Good to know, but I'm trying to focus more on the nitty gritty electrical aspects of this. I want to engineer something for my set, test it, and possibly come up with some kind of circuit that others could use.
If this goes well enough, I may be able to offer tube based PCB retrofitting kits that people can buy.
Here's some reading, to get the juices flowing:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/7351543/Crt
A snippet reads:
"DC restoration of the video signal can be done in two ways. The first method is to use a simple diode to clamp the
signal at the reference black level. Diode clamping can be done either at the AC coupled input of the preamplifier or at
the AC coupled output of the CRT video amplifier. The disadvantage of diode clamping is that the black level is sensitive
to fluctuations in the power supply as well as noise coupling and temperature drift of the diode's forward drop.
A more effective approach for DC restoration is to do a dynamic black level clamping at the back porch of each
video signal. This requires the use of comparator within the feedback loop of the CRT video amplifier and the preamplifier.
During the horizontal retrace period, the comparator compares the DC feedback taken from the CRT video amplifier's
output with the voltage set by the brightness control potentiometer. Depending on the CRT video amplifier's output
voltage, a clamping capacitor at the output of the comparator is either charged or discharged so that the feedback
loop is stabilized and the video signal is restored to the black level."
This would seem to suggest that the restoration method employed in a set such as the CT-100 is inferior, since it uses a diode:
http://www.antiqueradio.org/art/RCAC...nSchematic.jpg
Instead of doing DC resto in the amplifier section, they chose to do it individually for each color at the outputs.
Reflecting on the above article, I'm gonna say that using the IC I first posted about is probably not the way to go about this. I think a better circuit can be designed which could be inserted into the video amp section of a set like my -9, and it could be done cheaply. Thoughts?