Was given a Sony KV-1945R
 

Just finished setting up a nice October, 1980 KV1945R Trinitron.

Pincushion was way off, real bad. I changed a couple of the small capacitors around the pin amp, common issue on these as you know. Got it near perfect with the control after. Focus is so solid on these. Greyscale tracking was absolutely perfect right out of the gate, vertical was a bit touchy but that was just dirty controls.

Not high-hour, but certainly used.

The original remote was a nice touch.

I watched a movie on this set tonight, and ended up having to open it up again. There was an intermittent on the neckboard causing flickering in the green channel. Not surprising since this TV sat unused from 1991 until today.

The tube is as strong as new, very good color and contrast.

Sony quality was hard to beat back in the day. But I don’t like their TVs much after around 1985. The styling by then was changing and not as cool as earlier sets were.

I agree with that. This as about as new as I take in. Still pretty good build quality. If the tube is good they are quite repairable. It's even made in USA (San Diego I address). But I know, if it doesn't run on tubes no one cares. I never subscribed to that line of thinking. 80s stuff is great for daily watching and they aren't pure junk like mid-90s+ CRTs

I agree as well. I had two great-aunts (sisters, who shared the same apartment) who had a 12" (IIRC, could have been larger) Sony color portable TV. Theirs worked absolutely beautifully, no service ever required that I ever knew of. They lived in the Cleveland suburb of Euclid, in a second-floor apartment, so the TV always got very good signals from the Cleveland TV stations (major networks, PBS, and two independent channels at the time) using just the built-in rabbit-ears (VHF) and loop (UHF) antennas. They watched the PBS channel a lot after returning home from church on Sundays. This was long before we had cable in our area.

Both my great-aunts are deceased now. I have absolutely no idea whatever became of their Sony color TV, but I hope it went to someone in our family who could use it, since the set still had lots of life left in it; it even had the original CRT, IIRC.

Very cool old TV, nice score.

I've worked on several of this type of Sony and with a good jug, they produce a stunning picture (better than some of the later models). I've replaced a few flyback transformers in these and the last one I worked on had a bad vertical IC, which was unavailable. Fortunately, I had a good one on a junk board.

I have one from the same era as this one. It has a beautiful picture except it has an hour glass shaped raster at the moment. I never dug into it to figure out the cause but is on my to do list.

That's why I always save junk boards and parts! Hope my HSTAT block holds up, those were already hard to find in the 2000s...

I'd be more than happy to help you diagnose it if you'd like. If the raster still fills the screen horizontally, it may just need the pin amplitude adjusted like mine did. Common. I also had to change out a couple of open capacitors but it was still an easy fix.

If the picture is shrunken horizontally you should look at the horiz drive voltages and see if your HV is at the proper level to rule out the flyback. I've seen a 70s Sony with short width and it was caused by the horiz linearity control. Some sets do not even have that control though.

Easy. 1mfd (IIRC) off the pin amp control.

Mine needed two replaced. Both 1mF 50V