Originally Posted by old_tv_nut (Post 3131859)

Lack of snow with no signal is completely separate from your color issues - I'm only going to talk about color setup:

You say that lower brightness "seems to help" but from your pictures the "brightness" (or "black level," not "contrast" or "picture") is too low already. You should see uniform steps in the gray scale with only the darkest one being black. Secondly, your complaints about color being washed out tell me that you are looking subjectively for uncalibrated overly saturated color. To get (approximately) calibrated color, you first need to get the gray scale correct, then view the color bars through a blue filter and adjust hue (tint) and saturation (color) to get all the blue-containing colors to have the same amount of blue (looking the same through the blue filter) as shown on this page:
http://www.spearsandmunsil.com/portf...r/#prettyPhoto

My guess from your comments is that you will not like this accurate setup, but at least it gives you a known starting point for adjusting towards your preference.

Originally Posted by zeno (Post 3131863)

A few things.
Looking at you pix if its accurate its a little purple.
Try adding just a little green.
The pattern looks pretty good. The bottom bar is for
resolution & looks normal. If the set had a comb filter
the blue wouldnt be as bad & you would see more
lines to the right of it ( the high freqs for detail ).
The CRT looks just a tad weak. You cant always go
by the checker for that. I never harmed anything
with the clean & balance so maybe try that.
The Hitachi probably has a comb filter, most mid to high
end sets had them by the mid 80's. Thats much of the
reason for better small white lettering.

BTW Did we cover the HV control on this yet ??

73 Zeno

Originally Posted by Dreamsbeard (Post 3132205)

You are right, I do adjust everything by eye, but do not worry I know oversaturation when I see it. I adjust everything to get the most natural looking picture (NOT what you can see in department store where every TV are on torch mode with cartoonish colors). That being said, the reference picture you saw where at the low brightness and contrast setting for convergence adjustement, and are not the setting I use to "test" the TV normaly.