 Welcome back everybody. Today we're doing a brand new episode of Retro Tech. I've got a JVCTMH150CG that is a high resolution CRT Pro video monitor. And today's video is the first video highlighting briefly this monitor. It's just today's episode really is going to be all about how to calibrate the monitor and get into the service menu. Then I'll have another video that'll just highlight the overall features and how this compares to say a Sony monitor or Ikegami or some other brand of CRT. We'll talk about the specifics and what makes again this JVCT so unique. But today we're just going to jump into this and we're going to calibrate it. And to get started I want everybody to know that most of the time to do these calibrations you should start with a couple of basic pages from your service manual. That's how I got the information on how to pull up the service menu on this particular monitor. But I'm going to show you without you having to go into the service menu how to do it, but you will probably need the service menu for your monitor so that you could properly calibrate it. And we'll kind of talk about why as we go along. So this is the button makeup of the front of this monitor. It's pretty simple. You've got some regular checks over here on the right rectangle. And then this one down here that is in the left we're going to actually use to make our adjustments. You've got some a regular menu button and then contrast, chroma and a volume up and down. So the first thing we need to do is power on the monitor, which I've already done just a second ago. And then I don't have any kind of software running into it. I'm just using the monitor as is. And the first thing I'm going to do without any type of menu pulled up at all is I'm going to press this volume select button on the right and then the menu button. I'm going to press them both at the same exact time. And then that S came up. If you just saw that a second right there at the top of the screen, I press those two buttons simultaneously and the S pops up. So while that S is still displayed, I need to quickly press chroma and menu at the same time. And then I'll get another pop up that will say it'll go from the S to please don't touch. So you're doing it right if it says please don't touch. Don't get worried. You're actually getting into now the service menu. So when you have this please don't touch pop up, press either up or down on the volume. And then you'll be taken into your main menu here for your block selection. And these are your four blocks that you get to select from on what you're going to calibrate or use to calibrate and make deep internal adjustments in this CRT monitor. Now I'm going to tell you don't worry about a lot of this stuff. Hopefully you won't have to go in and do a white balance check because you really need specific tools. And that's a little bit more difficult. What we're going to walk through today is this deflection block, which is the third category on here. And if you look down here where my finger is, you'll notice it's got four buttons and then exit. So that's an exact copy of the buttons down here on the front of the actual monitor that we looked at where we actually used to access this. So in order to get to deflection, I just need to press the volume select button that's over here. I think it's the up one. So I press that on the front of the menu buttons on the front of the monitor. And that'll give me access right to the deflection block. So once I press that here, it'll pull up a few options that we've got. It will see, I press the deflection button finally. Okay. And it says it says D01. So these are our deflection settings. And this is maybe why you would want to have, again, the service menu because in this service menu for our service manual, excuse me, for this monitor, I've got this key right here. This was on one of the pages. You won't be able to see it, but you could see how I printed it out. It was on PDF. And it gives me what each item on here like D01 that we're looking at right here. It tells me what that controls. So that controls my horizontal centering. But in order to use this, see, I'm using the copy right there. In order to use this properly, I need to go ahead and feed a video signal into my monitor. Of course, I'm going to be using the 240p test suite. Today, I'm using the Genesis version. But I've got this crosshatch, you know, block pattern pulled up to start with. And I want to show you what happens. When I make this adjustment, you could see that it is horizontal positioning where it's going to move left to right. And that's how you can center up your picture is just the DA1. Now to switch up and down, you just need to push the chroma and contrast button there right next to the left and right select button. And that's how you change between settings and DA2. Well, that's the horizontal size. So if I go up, I expand the size out. And then if I go down, it shrinks it up a little bit. And that's the two controls right there. So again, I like to just slightly over scan that box. And then we'll go into DA3, which is vertical positioning. So that's the vertical centerness. So again, if you have this and you don't have a copy of the service menu, you can play around with these values and just see what happens on the screen. And that way you'll know what you're controlling. But it is a lot easier when you know what these actually stand for. The next one, DA4, is vertical size. So that's the way to expand the top and bottom of the screen so that it, like the horizontal setting, is expanded quite a bit. And you get that little, you get the expanded lines out so that the edge of your picture will always be slightly over scanned. That way you don't have any black lines or any curved lines along the sides of the picture. So the next one is DA5. And I'm actually going to need a different pattern that I can pull up from the 240p test suite. And that's the linearity pattern. That's these circles right here. So DA5 is one of the linearity controls. So as I go through here, I'm just adjusting it up and down. You can kind of see how it changes the orientation on those circles. You're wanting to try to get those circles as round as possible, all five of them. But that DA5 controls vertical linearity. And then DA6, which is another kind of like linearity, it's vertical S correction. So if you leave your, you can see that just smushes it a little bit and also is good to use with those two patterns if you need to get that size corrected. The last two is DA7 and DA8. And I have to go back to my cross hatch patterns so you can see what those do. Those are your pin cushion settings. So DA is called the parabola or parabola and side pin parabola. So that's what's controlling the main side pin cushion. And then if you expand that or shrink it, it's what makes the screen flare out or kind of globe in and look a little bit misshapen that way. So those are two things that could fall out of spec is the parabola and the corner. DA8 is the corner, which is just slightly tighter. So you actually have two side pin cushion controls to try to get it as uniform as possible. And that's pretty much it for the deflection settings. Now you want to use these deflection settings. You want to make sure you're inputting in whatever input format that you're going to be using the monitor mostly for. What I've got now is I'm just pulling up some screens so you could see the checks here on how the screen looks. And we've got, I'm just going to pull up the screens from the test suite. And you can see them behind me. But you're, you know, like I'm calibrating this in RGB because it's mostly going to be used as RGB monitor. So you have to notice that sometimes vertical and horizontal geometry can differ when it comes to switching between an input. And I mean, like switching from composite over to RGB, you might have an orientation switch, you know, like the screen may shift to the left or right. That's pretty common. So just make sure you calibrate the screen to whatever you like. And if it's driving you crazy, you can temporarily change it and just get out of the menu itself saving once you exit it. So you don't have to worry about like writing your data. If you're confused, go in ahead of time and write down what all the values are on those eight DA settings. Write down all the values that are set up currently. That way you won't make a mistake and you can't go back to what you had it before. Because there's no way of really knowing without looking or without writing down what those old settings were. I like to do this scroll test. You can really see if there's any linearity issues as the screen picture kind of scrolls. You see there's no weird wonkiness in the picture. It all looks pretty uniform. And that's really what you're looking for. That's another great little test. You could speed that scroll test up and slow it down by just using the up arrow and the down arrow actually on the main controller. This is another good check to see the quality of your tube. Obviously you've got all four of your colors there, but you could check to see if anything's bleeding. So that's pretty much it for how to calibrate it through the service menu. There are two other things you can do and that's on the back. Real quickly here, look at these two holes. These two holes are not marked with anything, but they do allow for some adjustment that can help your monitor. This is pretty much the only other adjustment besides adjusting the yoke and converge the strings, which we don't really want to get into unless we really needed to do it. That's not necessary on this monitor. So real quickly here, just watch as I spin that. You see how the lines go out of focus and then tighten up in focus as I spin it. This actually whole leads to the back of the flyback, so a small screwdriver will fit in there and you could spin it clockwise or counterclockwise and make it focus. That's how you dial in your focus and make your picture as sharp as possible. You just watch that cross hatch pattern and make it as sharp as possible. Then you've got a second adjustment on the bottom, a secondary lower hole. That just controls the flyback's sub-brightness or the brightness coming straight out of the flyback. With a good monitor like this one, you see how I twist it and it goes completely black and then if I twist it again, it blooms out to really white. That means the tube is actually still pretty good on this. When it blooms out like that, it means it's got a wide range of brightness still available, which is good. This tube does still have some life left on it. I'll go over it a little bit more in detail on the main video because it differs from a lot of monitors. It's a pretty unique pro video monitor and I think there are a lot of cool details. The rest of the video, I just have some example here of gameplay footage. I'll think about those are pretty much the only adjustments you'll really have to concentrate on and work on. Just make sure though that you've got your service menu handy and the easiest place to find this, I'm sorry, the service manual is through Google and I usually search for CRT spec list and then that'll take you to the Reddit page where it has all the different service manuals that you can link to right away. There's also a lot of other information that's really handy on there and then once you get the service menu it'll tell you how to set up and adjust the monitor and that's the big secret to this is mostly using that service menu to follow just a lot of the tricks and things that it talks about it there. The service manual for this monitor even explains ways to change components if you're making a repair. There's all kinds of stuff in there. They're generally about 60 pages or more but again this is a really good monitor. If you find yourself using one of these they're very easy to calibrate and again you don't have to get into the back of the monitor at all to do this calibration. You can just do all that what I just said and there's no other real interior or internal adjustments that you'll need to make unless you have a problem with like corner convergence or something but that's pretty much it for the calibration and how to calibrate geometry for this monitor. I will tell you that there are other JVC monitors that will use the same type of setup and will have the same type of sub menu. They're also going to have similar names but there's a couple of 17 and a 19 inch. Those will have more options in the menus and more adjustments that they can make because they're higher in monitors but as far as this monitor goes that's pretty much all there is to it and that's all the adjustments you'll ever really need to make. But again thanks for watching please let me know what you think of this monitor and if this was helpful at all to you please leave a comment below and I'll see you guys next time with some more retro content.