Good eye, Bruce! I had Dick Van Dyke playing on the DVD player. I have this set I bought at Wal-Mart with 65 hours of old tv shows. I think this episode was about an italian guy painting their living room.
Yeah, I'm not sure about the contrast. I think I've cancelled out the chance of any bad tubes, unless 1B3 tubes get weak and cause poor contrast somehow? I don't think that would happen, but it was mentioned in one of those repair books I've got. I have a picture of my contrast/video section. I had a hard time matching some of these weird components to the schematic:
Wow, my labeling didn't work out so good. Anyways, there's some capacitors listed that I couldn't find, as I recall. Those little cylinder/disk things around the sound take-off coil looked like tiny resistors or something, and I'm not sure about that green thing that's marked with paint dots like an old resistor. There's a similar one that's red like this and where I'm looking on the schematic, it mentions a capacitor. I wasn't sure if these were were caps, or resistors. The peaking coil, that someone had suggested might be open, appears to be that "blob." Looks like a resistor with a coil around it, coated in wax. Am I right? It said 10 ohm on the schematic and this measured 8 ohm on my multimeter.
I've been meaning to apply that video signal to see if the problem is before or after the video amp, but I don't seen to have any spare .1 capacitors to protect my DVD player.