Washed-out looking monitor

If it happened suddenly, it may have been damaged in moving it around. I know the 22" Sony tube monitors have an issue with the brightness going up over time, there's a hack to add a resistor to bring things back down to where they should be.

Check if there is a switch in the back for selecting beetwen 0.7V or 1V video signals.

Wrong selection produce these symptoms.

Yuki spake thus:

Nope, no switch.

But hey, I think I just solved the problem: by dinking around with the OSD menus, I found something called "Color return", whatever the hell that means, under the (ungrammatical) "Option" menu. When I activated it, the screen went whitish-blue for a few seconds, and when the display came back, it was better. Not perfect, but definitely not as washed-out looking.

Anyone know what this function does?

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Just as McDonald's is where you go when you're hungry but don't really
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It's amazing what some people deem 'working fine', it's all about perceptions. Maybe he could see it and tell you if it's how he remembers it?

Any CRT which displays retrace lines has to be suspect. IOW, the CRT is likely near the end of its life. It's not a cast iron certainty, but quite likely.

Morse

Brightness is too high. Sometimes there are internal 'master' contrast and brightness controls, however mark the position of any that you alter with a pencil first.

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Please, don't open a monitor, unless you are quite familiar with them! You can get a bad shock, or worse! This is one way to do a "work around", for the problem! I have done a couple, & it works fine. You MAY have to "tweak" the exact resistor value, to get a good G-2 "range"! Hope this helps, Dani.

Dani spake thus:

You must not have read my reply up there in this thread. I managed to get it looking fine by using a built-in function (which, by the way, I'm still curious to know what exactly it does: it's called "COLOR RETURN" in the "OPTION" menu).

So what, pray tell, is a "G-2" range? Don't worry; I know all about resistors, and high voltages, and shocks, and all that. No need to nanny-state me with all the dire warnings.

--
Just as McDonald's is where you go when you're hungry but don't really
care about the quality of your food, Wikipedia is where you go when
you're curious but don't really care about the quality of your knowledge.

- Matthew White's WikiWatch (http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/wikiwoo.htm)

G2 voltage. See any book on how TV sets work.

On Sun, 21 Jan 2007 21:12:15 -0800, David Nebenzahl Has Frothed:

So you know all about CRT devices but don't know about the CRT's g2 grid? The warnings are for your saftey and the potential saftey of others reading these threads.

--
Pierre Salinger Memorial Hook, Line & Sinker, June 2004

COOSN-266-06-25794

Meat Plow spake thus:

No, I had never heard that term before. I do know about CRTs (not *all* about them, obviously), but I'm not in the TV repair business and don't know all the jargon. So sue me.

By the way, I did look up "G2" on Google, and discovered that it seems to indicate a grid (2nd grid, I'm assuming) on vacuum tubes in general, not just CRTs; found references to 6550s and such.

But I do know all about high voltages, and know enough to be damn careful with the innards of any TV set or monitor. The two aren't mutually exclusive, you know, so you can lay off your warnings, as well-intentioned as they may be.

--
Just as McDonald's is where you go when you're hungry but don't really
care about the quality of your food, Wikipedia is where you go when
you're curious but don't really care about the quality of your knowledge.

- Matthew White's WikiWatch (http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/wikiwoo.htm)

Most common cause of washed out appearance IME is a monitor set to high colour temperature. Set to 5000K or so they look much better. But that in itself doesnt address the misadjusted black level, that will need a tweak inside to sort. As well as the safety issues you dont want to hear about, also dont turn a preset more than needed, as some presets will kill a set if turned too far.

Lets hope you know more about CRT safety than you're letting on.

NT

On Mon, 22 Jan 2007 10:29:15 -0800, David Nebenzahl Has Frothed:

Seeing you have an attitude problem with my *free* help, I guess I'll lay off any help (30 years experience in the service field) I can offer you.

--
Pierre Salinger Memorial Hook, Line & Sinker, June 2004

COOSN-266-06-25794

Meat Plow, you did the guy a favor. You taught him a lesson about what happens if you run your mouth on Usenet.

I had an Iiyama CRT monitor that I thought was "working fine" until I set an LCD monitor up next to it. Boy did it look washed out and bleary!

thats interesting. I recently did a similar test with an lcd and a crt montor. lcd had horrendous colour bleeding and extremely poor black background.Until i actually put them side by side I thought the lcd was alright.

-B

this thread is starting to sound like deja vu-.... see :

from post number 24 on.

-B,

b spake thus:

:

This is really, really annoying.

What are you, the HV police? A new extension of the nanny state, here to tell us to behave like good children and never, ever touch the insides of a TV until we've gotten our PhD in Electronical Fixin' Stuff?

Fergodsakes; OK, I know there are bozos out there who don't know about this stuff. I DO. I do know that capacitors (and even picture tubes

*acting* as capacitors) can store lethal charges. I know it's very easy to get zapped mucking around in the innards of a TV or monitor. OK? Got it? So lay off.

By the way, all of this is completely unnecessary, as you'd know if you read my post above where I explained that I was able to fix this by using one of the built-in OSD functions. Monitor looks just peachy now, thank you very much.

(I'd still like to know just what that function does, but I don't ever expect to get that information here.)

--
Just as McDonald's is where you go when you're hungry but don't really
care about the quality of your food, Wikipedia is where you go when
you're curious but don't really care about the quality of your knowledge.

- Matthew White's WikiWatch (http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/wikiwoo.htm)

David,

Historically, CRT monitors used to have separate red, green and blue intensity adjustments to cope with the fact that the separate guns age at different rates. The potentiometers for making these adjustments were sometimes made accessible without removing the case, sometimes not. In any case a large busy IT department might well decide that a monitor with degraded color balance was due for replacement, as it was not considered cost-effective to do the adjustments manually.

More recent models had a microprocessor to handle control and setup, and some Sony Trinitron monitors, including Dell badged ones, featured "digital color return technology" which was intended to enable a return to original factory-shipped color temperature and luminance if desired at any point over the lifetime of the monitor.

The operation needs to be performed with the guns warmed up, and I think you will find that it is locked out for about 10 to 20 minutes after switch on. During this time an "Available After Warm up" message is displayed if Color Return is selected using the OSD menu. After this time use of Color Return is possible.

One way to tell if a Trinitron monitor had microprocessor control was to see if Color Return is a menu option.

Obviously, if the tube is too far gone, perfect balance and luminance will be impossible to restore, but even with quite old kit, 7 to 10 years, people report acceptable results after using this feature.

I have heard stories of people who know about this retrieving Trinitron monitors from dumpsters because university or business IT departments have replaced them for being "too red" (or blue or green) because they were not aware of the Color return feature.

I see you have not shown an accessible email address, so you'll only find this information if you come back here.

snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com spake thus:

I "wear a condom" when posting to Usenet (ergo no spam whatsoever in my real email inbox). But thanks for posting this information.

--
Just as McDonald's is where you go when you're hungry but don't really
care about the quality of your food, Wikipedia is where you go when
you're curious but don't really care about the quality of your knowledge.

- Matthew White's WikiWatch (http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/wikiwoo.htm)

On Mon, 22 Jan 2007 23:03:42 -0800, David Nebenzahl Has Frothed:

Does your neb at microtech address still work?

--
Pierre Salinger Memorial Hook, Line & Sinker, June 2004

COOSN-266-06-25794