Fixing Sony's Worst Era of Trinitrons - The Flat Screen CRT Deep Dive

Hey, welcome to Retro Tech. My name is Steve. Today we're going to be looking at three different Sony KV televisions, all from the early 2000s. And these set of TVs are each going to have a flat Trinitron television set or tube in them. And also, each set has the BA6 chassis. Now, I don't want to get too into the details right here at the beginning of the video. I wanted to just tell you that this video is going to be broken up into sections. So, I'm going to have chapters marked out below for each one of the TVs we're talking about here. If you want to just check out a single TV, do that. But there will be sections for each one of those. And I'm also going to have to go into and do a yoke adjustment and receding in one of these videos. So, I will specifically put that chapter in there in case you come to this video years down the road and want to know about yoke receding on the Trinitron. I'll refer to that section. So, that's how it's going to be. You can either watch the specific section you want or check out the whole video in full. Thanks again for watching everybody. Today, we're going to get started with the Sony KV 20 FS100. And this is the first in the model lines of these flat screen TVs that came out in North America in the early 2000s. So, now let's take a closer look at the Sony FS 100. First thing I want you to notice is that it does have a boxier design and definitely has that flat trinitron tube right there. All flat glass, 4x3 and 20 in in size. And down here we've got our classic Sony logo and button array for power channel volume and then video inputs switching. And then over here we do have a push down or pull down tab and we can access our regular menu, some arrows to make adjustments and enter button. Then we have a video input too. Right. Here's a look from the back side and the top. And then you scroll down and we've got our Sony logo right here embosed in the plastic. Our label. Um, this is again BA6 chassis May 2002. And it's about 120 watt max usage. If we look down here for inputs, we have RF, another composite video input, and then our best input here is component video. And that's it. We're going to start from well, the CRT. How about that? And here's our tube number. It focused there. A51 LPT50 X-ray made in the USA. And for our stereo speakers, we have some 8 ohm 8 watt shielded Sony in-house speakers. Okay, here's our deflection yolk. And we have some potentiometers for convergence alignment. And then there's actually a ring around that for rotational adjustments. We'll get into more into that later on. There's some convergence rings for adjusting that. And then we do have velocity modulation on this set. So there's some of that hardware attached to the CV board here. And uh this is a two board two primary board setup. It's got this CV board for the back of the CRT. And then down here is our primary board. And the primary board is going to have things like our deflection uh capacitors, our power supply capacitors, and then here's the flyback transformer. And um the inputs are down there too. So, um, got a nice degazing coil on the back of this TV. And when you turn it on, you should hear that activate right at the beginning to help try to balance the tube colors. And there's not a whole lot more to talk about in here. It's a pretty simple design for Sony TVs. Now that you've seen inside the TV, what I like to do in my restoration process is actually take the circuit boards out, clean inside, and then inspect parts. I have a capacitor kit that I work through on this particular chassis and television. So, I'll do that. I'll test some other components and I'll do some other maintenance to the boards. And after that, I like to put them all back together, put the TV back together, run some tests, and then pull up the 240p test suite on multiple consoles and see uh kind of the quality of the image, and maybe see if there's anything that we can do to tweak that image to make it look a little bit better. Well, I've got the TV restored and I'm just going through some adjustments and testing and you can tell on here that our red drive is just way maxed out, way higher than our green or their blue. Some people call this like a red push, but this isn't specifically like a setting where the red is being overdone except for on this drive where our red drive is set at 55 and the other drives are around 40. So, I'm not really sure why it's set up like that. I'm gonna reduce it and I want to see let's I'll come back in a second after I reduce it in the sub menus and uh hopefully we can get this to balance out more with these. So to make this type of adjustment you have to be inside the service menu and then you use one and four to cycle through the settings in here and it's the cut settings. So it's the cut off settings that you can change. If you go to the drive settings, you don't actually make it doesn't do anything on the screen, but the cut offs will. So, you could probably see the blue is a little bit high. Makes sense. It's a little higher than the others. So, I'm going to try to take it down a little bit more, but you just use three and six on here and then one and four to shuffle through. Three and six lets you go up or down on the individual setting. And then you got to press once you get it set, you can press mute and enter and it'll say right like that and uh it'll save your settings when you turn off the TV. But that's much better. See that red is not pushed all the way out here while the others are at a different point at it. So that's just a real quick uh way to adjust color on these old TVs. All right, we have the BA6 chassis here. which has the well-known and documented flickering issue. So, we're going to look at this real quickly on Air Zonk here. I'm going to zoom in on the trademark. Let's get to a good spot. Depending on what your background is, you'll see the flutter better, you won't see the flutter better. Um, you could really see it the it's the it's the red gun that primarily does it. and the blue gun. The green gun is really stable, but most of the fluttering comes from the red gun. And that's again just part of the processing of this television. All right. So, unfortunately, that screen flickering that you just saw on that little trademark is just a part of this BA6 chassis. And the way that the uh RGB encoding is done, it's like on a single chip. And that's the thing that prevents it also from being RGB modded. But that single chip design allows for a lot of noise to leak over. And so a lot of times you end up with like that flickering image. And there's really nothing that can be done to fix this. It's on all the BA6 chassis. You just have to deal with it. So don't think that recapping the whole set or doing some magical adjustment will fix it. It's going to do that little flicker. Just have to live with it. So, there are a couple more tricks that we can talk about besides just the red push and unfortunately that screen jittering problem. Uh, there's the rotational hardware around the yolk as well as velocity modulation on this set that do impact your screen quality. So before we get into how to correct this or maybe use these tools to uh get a better screen image quality, let's look at the other TVs in our list. Starting with the 20 FS120. All right, so the biggest difference uh at first glance here of this FS120 is the actual design of the TV. Sony really shifted here to this curved back and really thin bezel line as opposed to the FS100 which had that really boxy square cube kind of look still that's been totally abandoned here. And we've got again more of a futuristic curved style along the back edge. And then the bezels very straight, very flat, but there are some curves uh and features in here that again are unique to the time period for Sony. So that's a big difference is the look of it. One of the things I like about this model from these years is sometimes you'll find these little tags here and they tell you the model, serial number, the place it was made, the chassis, and the year and month it was made. So, this is 2004. There are differences with these speakers. They have a little bit more shielding. They're 10 watts and 10 ohm speakers. The deflection yolk looks pretty much the same. We have potentiometers to adjust convergence, convergence rings. We have the rotational hardware and then we have velocity modulation hardware and the CV or socket board looks the same. Now, the tube, the tube also has the same tube number here, but it says it's made in Singapore, and the FS100 was made in the USA, but the numbers are the same. Uh, we do have the exact same input, uh, configuration, composite, and component video, and then everything else in here looks almost exact. I mean, it is a little different as far as the build out from first look, but it looks to be about 95% the same. So, this is the BA6 chassis, and it's the unmodable chassis, so you can't update it at this time. And I'm just doing a general inspection. And one thing I did find was these two wedges are meant to suspend or hold the yolk at the appropriate angle. Two of them fell off. That's pretty common in these old TVs. You can tell those those that two-way tape right there just isn't that great. So, that's one thing we'll want to address in the back of the tube. We're going to prep these to reinstall them on the back side of the CRT. And this is that old tape. It doesn't stick to anything anymore. So, I found these at the store and they are double-sided mounting squares by 3M. cost was about $4, but they were designed to be used on glass. No tools needed and uh they are meant to hold up uh a little bit more weight than a normal one. They were also a little bit thicker if you see there. So, what I've done is I've actually cut one of the squares in half, which came out to a perfect size to fit on the back of the wedge here. So, the first thing I did was remove the old tape by just peeling it off and then cleaning the surface of that a little bit. And then I added one side of the tape. Removed the two-sided tape. And now we can install this over on the tube. And one of these is going to go in right here. Uh, and then another one will go in over on this side in the same spot kind of. And then when I have those two set, I'll probably redo this one because I'm sure it's not good anymore. And then I'm going to go over them with a little bit of um a caulk material. Now, before we get in here and install these, I want to just make sure this surface is nice and clean right in here. And I can just take a little paper towel wipe in there. And I did put a little isopropyl alcohol, just a tiny bit on the end of this paper towel. And you see you get a bunch of stuff here that just get out of the way so your adhesive will stick good. Now, don't rub this darker area that's actually painted on there. That's your aqua dag, which is a vital part of your CRT tubes. just stay in this section inside the aqued where you just have glass going on right there. Now, before we actually install these, let's take a quick check of the geometry and make sure that our yolk is sitting in the right spot. All right, I've fired up the monoscope pattern coming out of a Turbo Graphics and it's going through component video here. I'm just checking kind of the screen to make sure we have good lineup. Like especially up here where these things kind of line up next to each other in the corners. It's a little tilted. So I'll try to maybe turn it just like a hair this way. Um and then it doesn't look like it's too bad for anything else. So it doesn't really look like I mean that kind of off that's so minor that that could have always been like that from the factory. So there's not um really evidence here that the yolk has slipped. Um and that's a good sign. So we may just need to get those wedges in there again to protect it from moving in the future. All right, I'm just going to remove this There we go. Let's try to set this in here about like that. Push it a little bit back here. That actually looks really good. So now we have both the bottoms. Reinstalled and secured. And I'm going to remove this one now because I bet you, watch this. I bet you it just comes right out. No, actually it's still, you know what? It still has some tackiness to its tape. So, we'll just leave it and we will put some adhesive caulk over top of it. All right, our screen looks pretty good for geometry and at least as far as the cornering is concerned. We'll make some more adjustments to things like horizontal centerness, but that's all done after I close the machine up. And again, there's our wedges. And I went and changed this one out, too, just to make sure that all of them would be in good shape. And then let's do one final thing here to make sure that they don't move again. I'm going to add some of this stuff. It's called VizTorque. It's tamper detection marker. Comes in different colors. Um, it doesn't have a whole lot of like structural hold to it, which we don't need a ton cuz we're going to be using it as a secondary adhesive, but it's the lighter style of stuff that you kind of see, similar to what's here on the rings and the yolk assembly. similar to that uh in a consistency. So, if you do need to remove it, you can actually get rid of it. But I'm just going to squeeze some of this over each one of them and we'll finish her up. After a little time, this will cure out and harden and it will help just hold that and prevent it from falling off. Now, if you want a more permanent adhesive, you could always use RTV silicone over top of the wedges and put a little bit on the tube as well as the deflection yolk and that will stabilize that wedge and hold it and then you'll have a much more permanent bond with that. Uh, but it will take longer to cure. If your yolk has moved around and you see some kind of really oblong shapes on the screen, you should uh again look at the yolk and see if it looks tilted at all. If it is tilted, please, please, please follow this guide on the CRT database on how to receat your yoke. I'm not going to just move this client's yolk all around just to show you what bad yolk looks like. You can get more information at the CRT database. So, this TV did get the full treatment on restoration. So, all the boards are rebuilt with the same capacitor kit as the prior TV we studied. So, no difference there. The chassis is the same. Honestly, I can't tell much difference at all in the performance between these two TVs. I guess the one side is you get the made in the USA tube with the FS100, but with the FS120, you get a little tiny bit better speakers. Uh, but all in all, they're practically the same TV. It's just which one of the two form factors do you like more of the two? And unfortunately, both of these TVs suffer from this uh jittery effect that I explained a little bit before earlier on the FS100. The 120 does the same thing. And in fact, any TV that uses this BA6 chassis from Sony will do this same little effect. All right, we're about to look at our final TV in this video, but I did want to mention something. All these TVs again have the BA6 chassis, so they all have a couple of the same features built into them. One of those features is velocity modulation or VM. Now, this is a screen effect that Sony use as a tool to try to enhance like darkness around edges of images and things. Um, it's supposed to enhance the image of TV shows and movies and stuff like that, but it can really hurt uh pixel art and things that are like uh platforming games or anything that's in kind of that 240p range of video signal. So, if you want to turn velocity modulation off, please look at the page for your TV on the uh CRT database, whichever of these three TVs you have, cuz each has its own way to turn velocity modulation off. And there's another thing, too. uh these TVs since they use that BA6 chassis and they have that same like video encoder, whatever you want to say for the RGB processing and it's all done in that single chip. Well, that also makes for poor reproduction of composite video um with things like the Genesis. There's a lot of this digital comb filter that doesn't really work right with these older consoles. So, it looks really bad. Again, there's more ways to tackle this with modifications to the TV set or like I say, always just avoid using composits straight out of the Genesis unless you have to or you want to make it look like hideous mess. There's one more thing that all these uh TVs have in common, and that's called rotational setting, but we'll get into that in a minute where I can show you more on that with the FV300. So, right now, let's take a look at the Sony KV 24 FV300 this time. So, this is the Sony KV FV300 model line. It's a 24 incher, so it's a little bit larger. It definitely has more of a front-end style similar to the FS120. And if we go down here, we'll notice a new little acronym here called WOW by SRS. And that is talking about the sound system. This CRT TV has a much better sound system. It has two speakers that are better and they have a uh design on them to help the sound carry better out of the TV and it's much more hardware. So, it's a better sound system inside. Now, if we look down here at our front under our Sony logo, we've also got this push down tray. The same setup of buttons as the others, uh, pretty much identical to all that under there. And then the video 2 input right there, stereo, headphones, and then if we slide over here and start looking at the side, uh, this is kind of a mix, I say, of both of them. You don't have the extreme point where it comes all the way here on the bezel of the FS20, but you have kind of a middle of both. And I really like the way the back of this looks better than the FS120. And it might look better than the um 100. That's up to you to decide. If you look back here, this was made around the same time as all the others, October of 2002. This one does use a little bit more electricity, 180 watt max. see that marker for the same BA6 chassis. And then if we go down here, we have actually a better setup for our input board. We've got RF. Now we've added Svideo to our composite video input here on the back, which is a nice upgrade. Still have component video support and left and right audio out now for if you want to hook something uh and have additional stereo audio out of the TV. Now, the FV300 did add something really cool inside on the neck of the CRT, and that is a second set of rings that look a lot like the convergence rings, but they are not the convergence rings. It is again a set of two rings. And if you manipulate and move these rings, it affects your curl or lean of the bottom and tops of your screen. So, it's like when you hear that these TVs suffer from screen bowing or it looks like it's curved at the top and the bottom where it's making almost a U shape or an upside down U. This has those two sets of rings to help correct that. And I cannot tell you these things can be a game changer. If your image is really looked curved along the top or the bottom of the image, you can adjust these rings. The best way to adjust them is to carefully cut the adhesive off while the TV's turned off. Then mark the rings where they're currently located and slowly move them away from each other to see how it manipulates the top and bottom of the screen quality image there. And then once you get it in the right spot, just go ahead and put some more of that vizqu tamperproof stuff we used on the yolk wedges on the last TV. use that again to stick onto the two rings and hold them in place for the future. Now, the one thing I told you about that I hadn't talked about yet is the rotational uh software in this TV and the hardware, but unfortunately that adds a bit of distortion to the image. Uh let me see if I can show you what I'm talking about. Hey guys. So, I'm working on this Sony KV 24V300 and there's like a a pattern that's strobing across the screen that you can see in the green. Um, but there's a way to get rid of this. It's kind of like a noise. It's almost It's very difficult to see probably on this screen right now. Let me turn the lights out and see if that helps. Keep this still. All right. So, you can see the problem right there. And we're going to get in here and uh we're going to fix it. And we need to remove the back shell. And then we're going to inject our 240p test pattern once again. And we want to check our calibration out. And we want to make sure the top and bottom of our our screen are leveled out as good as we think we can get them. And once that is completed, we're going to power the TV off. And then we're going to disconnect the rotational ring. All right. This is the inside of an FS100 because I forgot to film this part on the 3000. So, this is the rotational ring right here. And again, this is on all of these models, this rotational ring. What you want to do is you want to fully have this TV turned off and set the way you want it as far as screen tilt on the yolk. And then if you need to use that rotational setting to set, you want to make sure that you do that in the submen and make sure that your calibration is good, which you saw in the picture for the TV we're working on, that it is good. Then after that, you can come in and power this down. And you just want to disconnect this right here. And you can store this somewhere safe. And I'll hook it right here for now. And that's it. Okay. Now, let's go in here and let's do the rest of this process. Now, with that done, we can turn the power back on to the TV. Get back into the service menu and pull up the rotational setting again. Get into the service menu, get to the rotational setting, and just max that out. And if you max it out all the way up to like 255, it completely eliminates that noise. It's the same on every uh one of these BA6 chassis. So, um you will get a lot of noise in here if you don't do that. And uh that's how you get rid of it. All right, there you have it. three different TVs, all with the BA6 chassis from Sony. And to be honest with you, the BA6 chassis leaves you wanting wanting more because you always hear about the 310, which has the 5D chassis, which actually can be RGB modded, and it has additional features that this one does not have. It doesn't have the noise from the encoder chip and the RGB processing and blah blah blah blah blah. And I don't know about the digital comb filter being as bad on the other TVs as it is on this one. This one is okay though. I mean, it's still an awesome Trinitron. And we've gone through all the steps we can do to kind of make it look better. you can take the additional steps I referred to on the uh CRT database if you're concerned about trying to get composite video to look better with your video games from the '90s. But, um, if I had to pick a favorite one overall, I mean, it has to be this one, the FB300. I picked the FV300 simply because it has the extra controls for correcting screen uh geometry at the top of the bottom and then also the sound system. And also since you get SVideo with this one, you don't seem to get Svideo very often with the uh other two models. And anyway, there are a lot of variations of these models still out there from different years of production. There are even more TVs that feature the BA6 chassis. Uh, but that's these three. And believe it or not, I have more to say about the FV300 and the FS120. And I will link both of these videos right here next to my head. And so you can check those out. And uh, otherwise, I'll see you guys next time with some more retro content.