Quote:
Originally posted by gyusher
Speaking of watching color snow. . . My old Pot smoking buddie used to come over to my house get loaded and watch snow for hours. . . He said he was inside a bag of cotton and the snow was cotton being picked and quickly thrown into the bag. . . I dont understand but I guess it takes all kinds. . . He actually ruined my TV by cranking the color and Contrast wide open. Finally after many many years he told me what he was doing. . . I would have shot him if I had known. I always wondered why my color and contrast were always out of wack. . .
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I'm curious. How did your friend actually "ruin" your TV set? I can see how turning the color and contrast controls all the way up would ruin any TV--it overloads the CRT, the power supply and everything else.
Turning the brightness control to maximum can damage the CRT permanently by causing the picture to "bloom" out of focus at maximum brightness; the tube will become gassy from the overload, and several other tubes in the set could be damaged as well. One set I read about in an old color-TV repair book some years ago was heavily damaged, and the culprit was a gassy CRT which caused a chain reaction; the resulting overload caused an arc on one of the set's PC boards, near one of the chroma demodulator tubes. The arc actually flashed across the base of the tube, cracking the glass immediately. There may have been, and probably was, even more damage as well, such as to the power supply, video amplifier circuits, etc. My best guess is the set was junked after the owner found out how much it would cost to repair it.
Another dandy way of wrecking a color set in the early days through about the '80s or '90s
was to turn the three G2 (screen) controls on the back of the set all the way open, then turn the set on. If you were lucky, all you did with most sets was blow a fuse or kick out the circuit breaker, but some sets weren't that well protected and could be ruined in a minute by running the screen controls (which controlled the brightness of the three electron beams in the CRT) at maximum.
Today's microprocessor-controlled color sets have been made more or less "tinker proof" by putting almost all the service adjustments (except the focus control) in software accessible through a service menu, which itself is accessible only through a complicated series of keystrokes involving the front-panel buttons. The access sequence, and the meanings of the hexadecimal numbers in the menu itself, are normally known only to service technicians, which prevents set owners from altering settings they have no business changing in the first place. The focus control, although mounted (at least in RCA sets such as my CTC185 and others using that chassis design) on the rear of the set, has been made tamper-proof by making it impossible to adjust without a special hex-head tool available, again, only to qualified service technicians. Moreover, the back covers of all new color sets are now secured by fasteners which require, once again, a special tool not available to the average set owner. I believe the master G2 adjustment is on the rear panel of recent-vintage RCAs and possibly other makes as well, just above or below the focus control; it has the same type of tamper-proof hex-head shaft.
BTW, I like your avatar--very cute.