Sony CPD-1304: Diagnosis and repair of this awesome little monitor 

And I bet we all have a few stories ourselves. As for me: Before I was anywhere near competent at soldering, I scrapped and replaced a Pentium 4 motherboard just on account of bulging caps and a broken heatsink retainer clip. (I swear, that stupid P4 CPU probably outright _baked_ the caps and clip by frequently running over 70°C under load.) Oh well, not a huge deal... The replacement board was old stock from a local chain store and would probably have ended up going to e-waste anyway. So while a faulty but definitely repairable board ended up going to the scrap heap, an "okay" board was saved from it.

They throw it away even when it is working.🙁

For at least the first half, yes.

How can people find old monitor repair guys?

Monitor as a term for computer displays was common in the early 80s, and this monitor was manufactured in 1991. So monitor as a term for computer displays was a standard before this screen was made. Which really makes the term "character display" interesting, and I wonder how Sony got there. Was it a unique quirk of their product line, or just demonstrating a specific focus? Maybe it differentiated it from composite video monitors or studio TV monitors?

Usually Character displays display characters that are stored in the display's electronics

The CRT I used for my first computer in 1977 (which I still have for some reason) came from a CCTV system in which it was called a "monitor".

It took me a while to be clued in that this second channel even existed. It's a goldmine. These videos are every bit as much of a joy to watch as the main channel videos. I don't know how Adrian does it. It's awe-inspiring.

That would seem to be a very good idea considering how old the caps are in these things.

yep, a high voltage, leakage tester is the way to go.

Get a Sprague Tel-ohm-mike to-5 through to-6a. They will check capacitance and leakage while it's putting the capacitor under its rated voltage up to 450 or 500 volts. I own one and it is a keeper.

@@randyab9go188 I take it you never seen Mr. Carlson's Cap tester? the point of his design was to eliminate the hazards of being electrocuted when testing caps hahaha as lovely as the Tel-ohmike are, they are best admired on a shelf hahaha.

A lot of his earlier videos have the same format.

How can people find old school monitor repair guys?

Now I need to check if all the color CRTs I have that feature a green button also have the picture collapse green when you turn them off... because I guess it'll be white, but honestly I never turned any one of these off with the green button pressed.

Actually every green CRT is color with the green button pressed in. Its just a small button on the inside of the monitor. They needed a cheaper monitor so they pressed the button and sold it as green only. We have always had full color displays the whole time... ;-)

Meh, he should have grounded the cathodes first. His troubleshooting game is pretty weak, nothing impressive about it. Shango066 has a better troubleshooting game when it comes to CRTs, he can bring back from the dead just about any TV.

The reason monochrome monitors are desirable is how sharp they are. The shadow mask/aperture grille and phosphor array on the front of a screen limits how high of a definition can be displayed, and since monochrome monitors don't have them, they produce a stunningly sharp image Yeah I know you're making a funny but just figured I'd throw this out there for those curious why monochrome displays are desirable

hihihihihi

I have to agree on this point, would have saved a lot on grief

If I remember correctly from a video I seem to recall from many years ago, those magnets were applied on a test bench, so swapping yokes wont have an effect requiring them to be reconfigured.

@@freednighthawk That's for magnets though. The ones Adrian pointed at are convergence strips. I think those fix flaws in the yoke so he might have to move them since he swapped yokes. But I could be wrong on this. I have swapped yokes on my 13 inch Trinitron TVs and recall having to move the strips around so it's probably the same for the monitor so I worked on this kinda stuff for a little bit. :P Oh and the rubber wedges that keep the yoke aligned might need moving too since the wedges on the newer CRT were setup for the old yoke. He might get lucky and not have to move them. Alignment of yoke has a big impact on corner/edge convergence. ;) If he can't bring it in with just the static convergence adjustments he'll want to take all the convergence strips off, then get the best edge convergence he can via yoke alignment changes (which requires moving the rubber wedges out of the way and resetting them once he gets the best new alignment), then reinstall the strips in new positions to fix the remaining flaws. This is what I did for my TV anyways and got it to a pretty good alignment. The red vertical convergence is still not perfect but it had this issue before I worked on it so it at least I improved upon the flaw it already had. :D Note though that the Trinitron monitors may have adjustable dynamic convergence via electronics (unlike most TVs) which I'm not sure if this monitor has that ability or not. I know the mid 90's they did and used a special serial port on the board that you'd connect to a PC to a serial port and use special software to adjust dynamic convergence (among a lot of other things) so you could reduce the amount of convergence strips you had to use. But judging from the amount of strips I've seen in those two CRTs these monitors probably don't have adjustable dynamic convergence and require more strips to fix the flaws.

Ditto, had a widscreen Trinitron for over 20 years, and when it died, it went green first, although just a half hour before it died completely.

@@jitmancanth6698 ah, she put up with it being all green for a few weeks or months, saying stuff like “sometimes this happens but then it clears up”; before she was finally convinced to upgrade. She stayed with Sony of course, but went from a 24”(?) 4:3 Trinitron to a 28”(?) 16:9 Bravia. (Question marks because I didn’t measure it myself before the upgrade and I didn’t read the box too hard when we took her TV browsing either, but that’s roughly the sizes it seemed. Had to fit in the same cabinet you see.) Pretty sure she’s still using that LCD 15 years on, and TBH LCDs are definitely the most long-lived monitor type, no phosphors to degrade etc, so realtalk I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s the last TV she ever uses. It’s not like she’d really benefit from going beyond whichever HD (regular or full) it is, and possibly can’t even tell that apart from SD, so really the main thing is the colours and the speaker quality for her. So yeah, I don’t see this TV getting replaced unless it dies, so unless the power supply caps suddenly dry up, I don’t expect it to do that either.

@@kaitlyn__L The coincidences continue. I replaced that 28 inch widecreen Trinitron with a 32 inch HD Sony Bravia as well, went on the old TV's stand, which had a cabinet in which reside the old DVD player and a set-top box for digital TV. Made sure the TV I bought had a SCART socket to plug the DVD player into, and bought a Blu-ray player to replace the set top box, and plugged that into an HDMI port. Had to buy speakers for the TV though, Stll, went from an 80kg TV to a less than 5kg TV, which was good for the floorboards.

@@jitmancanth6698 my grandmother’s TV stand was full of niknaks and statues, haha, but otherwise it was a fairly similar situation. She had hated the separate Freeview box and so was pleased when the upgrade let her use a “proper” TV remote again, since it had an integrated digital tuner. She never used her DVD player because she preferred live TV, she never even liked tapes.

The TV I grew up with did that too. Hate to think it might have been something as simple as replacing some stuff on the board, although my dad has always been pretty handy with electronics; he had modded that same TV to have a headphone jack. If he couldn't find a problem on the board, I hope that means there wasn't one.

Yeah, it might not be a bad idea to give the tube a once over with a tester/restore system. Never a bad idea to see if you can bring another CRT back to some level of usability before it gets yeeted for good.

So did NEC. 9-pin RGB seems to have been an accepted general standard for a while.

Well it makes sense. VGA only needs 5 signals at minimum, RGBHV. Newer monitors also have SDA, SCL and 5V. On the 15 pin connector most of the pins are grounds.

@@simontay4851 Not entirely true. Aside from separate grounds for R, G, B, and a shared ground for H and V sync, IBM's original specification also designated four monitor detect pins and a ground for them, so the display adapter could determine what type of monitor was connected. While only RGBHV and ground are required, best practices would include separate grounds for each component, and shorting ID bits 1 and 2 to the logic ground so your display was identified as a color monitor capable of 1024x768(the best of the three modes). IBM did not just refuse to use a 9-pin connector out of spite, but this was also around the time their influence in the market began to wane, so no more than the original 3 monitors were ever defined as VGA was extended by third parties. While VESA would later repurpose three pins, they were not grounds. Two of the ID logic pins were reused for the I2C bus to transfer EDID data from a ROM inside the monitor to the graphics card. +5V was actually mildly problematic, since the VESA spec uses a pin that IBM had defined as a key. By the IBM VGA specification, that pin was not to be installed on a monitor cable, and adapters adhering to that original spec have the corresponding pin hole filled in with plastic. A VESA-compliant monitor with the +5V pin can't readily be plugged into very old VGA cards because the key pin works exactly as intended and prevents a non-compliant connector from being attached. However, that pin can usually be removed from the cable without issue, and the blocked hole on the adapter can be drilled out with equal ease.