Don't dump your CRT RPTV! - Page 259

Thank God for wheels, huh! Be ready, once you have that glass mirror in there in place of the ultra-light mylar one, that top section will be even heavier!

No, life has not granted me the time to do that mirror replacement yet. Still under the gun on other key life issues that can't be avoided.

But that's the least of your worries, it's secondary in my book. Even with my present mylar mirror, I am still getting stealth grade, incredibly superb performance from a screen I can sit so close to that people call it my "own private IMAX". People have driven from 5 hours away just to see it. It's truly a wonder to behold, and I invite anybody reading this to contact me so you can come over and experience it for yourself.

Your set is a late model set just like mine and is eminently ready to deliver a pic just as good as mine, with the proper work. I would concentrate on that first, and get to the mirror later, if you have to choose.

If you have time on your hands like I don't, yeah, work out that glass mirror thing first and go from there. It will give you 25% more light output than mylar and blacker blacks, for even deeper shadow detail when the Brightness setting is tuned just right in User.

www.highreflectivemirrors.com

And I believe it's a late enough model to qualify for the CraigR anti-ee mod, for fine tuning the sharpness of your picture on each of the 3 guns. This is available as an add-on in any of my calibrations, if your Mit or Sony set is a late enough model to support it.


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Very few calibrators work on CRT anymore. If you can't find one with a national reputation who still does work on them, DO NOT settle for a local repair tech unless he is highly unusual in his talents and is known on the net for being CRT capable as well as repair capable. Repair techs are incredibly valuable for what they can accomplish in the field of repair, but usually know nothing about the calibration aspects, and have been known to do more harm than good in seconds. Permanently, until remedied by a truly capable CRT pro.

If you can't find anyone, please consider forming a tour and flying me in. These are my specialty and I am totally dedicated to them. An alternative is getting me on the phone, where I can hold your hand during some stuff that's simple for me, but challenging bordering on dangerous, in the hands of a newbie.

Call me and we can spend a couple of minutes on the phone, at least getting you situated properly in this endeavor.

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Is your light path crystal clear? Or does it have years' worth of blanketing of dust, soot, smoke and grit on it, which happens naturally despite our best house cleaning efforts, due to the use of 30KV in CRT systems? That high voltage really does a number on the delicate optical surfaces in there.

If not, your pic does not have a chance of standing up against fixed pixel because your dynamic punch is being totally compromised. If its optics have not been cleaned reasonably recently, what you are seeing is only a fraction of what it should be, in terms of its dynamic punch.

And to be completely crystal clear, Tosh's need the additional 6 surfaces (of the 28 total in there) cleaned periodically that only the deeper optics cleaning can get to.

Be VERY careful about how you do that. Those surfaces are plastic and very fragile. They scratch instantly and indelibly, when done without the proper practices and procedures.


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I have been asked by someone I phone coached for a couple of hours who did marvelously at what I coached him on, to please say something about doing it yourself.

With the best of intentions, he got himself in over his head after that and now his picture has been compromised. He had told me he had the service manual and would be fine, so I wished him well. Next I heard he had copied down the originating values improperly and had done some major damage to the look of his pic when doing the overscan reduction op on his own. He now blames me for not warning him adequately about what could happen on your own, without having professional help with it.

This would not have happened on my watch. If he had copied things down correctly and had still had me on that phone line as he had kept proceeding into unknown territory, that would not have happened. I can only do so much as a coach, after which an owner's own personal capabilities and experience have to kick in and take over. Even with improperly copied down starting points, his chances of getting his original picture back once he did screw up, woulda been far better with the right help - help that came from years of experience in doing these things.

So he's right. I clearly did not warn him adequately enough.

Service menus can be very cryptic and non-self explanatory, and there are no rules about what gets mentioned in them and what doesn't (have never yet seen the need for optics cleaning, due to the high voltage, be mentioned in one, yet that op is critical to superb viewing of CRT triple gun).

Yet they are also very powerful. They make or break your picture.

Getting into service menu - on any brand - can get you in over your head in minutes, if not seconds. It is not hard at all to paint yourself into a corner that it might be very expensive getting out of.

You've been warned.

Happy holidays to you too, and don't screw things up!



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The Pioneer CRTs have a very effective setup in the sm that takes care of ee well enough for me, much better than the other 2 brands.

All you have to do is almost max out your Detail reg, then work with the Sharpness reg till you have it right, using test patterns if you need them or regular video material if you don't. I use regular video material myself, usually faces and other vertical lines/curves -

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Remembering of course that all HD in that area - non-structure area - is built upon the STD foundation, ie. the S video platform, starting with SD material and test patterns -

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Couldn'ta said it better myself! Awesome!



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Indicates grayscale and not color decoding.


Stay away from those trimpots behind the front panel, they are the biasing levels for your guns, and are usually set perfectly at the factory. They usually don't drift. Unless you are determined to discover exactly how to do that alignment properly, leave it alone. Chances are you will only screw things up if you change any of those AT ALL. They are very, very sensitive.

And yes there are values that can screw things up. Don't push it and experiment, just keep what you feel a need to do at the very minimum, stay conservative whenever possible. And if there's anything you don't know the answer to, it's much better to ask someone in the know than to shoot from the hip and see what happens. These are VERY sensitive sets, and the quickest way to screwing them up is a careless, thoughtless laize-faire attitude. Which of course you don't have, or you wouldn't be here!




Where do you have your Contrast set? Sounds like it's too high. Should be midpoint of max, which for a Mit, where the bar graph is slewed, is 35-40% up from minimum.


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Yes, 90-100. I usually go to +120 with it. Factory default on these 2 has been known to cause truly abysmal edge rendition, bordering on the level of bad, overenhanced animation quality when applied to true HD on these Pioneers.

Play with it and you'll see that no bad things happen when you crank it up to almost max - I stay away from max at all times on pretty much anything, unless absolutely needed.

SM Sharpness is another matter. That's where the ee - edge enhancement - kicks in. You have to find that delicate balance between too much and too little.

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On a Mit, midpoint in your Contrast bargraph is already 80-90% up. That's why you get very little change in overall light level when going all the rest of the way up. If you're a little over halfway up on the bargraph, you're at 90% up. Very bad, a very non-videophile practice. Pre-ages your guns, makes the grayscale slewed, softens your focus and causes "bleeding" of your strongest color - which in your case is obviously the red - to the right of where it should be.

As I said earlier, actual midpoint of the Contrast bargraph for a Mit is only 35-40% up from minimum. That's where videophiles run it, where everything is well within linear operating range. 90% up is pushing things way out of linear operating range.

Pink in the center but not the sides indicates screenburn on the green gun in the 4x3 section. Your green has aged faster than your red and blue, in that area. If you look straight into the guns/lenses with a flashlight while your set is off, you'll probably see a stronger aging footprint on the green CRT face than on the other 2.

The red Screen trimpot changes the red only in the darks. It has very little effect on the whites, virtually none at all.

The Screen trimpots on a Mit are set to a specified, set voltage at a test point on their CRT socket boards. As (again) I said above, they usually never need to be changed on a Mit, the change you were looking for should have been done only at the red cutoff regs in the service menu. Once you make that kind of change in the position of your Screen trimpots, a whole fresh grayscale alignment can sometimes be needed, with all the interactivities in there among the whites and the blacks, the lights and the darks. Perhaps your tech got lucky this time...

Having a pink grayscale - pink on b/w material - is very typical of a Mit factory aligned unit. I correct for that all the time. The good news is that once corrected, they track grayscale like a velvet glove.


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Send me your contact info and I'll flag it for your home town. Send privately please, call or email me.

Phone coaching is still available, till then. It is very powerful -



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What's all this concern about DVI/HDMI??? You don't need it for true 1080i HD on CRT!

This info has been readily available for years.

At the risk of repeating myself: (again)


Blurays play perfectly fine using component only, from your BDP straight to your CRT. Component is by far the best way to hook that up. And the precision of the delivery is absolutely stunning. See the cover pic of my website for just one example.

If you want to do upconversion of your SD DVD library, get an HD Fury II or III, and output the HDMI from your bluray player into the Fury then out of it and into your component inputs.

YOU DON'T NEED TO BUY NEW TO GET HDMI capability for your CRT RPTV, NO MATTER WHAT THE BRAND!

And you don't need HDMI anyway for HD on your set, as long as your 1080i source puts out true HD on component (and it does). This covers Bluray and HD DVD discs, satellite HD, cable HD, DVHS HD, OTA HD, and any other true 1080i HD. Is there any other kind of source to even consider? If so, if I have forgotten one, please add it! It'll work on component.

1080p is completely unneeded when you have true 1080i HD on your CRT set, and just gets in the way of your scintillating HD experience when you consider the needed upconversions on the new displays, where some brands do it right and some really schlocky, and as such 1080p carries some very real limitations that1080i doesn't have.

At the risk of repeating the same thing I started out saying over 4 years ago in the very first post of this thread (please, go back and check it out!) and have been repeating ever since:

YOU DON'T NEED TO BUY NEW IF YOU HAVE A CRT RPTV.


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This is the kind of fidelity you have every right to expect of your CRT RPTV using component on your 1080i HD. It is from page 203 of this very thread. And there are other superb screenshots on other pages of this thread, and others.

YOU DON'T NEED A NEW SET. Your set just needs the touch of the master's hand. It has the capability of this kind of perfromance in it right now, as we speak.




Here it is, from page 203:


Except for simple passive mechanical switching, component fed straight to display from Dish VIP 622 DVR.

No HDMI or HD Fury is involved in these pix, nor any scaler of any kind. Nothing is being used to alter these pix. What you see is what you get. They are completely component to component, device to display, unimpeded and unchanged.

These are photographs personally taken by me and uploaded via www.imageshack.us, they are not screengrabs of any kind. Scroll down. I am just itching to make your set look like this.



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