CRT Television Troubleshooting and Service Menus

[NayusDante]

I just picked up a Toshiba 14AF43, which is a 14" flat CRT. It's absolutely beautiful, and gets great color and picture clarity for old consoles, and the geometry issues I've seen on other flat CRTs aren't as bad on this one. The issue is that the whole image is slightly slanted. I can access the service menu and play around with convergence and h/v offsets, but none of the options seem to fix the skewed picture. Any ideas or suggestions?

[dendawg]

Does the TV have a degauss option in the menu? If so try using that at least 5 times.

[staxx]

How are you connecting the consoles to the TV? You wouldn't be using a YUV to Component converter would you?

[NayusDante]

Here's an image for reference. I'm just using composite and S-Video, no converters. Don't think I have an option to degauss in the service menu. I get options to adjust the hold, but they don't seem to improve the angle issue.

Notice the bottom of the image. Color looks great, but my phone cam doesn't seem to capture it well.

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/_iPijsj5fRhs/TYAr0iBgRfI/AAAAAAAAAPo/kLmrRdbSvc4/s640/2011-03-15_23-14-47_135.jpg

[staxx]

Ahh the trapazoid look, there should be an adjustment for the trapazoid (i.e. one side is bigger than the other). When you mention Service Mode, are you referring to the hidden options on the TV (i.e. normally used for TV technicians only)

[NayusDante]

I have an option called "E/W TRAPEZIUM" but it doesn't seem to do anything when I adjust it. It has values from 0 to 63.

[staxx]

hmm that "TRAPEZIUM" should do the trick, try hooking up a game like SF2 or even Sonic (if you know the borders). You might well be outside the borders of the game image. My next idea is that there could be a bad cap.

[NayusDante]

Like I said, it doesn't do anything. I've adjusted it from 0 to 63 and there's no visible change. It's the same issue with the horizontal adjustments, though the verticle ones do work.

[staxx]

then I would think you may have bad caps on the board. The horizontal adjust should definitely 100% move the screen.

[NayusDante]

Another thing I've noticed is that on the service menu page labelled "CUT OFF," the entire image reduces to one horizontal line in the center of the screen. Adjusting that (well, doing it blindly) doesn't seem to change anything either. I haven't actually opened it up to look for bad caps yet, but I'll be doing that later.

[NayusDante]

Well, I fixed it, thanks to some help from a TV repair forum. Had to rotate the yoke.

What's the best way to calibrate a CRT for color, contrast, etc? I tried the THX optimizer, but it's hard to do it without a good reference.