Brought home a bunch of silver crap from the TV shop and one piece of it may actually be worth looking in to, a Sony KV30HS420 HD ready WEGA. It was one of those deals where the owner said "junk it if it cost over $50". The tag says "intermittent bright screen and jiggling picture". When I fired it up, it had normal color for a few minutes; then, the colors went crazy and the horizontal width started varying from side to side. Even when I first fired it up, there was a wider black bar on one side of the screen than the other. Also, when I brought up the menu, I noticed a minor bit of bleeding around the letters. So, I hope the CRT is not going bad and I hope the other issues are simply bad solder connections. I would like to fix this and connect an HD tuner to the HDMI input, just to see how an HD CRT set looks. And, I may end up keeping it if I can find a place for it. I'll post a picture later.

If you get it right, it's a beautiful performer. I have this exact model and love it! The HD looks great and the color is stunning. There is a service menu on these but I don't have the manual yet to see how to access it. I've also been told that if you play with things in that menu without knowing what you're doing, the set can be messed up real bad, even shut down without being able to turn it back on. Be careful if you're in that service mode. The CRT is made in the USA and the rest is made in Mexico for the most part. These can be really hard to troubleshoot, everything is computer controlled, even the convergence. You may end up just changing out a whole board, lot's of SMP's in there. Good luck with it, if you get it right, you'll fall in love with it like I did mine.


What month was it made? The early '04 models had a part that was a problem but I don't remember what it is, I'll see if I can look it up again. The ones made after September had the revised part that stopped the problem. Mine is a December '04 model so I got lucky. Maybe that problematic part is what's wrong with yours. It did cause crazy picture problems and jittering IIRC.

16v 2.2 mfd caps is what I recall being an issue.

Mark, it is from September, '04; so, made just before the revision (lucky me).

Those Sony high-end sets are appearing like fungus in our house. I keep "accidentally" finding them on CL for under $100 in mint condition, and I can't resist a $2000 TV that's only a few years old for $50 or $60. I say they're being trashed so quickly, that they'll be as rare as CT-100s in a few years!

Charles

I'm thinking they'll be rare, as well. When you think about it, there were not near as many CRT HDTV's built in comparison to LCD/plasma. I could have gotten one from my former school teacher; but, I didn't know about it until it had already been sold. It was only 3 or 4 years old and he sold it for $75. Why? Because they (or, his wife) thought they had to go 100% flat screen.

Hey radiotvnut, when this set starts acting up, is the OSD, and menu still stable? If so yes indeed look to those cheap chinese junk silver SMT caps I mentioned earlier. I used small tantilum's to replace them with. IIRC there were like 4 or 5 of them in the jungle IC area. Not too sure if your set's PCB is nearly the same or not, but this was the case on a 2003 circa Sony I fixed for my dad-in-law.