Humbug, I say.

[unixronin]

Visible flyback lines on vorlon's Sun GDM5410 monitor today.  This is not a good sign.  Both of my monitors, it seems, are on their last legs, and there isn't really spare cash in the budget right now to replace them.  (Technically, there's cash in the bank, but I don't want to cut into it until we have to.)

We have one spare GDM5410 upstairs in storage, but I'm not convinced it's in much better shape than this one is.  They both seem to have the same problem — severe loss of screen saturation, requiring turning contrast all the way up to get any kind of decent saturation at all, which then forces turning brightness all the way down to have the screen not be washed out.  I suspect it's a design flaw on this monitor series, which is a terrible shame, because the completely flat (horizontally and vertically) CRT is the best I've ever used as far as image quality and lack of glare, and unlike an LCD, it continues to look good at resolutions which are not exact power-of-2 divisors of its native maximum resolution.

Comments

[mrmeval.livejournal.com]

The bright green one is probably the tube. If you can see an image with the bright green lines it's a highly likely it's the tube. If not it *could* be a bad connection on the green cathode drive transistor. With Sony's I go with CRT as I've seen it so often.

If it's the CRT I've fixed that by shorting the green cathode drive transistor from collector to emitter then turning it on. The excessive current will sometimes burn off the gunk and it will work for a time. Up to two years in one case. This will cause the safety protect circuit to activate. Not totally safe but safer on Sony's. I solder the short across it and power it on without hands stuck in the guts. It's a last ditch effort when a crt tester/booster is not available and I've only had it work on Sony's.

If the other is that intermittent you'll have to wait to track it down.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

The bright green one is probably the tube.

Yeah, I was assuming that was an intermittent tube fault. It only ... well, ALMOST only occurs at first power-on. (I've had it occur once on waking up from powersave, but only once, I think.) The screen goes solid green with no picture and visible flyback lines. A power cycle invariably cures it.

If it's the CRT I've fixed that by shorting the green cathode drive transistor from collector to emitter then turning it on. The excessive current will sometimes burn off the gunk and it will work for a time.

A little scarier than I'm willing to attempt without a spare monitor on hand. :) Fortunately, solid-green-on-the-90D10 is an infrequent problem. Unfortunately, I'm having to powercycle the 90D10 as often as four times a day to "reset" the focus problem. (A power-cycle is probably not strictly required, but it's the only way to force a degauss, which — this is a hunch, I'll admit — is what's actually resetting the focus.)

[mrmeval.livejournal.com]

That one is odd. Focus is electrostatic, degaussing just effects the shadow mask. I suspect a CRT problem but ... I have seen a focus issue when the HV connection to the tube does not have the HStat hooked up right but that's permanent and is an assembly error.

Sony's HV resistor/divider block which has the HStat adjustment on it have a very high failure rate. If I had access to it I'd adjust the HStat and focus and see what each did while it's not working. HStat is horizontal static convergence and it will look kind of out of focus if slightly off or look like a 3D movie with three colors when way off.

I bought a 3000:1 contrast 19" LG LCD and it rocks.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

This 90D10 has a bit of a history of not being able to get HStat perfect across the full width. If it's dead-on at one side, it's fractionally off at the other. I've always had to sett for a "good compromise". Ironically, that seems like it may have gotten a little better; convergence seems pretty close to dead-on all the way across now.