adrian did have the light probe, but I'll be honest with you, using those light probes at this point is a completely risky gamble because the light probes themselves actually need to be calibrated. And if they're not calibrated, then you could go in and have it set up and hook it up to your monitor. And this goes for the same things for the ones for the Sonys. If that thing's not calibrated correctly, it'll adjust your colors and it could adjust them incorrectly. So you're incorrectly calibrating your monitor for color. So it's not really good to use those really old ones unless you for sure have them calibrated. So just note that, please, on there that it does have the ability, but you need to make sure that your probes are calibrated if you're gonna actually use them. So here we have the monitor turned on with a picture in it. And so I can show you a little bit of how this tube looks. You will notice that it does have that rounded class edge on the front, as well as the sides. So that side horizontal curve is always present on CRTs, unless it's a flat screen CRT. But on these older ones, even the Trinitrons, the good ones will have that curve. It's just, this one has a vertical curve as well. That's the Shadow Mask Tube technology right there. So here's this button pattern. You just press it to activate it and it'll turn all the buttons on like that. And you could pick your adjustment you wanna make, like horizontal center here, for example. And then you just spin the wheel and dial in your exact geometry setting you want. That is really nice. It goes, I feel like you get a lot more control with that instead of just making like one digit and it jumps. This one, you're actually turning a wheel and it's going at very small increments so you can really move that screen around to a perfect spot. Now, it will, you're gonna have to calibrate these a little bit differently, because again, you're trying to put a flat screen. It gets the entirely curved surface. So keep that in mind when you're doing a calibration on something like this that you're gonna have to try to make it almost match that curve a little bit around the corners. And that way it doesn't look so, the linearity and things won't get so messed up. It'll look kind of nice on there. But that's the way you can function through this monitor. You pull out that tray and you can use a lot of those. And that's a nice addition, considering that you don't have to really get into that deflection board, which is easily accessible to change those settings on those potentiometers. If you just need to do a quick tune-up, you could do that in that little bar. Now, I'm gonna go through and tell you, as I show some footage here, I'll make myself even smaller and I'm gonna go through and tell you some of these specifics on this particular monitor. This does have a 700 line tube so it is slightly higher line count than the Sony, this would be comparable to like a 1953 MD or something like that, similar to like a medical grade on there, or even if it was a broadcast grade, like a 1954 Q, that's what I consider this comparable to. Maybe even the series before that's a 43s and 44 Qs. But still, this one had a very sharp picture and it will show good scan lines. 700 TV lines is plenty of resolution for any kind of 240p resolution game. It obviously doesn't have any lag and it's just an all-around great option. If you do come across one, okay, these ones do tend to sell for slightly less than the Sony monitor so that's a good, you could usually get a better deal on these. And here I have, now I'm gonna show you finally both of these hooked up in tandem because you can easily hook them up together just by crossing, just by feeding the in and outs on those inputs on the back of the monitor. And again, this was a cool little thing for Adrian to have now, it's two of these side by side. They were pretty darn close to the same after I got done making the calibrations and color adjustments and things. Everything looked pretty much as close as possible. I'd say they were in about the same quality condition, both of them, pretty similar. But again, probably looking at somewhere in the neighborhood of $600 for this monitor. Today's market price, if you find one on like eBay, if you buy one through other channels, you can maybe even find this one for really cheap. I feel like this is probably a monitor that a lot of people just don't even know what it is. Ikegami and I've covered them before and most of the people watching here, you guys know what they are, but a lot of people do not and probably have never heard of this brand if they're newer to the scene. So you can still get these for a decent price and they are very cool. Again, with that separate setup, shadow mask tube, the pullout tray, different kind of monitor. I will tell you that this monitor did have a built-in overload feature. So if you pumped the brightness or the contrast too high and something bright came on the screen, I did notice a little overload tally lamp down here would come on and give you a brief warning saying, hey, you're risking overload. That's a very big deal. That was like something that Sony didn't have till later on like the D-Series overload. Well, there are overloads on the older monitors, but not as responsive I'd say as this one. I've experienced other monitors that their overloads didn't seem to notify you when you're up for an overload as much as this one. This would be on comparison with like the D-Series where it will immediately start notifying you on there if you're getting too bright of a screen, if that protection circuit's still functioning properly. So that's pretty much it. A pretty easy job again, no need for a board repair. If you run across one of these, it's definitely worth checking them out and possibly picking up if the price is right or if you're looking for a CRT. That's pretty much it for today's repair video. I thank you for joining me. If you're new to the channel, please make sure you hit the subscribe button and if you enjoyed the video, do me a favor and hit that like button too. And if you have any questions about this repair, please leave them in the comments below and I'll get to them. Or somebody from the community may be able to help you out too. Thanks again, everybody. I'll see you guys next time with some more retro content.