Black and White to Color - CRT
I know my TV is dying. It's a big screen CRT, but what is it exactly that causes the set to turn on in black and white and then stay that way for a while. I noticed this happened on an even older, regular TV. My big screen has done it for a minute to 5 minutes at a time only now it's stayed b/w as long as 45 minutes before the color pops on. What causes that?
Just how old is it and who is the make?
Sounds like whatever drives the color in the set is going out or is loose. i have a Curtis-Mathes console which had problems with intermittently going to a horizontal flat line. and it ended up being bad solder connections at the ICs which do vertical sync.
in your case, it could even be the little board which plugs into the back of the CRT neck, the solder joints there are known to get weak as well. i doubt it's 'dying' just needs a little TLC.
I also had VCRs which record fine but play back in B&W but i never did figure those out :P
It's definitely dying. The inputs are shot. My VCR volume drops way down. It's not the VCR because I've hooked it up elsewhere and it's fine. My DVD still works but I have to turn the volume up almost full to get the sound. I have blue shadows much of the time. This is a 50" Mitsubishi projection from, hmm, sometime in the 90's.
Oh lord Projection TV. leave it to me to still believe that 'Big-Screen TV' still means a 25" console in the living room floor.
Projection screens. i won't touch 'em. they're quite possibly the biggest headache for TV repair. when they 'die' instead of giving the satisfaction of smoking or going boom, they just start degrading in picture quality. i've seen them go so far out of convergence you cannot make out the On Screen Display. i've also seen the picture look so far out of focus that the only viewable section is dead-center in the display. the CRTs are combined into one picture which displays on the front panel via a labyrinth of mirrors so odd even an expert in the art of refraction couldn't explain it.
There's three picture tubes--count 'em, THREE. one is for red, the other for blue, and last one for green. they're non-serviceable and fluid-cooled. when one goes count on a CRT replacement and it's just not cost-effective i'm afraid.
Even the boards in them are so complicated it's not worth it.
Orry, I had a tuner go out on one of my projection TVs back in the early 2000's. It cost me $150 just to have a technician look at it and determine what was wrong and another $400 to replace the tuner, replace bulbs, and other misc. maintenance. This was on an old Pioneer Elite 55", so at the time, it was worth it to spend on repairs, but these days it's so much cheaper to replace the TV.
Exactly! I've always known that; had it explained to me years ago. That's why I was only curious about what caused the B/W thing to happen. My TV is so screwed up that the MENU options aren't even readable. They blur and such. The picture in picture thing stopped working eons ago. It's been that progressive dive downward. I'm just economically challenged. But I'm also now forced to try and replace it by the end of 2010 because of California's new big screen rules.
I like DTVuser thought you meant an old 25 in CRT. I was going to say it could be a bad cap in the color burst crystal circuit or a bad solder joint. But now I know it's a project TV, my experience is zero....
In many ways the new LCD are more like fixing an old CRT TV (not counting the CRT or flyback). Most of the failures are because the solder at 100 mph and Quality Control happens in the customers living room.
The more I understand, the less I know.
PORK... The Other White Meat....
90% of trouble i've experienced from a thrift store $10 TV (like my Zenith System 3 used in my retro console) is usually something stupid such as bad solder joints in the vertical/horizontal sync area (hot from the ICs and ceramic resistors--easy fix with a soldering iron) or a blown fuse from a power surge (never had anything blow with the fuse either) and it's usually a very simple fix.
But the other more complicated issues i've had have been with newer TVs. around the early-mid 1990s they made them even more non-serviceable. in other words, they put in 'protection circuitry' which shuts the entire set down or even blows other components (sacrificial electronics) even for the simplest of problems such as brownouts or undervolts and that makes it near-impossible to fix. when it takes out the entire set and blows components designed to go with that it's just the old 'buy a new one' philosophy i refuse to believe in. so i just refuse to buy any newer TV. all my stuff, including Color TVs, are from the late 1970s or early 1980s.
I'm the kind of guy who just can't get used to an LCD or Plasma. it's just not my style. plus they look the same in picture, only with LCD it's worse, black levels below par, viewing angles distorted. with my System 3, not only does it last longer (get more out of my $10 than i bargain for) but i can eat at my kitchen table and still make out the picture, even though the console is in the living room a few feet to my left.
With HD, i cannot tell the difference in HD vs. SD DTV. when i say that, i mean i cannot see any perceivable difference between a clear SD-Digital picture on my old CRT and an HDTV-signal on an HDTV. now the difference is that if you view an SD channel on an HDTV, it sucks. and not all channels are HD yet.
Plus, the same picture, even if a tiny bit better, isn't worth $300 more dollars IMO and if it were, i'd expect the set to last over 30 years as the Zenith already has before i bought it.
Last edited by DTVuser2009; 12-18-2009 at 05:34 PM.
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