This is the very first thing I did of course, as it always is and not
finding anything relevant (those three hits are for a pay site) I posted
here. I guess I need to create a sig file that says "yes I googled it
already". I spent an hour poking around in the monitor, narrowed it down
to the circuit between the MCU board and the G1 wire, checked the semis
and they were fine, started checking lytics and found a bunch of bad
ones so I gave up and scrapped it. I hate to do that but I couldn't get
a dime for it even in working condition so it's not worth further effort
to replace a pile of caps and see if it works then.
I don't remember the site or thread but do recall reading a long thread
about monitor too bright.
Some monitors were fixed by running the software setup 'color
calibration'.
Some were fixed by REDUCING the resistance of a resistor in a [bias?]
circuit.
There were quite a few people talking about different things they tried.
The root cause seems to be drifting of the screen bias due to component
aging.
I see good, working monitors going into the dumpster because people want
flat screens.
It is a throw away society and someday they will throw us away.
Yes those are the usual suspects, however in this case it wasn't simply a
case of too bright, it was that the front panel control had very little
range. I could turn down the G2 and get the brightness ok at one resolution
but then it would be too dim at another. What I did find on these monitors
is that they're notorious for having loads of bad capacitors, and that was
supported by my limited probing around with an ESR meter so that would be
the place to start. This is/was an 11 year old shadow mask monitor with a
rounded tube, and numerous gashes and scuffs in the case, I'm not sure I
could even give it away working, much less get anything for it, and with the
huge backlog of broken crap taking up space, sometimes I have to give up and
salvage what useful parts I can, even if it means paying to dispose of the
rest. My plan with this, as I occasionally do, was to fix it and try to give
it away, there's only so much time that I can devote to one of those. I'd
rather put the time into saving a late model 22" flat CRT, I love them but
even those are getting hard to get rid of.
