Another $50 grab, except this time it was 2x JVC PVM’s and a little 9″ Pelco PVM. All in unknown condition. Other than I was told the RGB one turned on but the colours were all awful and probably needed a recap.

So, whats wrong with it?

The first few things I noticed was that externally the unit had a rough life, scratched up and engraved with two of the rear BNC connectors bent in. Other than that, it looked okay. Once I dug into it is was clear this thing had ALOT of hours on it, no burn in but everything was covered in black soot. So the first step was to strip the whole thing down and clean everything in the sink with soapy water and leave it for a week before re-assembling everything.

Thankfully, the strange tearing at the top of the screen went away after cleaning everything and reassembling and I replaced the BNC connectors with new ones while it was all apart.

Colour bar calibration

Now to get to that strange colour issue. At first I thought it was bad caps but after dialing in the colour bar test it was clear that the drives for the guns were bad, the micro trim pots up front had been messed with and it just needed a really good calibration. So I started by centering all the front adjustments, both the trim pots and the main controls. Then I brought up a solid white picture on the tester and adjusted all the gun drives until I got as white of a picture as I could. Once I had done that I brought up the colour bars again and used my LCD with the same image as reference to match them as close as possible.

After that, it was just a matter of playing some familiar content and adjusting up front to get it how I would expect it to look, Sonic 2 being the best for it.

Looking good

I then put it through its paces over Component with some Batman The Animated Series, Dragonball Z, Iron Maiden DVD’s, Rachet and Clank and Portal 2. This thing is starting to look great. It still has a slight red tint I need to dial out of it but I kind of need two people as it is all manual controls and it is hard to adjust at the back and look at the front.