Who’s Afraid Of A CRT?

Estimated reading time: 2 minutes

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Older consumer electronic devices follow a desirability curve in which after they fall from favour they can’t be given away. But as they become rarer, they reach a point at which everyone wants them. Then, they can’t be had for love nor money. CRT TVs are now in the first stage, they’re bulky and lower-definition than modern sets, and thus thrift stores and dumpsters still have them in reasonable numbers. To retrogamers and other enthusiasts, this can be a bonanza, and when he saw a high-end late-model JVC on the sidewalk [Chris Person] wasted no time in snapping it up. It worked, but there were a few picture issues, so he set about fixing it.

The write-up is largely a tale of capacitor-swapping, as you might expect from any older electronics, and it results in a fine picture and a working TV. But perhaps there’s another story to consider there, in that not so many of us here in 2024 are used to working with CRTs. We all know that they conceal some scary voltages, and indeed, he goes to significant lengths to discharge his CRT. It’s worth remembering though, that there’s not always a need to discharge the CRT if no attempt will be made to disconnect it, after all the connector and cable to the flyback transformer are secured by hefty insulation for a good reason. It’s a subject we’ve looked at here at Hackaday in the past. You could argue that, in some ways, newer TVs are harder to get into than these old CRTs.

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