micky wrote:
I have a Sony 19" desktop tv, about 20 years old, which gave a perfect
picture since I got it 10 years ago, until I went on vacation 10 days
ago. I was gone for 8 days and when I got back the picture was weird.

There are no ghosts but the colors are screwed up. OTOH a picture
transmitted in black and white is pretty good, still black and white.

But with a color picture, in some parts of the screen at least, the
blue has become pure green and the red has become pure blue.

A medium blue background has become all green except for a 2" red
circle on the outer parts of the screen, and blue at the corners.
Despite this, as a tv show progresses, there seems to be less red than
normal, mostly some pink, and skin tones are all wrong. Probably
everything is wrong.


I was a moderately successful amateur repairman in the days of tubes,
and I did some other repairs besides just changing tubes, but tv's
have gotten a lot more complicated. Any chance I can fix this?

Even if I can't, I'm curious what sort ol failure causes these
symptoms?

And would I have been better off leaving the tv on for 8 days, or
putting it on a timer, than letting it sit that long. It seems to
me that a lot of tvs and vcrs have failed when not used for months.

Thanks.

The laziest first step is try degaussing it, or make sure the degausser
still works. Is the nasty thud and buss present when you fire up the
set from being cold and off?

It's been said lightning strikes can magnetize a TV chassis enough to mess
up colors, but I have no first hand experience with that. TVs have so
little metal even scrappers don't want them.

A 19" television from 20 years ago won't have one of those north/south
hemisphere detector chips, so it's probably not that thing.