[vcf-midatlantic] My baby in Stranger things

Ethan O'Toole telmnstr at 757.org
Sun May 29 01:37:32 UTC 2022


> I got one of those monitors, too. HEAVY is one word for it. Mine has severe
> pincushion when first powered up, but that clears up in a few minutes. I
> want to use the DB-25 analog RGB port to display my Amiga output.

Indeed! When I was a young lad there was this computer store in Chesapeake 
VA called Video Computer Retailers (VCR) or something. They were the Amiga 
pitchmen, and they had one of these TVs and would hook it to their Amiga 
2000 and run that Walker demo and stuff.

I was in love with the design. I love the buttons down the side, and the 
whole style.

The 20" 2030 was my 2nd one, I had a 25" 2530 I bought off of eBay or some 
for-sale site back in Virginia Beach/Norfolk. That one was larger. Local 
pickup, "mostly worked" but didn't really.

The 1st one, there was some kind of flyback issue where originally it 
would only tube on once every 15 power attempts. Then it got less. So my 
enthusiasm waned, and I sold it.

It was in the back of my mind always that I would get another one. A 
friend got his hands on the PVM-2030 that I had, that eventually ended up 
on Stranger Things.

I got it "broken" but it seemed to work. But there was a few issues. The 
2030 is the 20" model, there is a 2530 model. There was also a high end 
consumer model, and as a kid I had the brochure for that. Most people 
don't know about this consumer model though. NEC has a clone, which I 
think would be really cool -- it might be a better set and I would love to 
mess with the NEC version. And there might be a 27" model which was later, 
or in a follow up series to the 2530/2030

On the 20" monitor the high voltage wire comes from the flyback through 
this other block where it taps the high voltage for something. I had to 
fix that on mine. And everything seemed pretty good. It never seemed to 
leak, it never seemed to arc. It was solid, no cracks, etc.

I had to rotate the yoke a little to straighten out the picture. During 
this I found that the schematics for the 2030 aren't in the wild that I 
could find, but the schematics for the 2530 are. BUT... the 2530 model has 
an additional board (maybe on the rear) that contains additional 
potentiometers for adjustments of the image. The 20" doesn't have this, 
and it kind of hurts.

Also, on mine, the convergence was off a bit on the lower half. Pretty 
badly. I never tried to mess with magnets. While I have worked on a lot of 
CRTs, I still am slightly nervous messing with them powered.

But the thing was, it was running fine then I heard an arc inside and it 
blew out the vertical hold. The VHold pot did nothing, and without 
schematics for that set and the general inability to get jungle ICs and 
the like I just figured I didn't have time to fix. Plus I was bringing 
home a lot of other stuff, and a large backlog of things that needed work. 
I asked my friend who gave it to me if it was okay if I sold it, and said 
I would put the money towards buying another one that worked. Threw it on 
craigslist and eventually it was purchased for ST. They couldn't tell me 
the show (understandable) but I was able to figure it out. Also, I would 
get a broken english email from someone every once in a while via CL 
calling me an idiot and a moron for trying to sell a CRT for so much when 
LCDs were much cheaper, bigger and new.

I still love the sets and figure I will get one in the future. But there 
is good and bad. They are really old TVs, they were early in the model 
line of the PVMs -- and this is apparent. The later Sony PVMs BLOW IT 
AWAY. Picture quality, controls, everything. Just remember that. They get 
A+++++ for style, but more like a D for the actual picture and stuff in my 
opinion.

They don't have internal speakers, there are sexy speakers that attach to 
the side. It has an audio amp with clippys like an old boom box would 
have. The speakers are the Sony flat and square style speakers though. 
Hot, but you will have to search for them. They are rare.

It has good connections of course. As mentioned, RGB on a DB25 and BNCs 
and svideo and all that. No TV tuner.

The 20" model doesn't have the additional picture quality adjustments 
that the 25 has. And I think there is a 27" or something that might be a 
later model, not sure how better that gets. A friend got the 27" model for 
$10 from a thrift store, and did so while we were on slack chattering 
about them. Most random thing ever. "Oh I just bought one of those for 
$9.99 at the thrift. <selfie with it>" I offered $20 but he wouldn't sell.

There are no on screen displays. You can sit there with those sexy buttons 
down the left and right and adjust the image to get it minty. But there is 
no way to tell what those settings are unless you count how many times you 
hit each button. And top left button as I recall, one press and everything 
resets to 0.  It's active when the illumination is off or on.

There is a button that turns off and on the backlight for the controls. 
That and the cube frame around the back is what make it so hot and stylish 
in the design.

My friends have newer Sony PVMs and BVMs and they blow them away in 
picture quality just because they are built later. The newer ones can do 
undercan and overscan and 480p and all this other stuff. Better tech. But 
they can't stand on theirs (note, only stand on the frame in the back not 
the front.)

Oh man, I found the original pics of me tuning up the 2030. You can see 
where things are off a bit:

https://imgur.com/a/LSjprvG

Now I want another one. Damnit.

But after I get a bigger place.




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