Summary
Sometimes you see a project just staring at you with proverbial puppy dog eyes and you just cannot look away. In the case of a once rather nice Sony TV it was the smooth 32″ Trinitron CRT that gave [Happychoice] that look when he came across it along the side of the road. Naturally he had to beg the owner of the junkyard to please let him adopt the pupp^Wjunked TV and attempted an ill-advised repair. Some later sleuthing revealed that this poor TV had been sitting on the side of that road for at least six years, exposed to the worst that the Italian weather and local fauna could do to it, so it was no surprise that all he got out of it even after cleaning and some repairs was a sad triple-blink of the power LED. This indicated that something on the control board was very unhappy about the status of the power supply. Over the course of a few months this project went correspondingly from careful optimism down to the depths of depression, through the fields of bargaining and into the blue skies of acceptance of a likely far more involved repair session than originally assumed. That said, the CRT itself looks to be in pretty good nick, as do the PCBs barring the few sketchy resistors that already got replaced. We would like to congratulate [Happychoice] on the acquisition of a fun new repair project and wish him all the luck on bringing this beast of a TV back to life. Some years back I picked up a 36″ trinitron on craigslist for free… because it was dead. (I mean “picked up” as in “acquired.” I’m not sure Anatoly of youtube fame could actually lift one). I dont know if this was another victim of “lead free” solder, but after reflowing 50-100 joints with a hot iron and the “good stuff,” the TV came back to life. The picture it generated when connected to our Nintendo Wii was stunning… bright, pleasantly large, and you wouldnt kill it if a remote slipped out of a kid’s hand and smashed into the screen. It was a beast… but unmatched as a game monitor. It’s still a mystery to me why Sony made them so heavy, nearly double the weight of a comparable set from Philips or Grundig. Bunch of old men always high on their own farts while the japanese economy was booming. They thought the solution to any problem is to overengineer it. In that state they completely missed the arrival of “good enough” era of cheap digital electronics. When they finally realized what’s up, they desperately tried to catch up using the old ways of engineering, leading to disasters such as the PS3. Here’s an example it is all in the tube. the trinitron system uses a grid under tension as the mask. and a lot of tension at that. they use a thick steel tube frame to keep in under that tension at all times, like a piano. Friend was a high up in local TV engineering. He had a…30″? 32″? Trinitron at home. Took him and his grown son to lift it, and they were not small. Bedt picture ever, but I heard they were a real bear to align. I had a Sony TV…cost more but the pic was worth it. I had a Viewsonic monitor and it was pretty nice, too. Never happier than when I got my first TFT monitor. Weighs nothing. Couldn’t get rid of those old CRT monitors fast enough.