Nothing lasts forever, especially in the realm of technology, and as much I hate to admit it even the items in my modest collection can, and sometimes will, give up the ghost and just become inert hunks of plastic, metal, and sometimes glass. That, however, will not happen without me putting up one hell of an effort to save the device in question – doing such for others is my day job, after all (albeit ironically for game consoles sometimes only a few months old – not 20+ years in most cases.)
As the title of this entry suggests, my gaming TV has finally, in effect, died. More correctly, it’s become unusable in the worst of ways. This, of course, requires a bit of storytelling.
The TV in question which, yes, is the same one discussed in this older entry, was purchased sometime in late 2013 or early 2014 to act as the center of my classic gaming setup. It’s a nice 20 inch flat CRT TV with a damn fine picture tube, a good assortment of video inputs and, most awesomely, video and audio output. The TV was an absolute champ, purchased from Goodwill on a whim for I think $15 or $20, and it served well for a few years.
Then, maybe about 2016 range, something funny happened. I produced a few videos on this way back (which have since been deleted) but to describe things simply, the television set would get a “mind of it’s own” and power on an off randomly, auto program, or otherwise behave however it wished. When I posted online about this people were suggesting (for some obsessive reason) that the issue was with the IR sensor and stray beams or something; even after I covered the IR sensor with electrical tape, thus blocking out all reasonable light sources. Funny how the peanut gallery gets fixated on one issue being the one even after it has been proven to not be the cause.
Eventually, after leaving the set unplugged for about a week and shorting out a few still-charged capacitors to drain them, the TV began working normally again – it stayed off when it was off and on when it was on. Things were good. Of course, this would happen after I went to Goodwill and bought another TV, one that wasn’t nearly as good and has some geometry issues I can’t fix, but it’s at least a backup.
That was until about maybe 6 months ago, not too long before I swapped the office out and moved a ton of stuff into the main room of the house. The TV was doing its old things again, and possibly had for a week or more before I noticed it, as during that time I wasn’t using that room for anything other than storage. Once I realized that I cut power to that whole setup (it’s a massive assembly of vintage 90’s AV equipment which really doesn’t get used and enjoyed like it should, but as always that’s another story) and went to play the waiting game again. That’s the time frame where I repurposed that room and moved everything again and, figuring it had been powered off long enough to “fix” itself after the hours spent reconnecting most of the setup I powered up the TV for it to instantly go back to its old tricks.
Damn!
Next step? Drag that fucker to work! That’s right, I took the thing to the shop. We’ve done some repair work on Arcade machines we own (I personally recapped a Nintendo PlayChoice-10 monitor) and CRT displays have become somewhat second nature to us, at least in basic form. We decided to open it up and take a look inside and saw…
Nothing. Absolutely nothing out of the ordinary. Hell, the set was honestly in better shape than most people would expect for something bought used that’s, what, 15 years old now. Minimal dust, no capacitors looking like they are going to blow, nothing! We cleaned the board, re-flowed the solder on some areas which looked a bit off, and that was that. I plugged the unit back in and things seemed fine for about 2 minutes and then it went right back to its usual crap.
It sits at work to this day, about 2 months later; we’ve not had time to look at it again and honestly don’t know what else can be done beyond literally washing the whole board in the hopes that maybe that will change something. I’ve pretty much come to the conclusion the unit is effectively useless, which is a shame considering how top notch the image quality is on it.
The crazy thing about this, though, is that apparently this isn’t actually an isolated kind of thing: a search for that TV model number ( Magnavox 20MS3442/17) leads to a few threads where people mention their set doing similar “strange” things, namely this one: https://forum.eserviceinfo.com/viewtopic.php?t=32855 which, while the end results aren’t identical to my, is still an identical phenomena.
I can only presume this series of TV sets have some common flaw and, unless I’m lucky and find another one locally that I can salvage the board from (don’t care how the picture tube is, I know mine is still great) maybe I can swap that out and have the set working again. Maybe. That’s not likely, though, and I’m probably just going to have to buy another one as soon as I can, but this time exercise a little more discretion than I did with the last “backup” TV purchase.
Lastly, you may ask “why I don’t just use an HDTV?” To give a short answer if it’s not an HD device, it doesn’t belong on an HDTV. That simple. I could (and will) go on about it, but I’ll provide that as the only counter to that question for this article.
Whatever I decide to do, I’ll post about it. More to come, as always.
