Trash find:Sony Wega 20"

[rca2000]

I think the QC just went WAY down near the end of the tube era. You may recall about 10-12 years ago--Sony projo sets had tubes that failed after a few thousand hours of use. The story was that the cathodes were contaminated from the START--and the tubes would short--often taking out the driver chip and perhaps some other parts. They did not lose emission...they just shorted and killed other things. For awhile--Sony was replacing these tubes under warranty. By that time---Sony was beginning to feel the backlash from the failed LCD projo light engines coming back under warranty LEFT AND RIGHT. Finally...Sony gave up and only cared about flat panel sets.

Their DV tubes from this time period seemed to have been built with the same QC as the projo tubes. Failng Sony pix tubes were VERY common --say 10-15 years ago...and would first begin looking bad--then the set did the "flash, flash flash" thing. And for a long time--Sony trinitron tubes have been built-it seems--with a built-in "timer", for lifespan. Unlike other tubes, Particularly roundie color tubes..Trinitrons do not rejuvinate at all.

I recall trying to hit one--a 26" tube....It DID come up, and looked nice...for about an hour..THEN...it faded and looked WORSE than before. I tried a filament boost---and it got worse...and finally looked so bad as to be totally unwatchable. All of this was in a period of less than 3 hours.

A similar thing happened on a 90's 27" trinitron set. I let the shop owner know the set had a bad tube. He said to boost it, so I did the "self boost" thing (shorting the filament dropping resistor). It DID look a lot better...for a couple of days.Then..it looked a LOT worse than it did in the first place. The owner of the shop was in a fix, since he had told the set owner we had REPLACED the tube--and had charged quite a bit of money for the repair. Now--he was in a mess--as the set was pretty much unwatchable. He blamed ME for the whole thing...even though I told him the tube would NOT last that way. I was able to "bail hm out" by finding a set with a good tube--and we installed it--and the set looked nice again. Did I get a thanks? No...this was the guy who along with his wife...cheated me out of about 10K in back money...and unemployment about 5 years ago.....