Pioneer Elite Pro-x10HD Shim Mod How-to with other tweaks

I'm the original owner of a Pioneer Elite Pro-610HD RPTV. This is my experience with performing a shimming modification. How I did it, the results and learnings. I hope this can turn into a tweaking and tips thread that others can use to share experience and also give me some additional tips along the way. I picked up bits and pieces of data for this from other postings here, especially from Owen who came up with this idea, and Mr Bob who also is a big contributor.

My goal was to reduce the overscan as much as possible. I was told this would minimize the about of geometery changes necessary in the service menu. See results and opinions at the end, key word is mimize not eliminate. Apoligize in advance that the pictures are not the best, I'm only a point an shoot photographer. Full disclosure, I have had this TV since June 2000 and it has never be calibrated or tweaked beyond simple user menu. I have recently purchased a 58" Panasonic 58pz800u plasma to replace this TV. I don't want this thread to turn into a RPTV CRT vs plasma debate. I just wanted a project to see if I could make improvements in the old set. Again, see the opinions at the end for more.

To start my overscan in Full HD mode was really bad, especially at the top of the screen. It was somewhere between 10-12% but a good 4% at the bottom so the image was not centered. I'm not sure about the horizontal edges before but I think they were about 5-8%.



I will not cover how to get the front screens off. From this picture you can see the crt assembly has to be raised. Unlike some other sets the Pioneer assembly is angled down which makes this more difficult, especially when it comes to keeping everything parallel and perpendicular where it needs to be. There is a bracket in the front that needs to be unscrewed.



There are 8 screws, 2 in each corner that need to be removed. Don't worry, the flanges keep it from moving.



There is another bracket in the rear bottom that is attached to a black board mounted vertically. However you must remove a horizontal board on top before you can remove this board. But before that you need to remove the IR sensor and set it aside.



I un-screwed the horizontal board and used a couple of screw drivers to pry it up. It was glued and stapled to the vertical board.



My guess is that this bracket and the front bracket keep the crt assembly from sagging in the middle or keep it in position better. I used an angled screw driver to unscrew this board. That was the only thing holding it in place. I removed the vertical board completely because it will impede the shimming. I will have to live without it unless I want to trim it about 1.5" from the bottom so it can be reinstalled.



From the bottom, I made sure that none of the wires would be pulled to tight. I loosed a few of the twist ties but overall, they were ok.



Items you will need. I used a piece of 4' x 1" x 2" pine board with nominal size of .75" x 1.5". I cut 8 pieces of 1" length and 2 pieces of 4.5" length. I stacked 2 pieces together for a piece that was now 1.5" tall by 1.5" W x 1" D. Anything bigger would not allow the 2 screws to be inserted. The other 4.5" pieces will be used on the front bracket.

I used my brad nailer with 1.25" nails to hold them together. Glue would also work.



The screws that are removed are Metric M4. At home depot I purchased M4 7 x 50mm. The 7 is the thread type, I don't know if the original was a 5 or 7 but my 7 seemed to work ok. The length of 50mm was also good since I'm raising it by 1.5". They only had 7 so I lived with 1 less than needed at the bottom/back. I also used some #8 washers and picked up some black paint and foam brush.



Now for the tricky part. I needed to lift the assembly and put the wood shims in place and put a few of the new screws in place at the same time. I managed by myself but it would be much easier with help. I used a few #6 x 2" screws with nuts to hold the top in place while I put them all in place, then I replaced them and trying to get it as parallel as possible (which is almost impossible) These are the results with the horizontal board and IR sensor replaced (clip off the staples and screw the board in place.





Because I was removing the middle support in the rear, I used a few piecses in front to support the bracket. Later I changed the top piece to a furing stripe that was nominal size about 1/8" smaller because the other piece was to tall. Then I screwed the wood to the base and bracket to the new wood. This was my attempt to give it some support in the middle.



After I was done I used the black paint (flat latex) and a black marker to blacked as much as possible. However, the paint does not take well on the aluminum surface but it helps.



The results:

After I turned on the TV the convergence was way off.



Now I had some work to do in the Service menu. I wrote down all the defaults for the coarse convergence for the Full and Full HD modes (i did not bother with the others). I did not change anything in the screen Size adjustments that are global (using the Ant buttom)

I made some minor adjustments to the static (position on screen) and the size adjustments, then pin cushion and Skew. The results for the Full (non-HD) scan rate were very good. I managed to get overscan down to about 3% all around and did the fine convergence in the SM.

Next it was on to adjust the FULL HD mode this is the mode I really care about. I did not have as much luck. I went back and forth with static and size but because of some problems I had with getting the fine convergence at the top and left edge I had to keep the vertical static settings the same (image is still off center vertically). I had to also increase the horizontal size slight due to some convergence issues on th left that caused a red glow on the left.

Currently the results are about 6% on top, 4% on bottom, 3-4% on each size. At the upper left corner and upper 2" and bottom 2" of the screen the convergence seems poor.



What I would like to correct is the convergence around the left and top. From this test pattern you can see some of the problems with the red bleed on the left and the convergence on top and bottom. This convergence does not appear in the service menu so I'm not sure how to fit it.



My next steps will be to attempt to get the geometery and convergence better. I think this is impeding me from having a sharp image. I also wonder if I need to do a eletroncial or mechnical focus. I need some tips on how to get the convergence better. I don't think I have the same problems in FULL 480i s-video mode.

Summary:
My overscan was corrected to better satisfaction, however, I never tried to do this in the SM only so I can't tell if it would have been more difficult or not. It was a lot of work and makes me appreciate the perfect geometery of the plasma. Now I know why CRT RPTVS are dead, consumers hate doing convergence and love geometery perfection of plasma and LCD.

It was a fun project but I don't see any drastic improvement yet but this could be because of my geometery and convergence issues.

Good look and look forward to any advice on the convergence.

Thanks mt_goat for the additional information. I like your strategy of the pvc and doing the 510 first. This was a little project for me also. You filled in the blanks for some people with the service manual but the tricky part is how to use it. I had the intention of documenting what I changed and my experience with grey scale adjustment. I saved all my settings in a spreadsheet. I will try to dig this out to upload.

After having done it, I agree. I think I would have been just as happy correcting the overscan in the service menu. Mainly because I had to do so much service menu corrections after the shimming. I was hoping the shimming would have eliminated that but it I think it only made it worse. I will try to post my spreadsheet I used to track the values I changed and the method I used. I have no idea if it's right or wrong but it worked enough.

Also, I got the biggest benefit from doing the greyscale adjustment.

Ok, I intended to share this much earlier but better late than never. I have attached the spreadsheet I used to track my defaults and the new values. I used hex2dec formulas to calculate the new values for the sizes because I wanted them to stay proprotional. Not sure if that is the best way but it's what I did.

After my shimming the geometry was all messed up. The problem with Pioneer is that each image mode needs to be redjusted. Since I only use Full mode and HD mode, I only corrected those.

First, there are global coarse convergence settings that will affet all modes. The are listed on page 204 of the SM and called the "Screen size adjustments" Instead I used the coarse adjustments for each mode. The first thing I did was to set the static and size values. I need to use static to center the image and size for minor tweaks. Then some minor skew adjustments. It this were you want it because after you do the fine convergence, you can't really change these without doing fine conver. again.

After that I worked on the fine convergence in the SM menu. This was the most tedious and time consuming. I spent many hours trying to get this acceptable (Edit: learning how to do it and trying to be perfectionist)

The last thing I did was to use the Grayscale for dummies and a meter to adjust my grayscale. YOu can see the value changes made. My grayscale was way off due to cranking up wit blacklevel without making the other drive and cut adjustments. The quality of the picture was dramatic after the grayscale. Again with Pioneer you need to adjust the STD mode (s-video input) first then the other modes are just offsets of that mode. I only corrected the Componet HD after that.

Bottomline, I think I would have been just as happy with just doing all the overscan reduction in the service menu (EDIT: just re-positioning the overscan to even out top and bottom) and doing the grayscale. I don't really use this TV much as I have moved on to a Panasonic Plasma.

In THX mode the plasma has almost the same quality blacklevel image an RPTV. Not to start a debate but Plasmas has it's pros and cons and for me, I think the space savings and perfect geometery.

Hope this helps someone.

 

Pioneer 610.zip 5.474609375k . file