Why I love Japanese CRT sets (especially the older ones)

[japlytic]

One of the reasons why I love Japanese (and certain other Asian, including Korean) CRT sets is that because they are easy to service, and seem to last a long time (especially the older ones).

I tend to find some (but not all) of the European CRT sets a little hard to service because some have the "bells and whistles" in them (I found that some of the early European colour sets released in Australia around 1975 had them).

Please discuss your experiences (past and present) with servicing Japanese CRT TV sets (including rebadges of Japanese sets, and especially the early ones!) here.

[BigTroll]

Re: Why I love Japanese CRT sets (especially the older ones)

I have a 1981 Sony Trinitron KV-1543R I plan on probably doing a recap as i want it to last indefinately, however iam curious if you happen to know if the early 80s sony tvs are easy to service or not and if they have a ton of caps in them?

[stj]

Re: Why I love Japanese CRT sets (especially the older ones)

old (80's) sony's often kill some custom (but readily available) to3 can that handles the pincushion or east-west - i forget which.
i had to change loads of those.

[Innov8tive1]

Re: Why I love Japanese CRT sets (especially the older ones)

Not ancient but I use a 1992 model Panasonic Superflat tube (not a Gaoo but a very nice set) in my workshop. It still has a great picture. I put it together from 2 or 3 sets, one of which was fairly new when the power supply was taken out by lightning. Had another one that was run 24-7 for a few years and the CRT was completely worn out which I took the power supply out of . Have had to re-cap the vertical cct (very common on these) and re-solder a few other areas but it looks good for an 18 year old set! IMO after those sets in the mid 90s, the Panasonics went downhill and didn't make another CRT that was anywhere near as good as the Superflats. Aside from the Sonys of the time I consider the Panasonics of the early 90s to be some of the best CRT sets ever made.

I also used to service a lot of Hitachi sets from the late 70's thru the 90s. They too had their share of problems with vertical caps and transistors (ICs in the later ones) and a lot of their flybacks were terrible. We'd run them on a Variac down around 85-90V just so they wouldn't go into shutdown and watch the flyback crater and shoot smoke out the side..........it didn't damage anything else but it was a good quick way to confirm the flyback was the problem.