[Owch]

It's a Thomson 32" non-FST analogue CRT.

Got home yesterday to find that the picture on my 4 year old Thomson was very white and blurred (unwatchable) with a dozen or so skewed white lines across the screen. My 7 year old said she was watching it as normal when there was a sudden fizzing noise, followed by the symptoms described.

Is this terminal?

Thanks

[GGTVBD]

Quite possibly. CRT failure is possible.

Worth an expert opinion though if you can find someone prepared to take a look. It'd be a shame to scrap it if it's not the tube.

[GGTVBD]

You're welcome.

Manners

[Owch]

Sorry, I'm taking the TV up to Lincoln tomorrow (as per your advice) and I was going to wait until I got the verdict then before posting anything back.

I'll let you know what the repair shop says next week.

Thanks

[GGTVBD]

You're welcome.

Good luck.

[Owch]

OK, well, here's what happened this weekend...

...The opinion on the Thomson was that it looks like the tube has gone . I had a look round the big electrical stores to see about a new TV but the various salesmen laughed at my requests for a 32" widescreen crt and pointed me in the direction of various lcd screens instead. These looked fantastic with the HD feeds they were showing but when I looked at the 'ordinary' feeds the results were somewhat disappointing. Also I don't really want to blow £800 on a plasma without knowing that I'll get a decent picture on Freeview - the advice from the plasma forum on this website was to wait a while until the picture enhancements on the top end tellies trickle down to 'affordable' ones.

So, by hook or by eBay I've ended up with a (secondhand) JVC AV-32R25EK. I've no idea if this is any good or anything but first impressions are that it seems OK, the picture's a bit dark but the sound is rather impressive (it has a dirty great subwoofer clipped on top!). I think this will either convince me to keep with it or at least tide me over until I learn a bit more about plasmas (and convince myself to spend over a grand on a TV!).

[Owch]

Originally Posted by Owch

... the picture's a bit dark...

(is there some rule about not replying to yourself?)

About the JVC dark picture (on RGB). I did a bit of googling about but couldn't find anything relevant to my problem. However, one post suggested setting the 'starting' settings for brightness and contrast in the 'secret deadly engineering menu'. This had no effect on RGB but I saw that one of the options was to set the RG&B colour thresholds individually. The original settings were set to large negative values so I upped each one by 100 and the picture's now fantastic (bright/sharp). What I did was:

Engineering menu [i] + mute
Option 2 (VNC Presets?)
Note down the numbers that are there already.
Now, to change the RGB values use the following numbers (up/down):

Red 4 and 7
Green 5 and 8
Blue 6 and 9
(Bingo!)

It's a really bad idea to press anything else. I pressed '1' for example and the picture went 'pop' and changed to a bright white line across the screen! Luckily pressing '[i]' again restored the settings (you've got to press 'OK' to accept the changes).

I don't know if this will be of any use to anyone but I've not found anything like this anywhere else. There does look to be stuff in the engineering menu that is potentially catastrophic so if anyone's reading this and is unsure about anything be very careful!

[aekostas]

You are right about the service menu warnings

I propose that you source a copy of DVD Video Essentials to calibrate colour, brightness and contrast (with or without using the service menu ).

It is also a shame that this is filed under a Thomson topic (for future reference), but I guess a search may still find it.