[Outland]

Originally Posted by old_tv_nut

What do you mean by "100%?" Is that just cranking the color knob to max? That obviously should be too much. If you cannot judge the setting by the look of skin tones, then there are more technical ways involving color bars while viewing through a blue filter. For that you will need a DVD with color bar pattern and a blue optical filter.

Yes, that's what I meant. Where can I find these color bars and blue filter?

You say the CRT may be weak. Does the red gun bleed when you turn the color all the way down but turn the contrast to max? If it does, you have to reduce the contrast to eliminate the bleeding, and reduce it a bit more to allow for bright reds. If a black and white picture doesn't bleed at max contrast, the CRT is probably good enough, you just have to avoid overdriving by using somewhat less contrast and the right amount of color.

With color all the way down and picture all the way up, nothing bleeds. It's just a very contrasty black and white picture.

What I keep running into is a hazy black from brightness being too high, or details in the blacks being lost because brightness is too low. Similarly, too much color loses details, and too little looks dull.

I guessed the tube is worn because the default settings are simply far too dark (on other TVs the default settings are usually too bright). The default settings being everything at halfway, except picture which is at 100%. There's plenty of headroom with the brightness control though.

Because of the color difference gains used in NTSC sets to compensate for modern phosphors and get proper skin tones, the red is driven the hardest of all saturated colors (and also possibly harder than blue or green to get grayscale tracking), so red is usually the first color to show bleeding problems.

I see. In my case, the red gun does bleed slightly with color all the way up and details are lost within.