Lionel wrote:

I just picked up one of these beautiful 21" monitors cheap at a market.
Except for this brightness problem, it works perfectly. I'm driving it
with a Matrox 450 Dual Head card at 1600x1200 x 32 bits at 75Hz. It
calibrates correctly with a Spyder, except for the maximum brightness
only being about half of what the calibraation software thinks it should
be (some 93 candles per square metre vs the ~50 candles on this
monitor). Turning up all the on-screen bias & gain controls to the
maximum values produces a usable, but still darkish image. I was
assuming that as the monitor is about 4 years old, it'd probably just
need a cleanup, & for me to tweak up the EHT, but having obtained a
schematic, I now know that there are *no* internal adjustments at all! I
cleaned all the dirt off the HT & EHT components & resoldered a heap of
joints that looked kind of 'dry' but it made no visible difference.

Any tips or ideas?

--
W
. | ,. w , "Some people are alive only because
\|/ \|/ it is illegal to kill them." Perna condita delenda est
---^----^---------------------------------------------------------------


It's a long shot, but I've seen a couple of sonys with a bad cap in the
CRT heater supply. Make sure you have 6.3 v on the heater. If the CRT
is weak, you might be able to try boosting it a little by using the old
few turns of wire around the flyback core trick. I've never tried to do
this with a monitor though, so I'm not sure if it would work. Most
monitors get the heater supply from the power supply instead of the
flyback. I don't see why it wouldn't work. If there are any resistors
in series with the heater supply, you could try bypassing them with wire
before doing anything else. I've seen quite a few of these with dim
CRTs that still look reasonably sharp. It's a shame that most companies
don't use the power saving features!
--
Andy Cuffe