RE: BUSTED CRT TV One of my faults is an over-inclination to pick up a topic that someone starts from an emotional perspective and take it full-on into a technical discussion that they have no interest in whatsoever. Unfortunately in real-life discussion this usually only becomes apparant to me after the other person immediately stops listening, or even talks over me at someone else. Here in Gopherspace I do have the time to see the mistake I'm making, but I can also simply imagine that people are really listening, so I can just ignore that and continue anyway. So in the case agk's recent diary entry about her CRT TV being broken, I will. gopher://sdf.org/0/users/agk/phlog/2022-11-25-crt.txt First though, I am very surprised that someone else in gopherspace still uses a CRT TV, I know others use CRT computer monitors (though perhaps not every day like me), but I figured I was probably alone on the TV front. Mine's much bigger than agk's (25" vs 13"), and probably a few years older, though without the built-in VCR (I never saw many of those in Australia). I've already got some photos in the relevent section here from when I repaired it a few years ago too. The vertical deflection amplifier chip litterally blew up, leaving it only able to display one horizontal line on the screen, but believe it or not I was able to buy an exact replacement cheaply from an Australian electronics components supplier, no fuss at all. I also replaced a few caps as it was mentioned in an archived Usenet thread from the 2000s that this was a good idea for this model, and noticed that a serviceman sometime in its previous life had beaten me to a couple already. gopher://aussies.space/1/%7efreet/photos/teardowns/NEC_TV_Repair/ More recently I've tried to work out a problem causing the brightness to dim on a CRT monitor that I used to use in place of the one I'm typing in front of now, but I am struggling more with that. It's probably the HV dipping, but the cause of that is time-consuming to narrow down without a schematic and with some part number obscured by heatsinks. Even as the electronics repair trade dies, the web unfortunately hasn't liberated all of its servicing documentation to the masses. Agk's aging set was damaged from being knocked over by her daughter, which plays to all my hang-ups about children. But anyway it might be repairable if it's an electronics fault rather than damage to the CRT itself. Unfortunately it's true that nobody's going to do the repair these days. There's a critical mass of information and demand that's needed for mass-market electronics repair, before the extra time necessary due to lack of documentation and simple lack of familiarity makes it way too expensive, limiting its practicality to specialist applications such as the art installations that she mentions. Nevertheless technically you _can_ still just buy a new one. Much to my amazement there are still Chinese sellers on Alibaba offering numerous models of CRT TVs, such as this one: https://aipuda.en.alibaba.com/productgrouplist-213625037/CRT_TV.html It seems unlikely that they're really still made, yet many of the models do seem to be newer-looking designs, so who knows? I've been tempted to order a sample just to see what turns up, but it's sure to cost many hundreds of dollars to send one here by courier. There are some hints that the export market is mainly Africa, though their advertised bulk prices (which I admit rarely have much actual meaning on Alibaba) are on par with similarly-sized LCD models, so it's hard to make sense of that: https://aipuda.en.alibaba.com/productgrouplist-218059586/lcd_tv.html If they really are still making CRTs, then replacements for old arcade machines is probably a better market that they're missing, and actually come to think of it this is a sector besides art where the CRT-monitor repair trade is still in operation, even in Australia. If only I knew someone into dealing with chinese manufacturers/wholesalers (I'm useless with it myself, I struggle with the chinglish and I'm pretty sure some rob me blind), there might be money to be made there. Then of course there's the collectors/restorers of old sets. This is naturally more of a hobby DIY sort of deal, one that I'm still planning to get into myself one day with my grandparent's first TV from 1956. The limit of the hobby side though has always been the CRT itself - much like the chips in modern electronics, it's way beyond an individial electronics tinkerer to rebuild one. But CRT rebuilding was an established profession in the past, and there's a trueley facinating american video showing the last man in the business over there going through all the magical processes involved before he closed down in 2010. It's a very thorough and facinating video that I highly recommend to anyone truely interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFnWYe5MzrY His equipment at least found its way to a group of DIY restorers. They also documented a CRT restoring place in france which takes things right down to the bare glass. Combined with the other video they together show a complete remanufacturing process, but unfortunately this latter video is unedited and rather slow to watch, especially with much of the chatter in french: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byCeMKzPJgM With all the complex steps involved, it might make one wonder how it was all done at scale. Unfortunately I never found a good film covering the inner workings of the fully-automated CRT manufacturing plants of the 90s and 2000s, in spite of much searching a few years ago, but there is this neat film showing how it was done in the 60s (two parts): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cf-rNlqeWw4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKvVE2jv5UQ More rambling about documentaries coming soon, but I really had better get onto my election-day stuff. - The Free Thinker