Secret menus on modern sets

My 80's vintage Zenith color sets had secret menus that allowed the repairman to fool with or check various settings, am wondering if my present Sony Wega set has this as well. Anyone know?

I bought this set as a demo and never got the owner's manual and Sony's website is useless in this regard......does anyone know what the "VM" control is or does? This is listed within the "Video" menu. There are 3 choices, Off, Low and High. I don't see any difference at all between any of them!

One neat thing is that there's a tilt correction which allows you to tilt the picture left or right. When at the showroom I noticed a few Sonys askew and asked the "salesman" (IE: ignoramus) about this.....I feared that perhaps there was a bad batch of sets. Turns out they were just adjusted goofy, probably some trouble maker like me who knew about this and screwed with them! LOL

Anthony

[andy]

Virtually all modern TVs use that service menu instead of having pots to adjust inside the set for things like vertical size and RGB bias. Do a search on google groups to find out how to get into a sony's service menu. Be careful because you can really screw up the set if you don't know what you're doing. The nice thing about sony's service menu is that you have to save the new settings to the EEPROM before they become permanent. If you don't, the settings will only last until the set is unplugged.

VM stands for velocity modulation. It's a technique used to make the picture look sharper than the set next to it at best buy. It basically slows down the horizontal scanning at the edges of objects. Vertical white lines on a dark background are made to appear thinner than they should be. Some people like the way it looks, but it's hated by videophiles. Kind of the equivalent to always keeping the loudness switch on your stereo turned on.

Thanks Andy. Once again I get the info I seek from this great site (which is only as good as the members.........wait a tic, I must be bringin down the averages LOL!)

Anthony

[Rob]

Anyone know the setup codes, or where I can find them so I can get "into" my Toshiba 61A60 RPTV and correct the greyscale tracking (need to adjust green screen) and also the blue convergence? These two little things have been bugging the crap outa me for 3 years now and previous internet searches turned up nothing.

[Eric H]

Rob, I found the info for my Sony here:

http://www.repairfaq.org/


For the Sony you have to hold down a recessed button while you power the set on, then the remote is used to make adjustments.

I've searched high and low on the web (Google) and have only found references to people who bought the factory service manual to learn the tricks....and they warn of the possibility of
Fubaring it.

http://www.members.accessus.net/~090/awh/how2adj.html

A Toshiba site but the wrong model:
http://www.mindspring.com/~jzyber/toshibatv.htm

Anthony

Originally posted by Eric H
Rob, I found the info for my Sony here:

http://www.repairfaq.org/


For the Sony you have to hold down a recessed button while you power the set on, then the remote is used to make adjustments.

Well slap me silly and call me a cab! I done forgotted all about that site.....it's the bestest for newbies and old timers alike!

http://repairfaq.ece.drexel.edu/sam/tvfaq.htm#tvadjlost

http://www.repairfaq.org/REPAIR/F_So...ml#SONYSET_020

Dats bad to da bone! There's a tweak to move the OSD but alas it only allows side to side.....I wanted to move the time from the away from the lower right corner as sometimes it's hard to read when the station shows their call letters.

Thanks for the hot tips Eric H

Anthony

[asynchronousman]

Originally posted by andy Some people like the way it looks, but it's hated by videophiles. Kind of the equivalent to always keeping the loudness switch on your stereo turned on. [/B]

And there is something WRONG with my loudness button? It gives my modified AM IF bandwidth the last bit of OOMPH it needs and now sounds a bit more substantial, like mono FM. Do you think that readjusting the whole IF strip is EASY? At least my selectivity didn't go south like the digital set that had a cap placed across the IC-based tuner IF--and--I don't need a LOOP!

[Earlsays]

I miss the old ads....on TV and otherwise....Like...ever pick up a national geographic from the 50s-80s??!?! page after page after page in the beginning and end of the magazine of awesomely great, cheezy ads (literally cheezy if you're looking at the old cracker barrel ads)

I agree that TV now, is complete shit. There are a handfull of shows I watch, and most of them are animated....(simpsons, king of the hill, family guy)

Know what recent trend I don't like in shows/movies? Product placement. I don't need to see a 2 mile long billboard for "PEPSI COLA THE CHOICE OF A NEW GENERAAAAAAATIOOOOOOOONNNNNN!" (waynes world did such a great job making fun of product placement, corporate tie-ins, etc.) I mean, c'mon, I miss the old days, when, on TV, people drank "BEER" and ate "Breakfast Cereal" ate "chips" with "dip" and drank "soda" (or sometimes, interestingly, shasta cola) I miss the generic shit that I could make fun of later on. That needs to come back.

In related news...I seem to remember when I was little (early 80s) my mom & dad buying "CAT FOOD" came in a yellow bag, black lettering, and it was called CAT FOOD that's all it was....just dry cat food.....did this actually exist? I seem to remember a whole line of generic stuff you could buy, including "BEER"

[NowhereMan 1966]

Originally Posted by Earlsays

I miss the old ads....on TV and otherwise....Like...ever pick up a national geographic from the 50s-80s??!?! page after page after page in the beginning and end of the magazine of awesomely great, cheezy ads (literally cheezy if you're looking at the old cracker barrel ads)

I agree that TV now, is complete shit. There are a handfull of shows I watch, and most of them are animated....(simpsons, king of the hill, family guy)

Know what recent trend I don't like in shows/movies? Product placement. I don't need to see a 2 mile long billboard for "PEPSI COLA THE CHOICE OF A NEW GENERAAAAAAATIOOOOOOOONNNNNN!" (waynes world did such a great job making fun of product placement, corporate tie-ins, etc.) I mean, c'mon, I miss the old days, when, on TV, people drank "BEER" and ate "Breakfast Cereal" ate "chips" with "dip" and drank "soda" (or sometimes, interestingly, shasta cola) I miss the generic shit that I could make fun of later on. That needs to come back.

In related news...I seem to remember when I was little (early 80s) my mom & dad buying "CAT FOOD" came in a yellow bag, black lettering, and it was called CAT FOOD that's all it was....just dry cat food.....did this actually exist? I seem to remember a whole line of generic stuff you could buy, including "BEER"

I know even back in the 1950's and 1960's, many shows were presented with the saying, "brought to you by..." and then the sponsor(s) are named. Glenn Beck's radio talkshow is a bit like that today where he says, "this half hour brought to you by...." I know products were featured in many shows too like "The Andy Griffith Show" features Fords usually, "Bewitched" hawked the Chevy cars (Darren had the Caprice, Samantha an Impala, Larry Tate a Corvette, etc) and "I Dream of Genie" featured the Pontiac line where Tony Nelson drove a GTO, Dr. Bellows a LeMans or Catalina, etc.

Still, I think I understand what you mean, when people reached for a soft drink, it said "cola" or it was a fictional brand.

[Jeffhs]

Originally Posted by Earlsays

I agree that TV now, is complete shit. There are a handfull of shows I watch, and most of them are animated....(simpsons, king of the hill, family guy)

I agree, though I wouldn't say it the way you did. About all I watch on TV these days is the news, a few classic shows on TV Land, and once in a while Law and Order on NBC, unless there is an interesting travelogue or nature show on the National Geographic Channel (or Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom on Animal Planet), for example. The rest of the time I watch classic TV and movies on DVD; I must say I've never enjoyed watching TV more. The only movie I didn't care for was the very first DVD I rented from Netflix.com, shortly after getting a DVD player for Christmas almost two years ago. The movie was the original, uncut version of Serpico, starring Al Pacino. I never saw such garbage in my life. Never again. The series I rent from Netflix these days are classic shows from the 1960s and 1970s, when I was growing up. TV was a lot better, IMHO, in those days and earlier than it is now. Back then there was a little thing called the National Association of Broadcasters Television Code. Most U.S. television stations subscribed to it, making for much better programming than the garbage seen today. Prime time programming 30-40 years ago was, for the most part, entirely suitable for family viewing; the few shows that tested the limit were broadcast at hours during which most young children would be asleep. The stations went off the air around 2 a.m. as well, so we had no such things as infomercials and such to worry about. That's another thing that gets me. Why on earth do TV stations bother to run those infomercials anyway? I'm sure not many people watch them between two and five a. m., and I am sure no one tapes them on a VCR to watch the next day. Most infomercials are about as interesting to most people as a test pattern. The nation's TV stations are, IMO, wasting money and energy (AC and RF) running these darned things, not to mention having to pay a transmitter engineer time and a half or more (!) to work those overnight hours. They would be better off, again IMHO, going back to the way it used to be: signing off after the last network program left the air.

I honestly don't know if stations make money on infomercials or not; if not, as I said above, running these things in the small hours of the morning, when most folks are asleep anyhow, makes no sense to me. Many people, myself included, reach for the remote and mute the sound on the commercials anyhow, but the television industry is trying to stem this trend by various techniques. (There is a technique being studied, and perhaps close to being implemented, which would make it difficult or impossible to skip commercials on TV shows recorded on a TiVo unit.)

I think the next step might be subliminal advertising, so even if one mutes the sound, the commercial's message will nonetheless get through. The only way subliminal ads wouldn't work would be if the person wasn't watching the picture, but, knowing that commercials keep the stations and programs on the air, the networks and local stations may eventually come up with a system to make it virtually impossible to ignore commercials even if the viewer was away from the set; sort of like the Emergency Alert System, which force-tunes your TV to the key EAS channel in your area if there is an alert or even a test (at least that's how it works if, as I do, you use a digital cable box ahead of your set). Even if you try to change channels, the same emergency message shows up everywhere, making it impossible to ignore the thing unless you turn the TV off.

Sigh! . . . you just can't win.

BTW: As to secret TV service menus, my RCA CTC185, and possibly my 1995-vintage Zenith Sentry 2, have them, but I've only seen the ones on the RCA once, when a technician from the local TV shop was here to repair the set four or five years ago. I don't remember for the life of me how the tech invoked them on the RCA, and I never knew how to call them up on the Zenith, but maybe it's just as well. As one of you said, it is possible to cause severe damage to a TV set if you fiddle with those controls without knowing what you are doing. Most give no clue as to what they do anyhow (a service manual is required to find that out, as the menus appear simply as numbers on the TV screen), so fiddling with them can only get you into trouble if you don't have that info in front of you. That was probably one of the best things TV manufacturers ever did, as it took the service controls off the back of the set and put them somewhere where most average TV viewers would never think of looking; this alone probably reduced the number of nuisance service calls drastically. The procedure used to invoke the service menus is sufficiently complicated, moreover (and never mentioned, of course, in the TV's customer instructions), to make it nearly impossible for unqualified persons to access the menus even if they know they are there.

[Chad Hauris]

All infomercials make money for the station. They usually air at times when viewership is low, such as late night so the station is still making money even when they might have a hard time selling spots in a regular show.
The money is there for the station whether people are watching or not.

Also these stations are probably just operating with a single master control operator late night. I don't know if they have found a way yet to totally automate TV stations like radio stations often are but they may have.
There is no requirement for a transmitter engineer to be at the transmitter all the time like there once was.

[Duane]

Originally Posted by heathkit tv

My 80's vintage Zenith color sets had secret menus that allowed the repairman to fool with or check various settings, am wondering if my present Sony Wega set has this as well. Anyone know?

I bought this set as a demo and never got the owner's manual and Sony's website is useless in this regard......does anyone know what the "VM" control is or does? This is listed within the "Video" menu. There are 3 choices, Off, Low and High. I don't see any difference at all between any of them!

One neat thing is that there's a tilt correction which allows you to tilt the picture left or right. When at the showroom I noticed a few Sonys askew and asked the "salesman" (IE: ignoramus) about this.....I feared that perhaps there was a bad batch of sets. Turns out they were just adjusted goofy, probably some trouble maker like me who knew about this and screwed with them! LOL

Anthony

Anthont,

The VM for Sony sets is velocity modulation.Other manufactures call it SVM,scan velocity modulation.It's basically the speed of the trace to help sharpen the outside prtion of the display area.It can be turned off in the service mode.I don't know if the newer sets eliminate the effect,but the "film" mode used to.I don't think most people would notice the difference.

To access the service mode on Sony sets from the mid 90's on,the sequence is:

With power turned off from the remote,operate the following keys on the remote within a second of each other.

Display
5
volume +
power on

To exit the service mode,power off the set via the remote.

Caution:If you don't know what you're looking at, you can create a real problem for yourself if you make changes while in the service mode.some of the parameter values are obvious,most aren't.


to navigate between the parameter vaues,operate the 1 and 4 keys.to change a value,it's the 3 and 6 keys.the parameter values step in sequence.they are usually grouped together by function.for example,there will be geometry parameters followed by video paremeters,etc.

there are some web sites that might expand on the service mode area,but in most cases,people are reluctant to pass along this kind of info.They may be ISF people and don't want to lose business.

[andy]

You forgot to mention that you have to hit mute, then enter before exiting serivce mode to save the settings. One nice thing about Sony TVs is that if you mess it up, all you have to do is unplug it to reset it to the old values if you haven't saved it. It will run with the new values until it's unplugged. This gives you a chance to test your new settings for a while before going back into service mode to save them.

[NowhereMan 1966]

Originally Posted by Jeffhs

I agree, though I wouldn't say it the way you did. About all I watch on TV these days is the news, a few classic shows on TV Land, and once in a while Law and Order on NBC, unless there is an interesting travelogue or nature show on the National Geographic Channel (or Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom on Animal Planet), for example. The rest of the time I watch classic TV and movies on DVD; I must say I've never enjoyed watching TV more. The only movie I didn't care for was the very first DVD I rented from Netflix.com, shortly after getting a DVD player for Christmas almost two years ago. The movie was the original, uncut version of Serpico, starring Al Pacino. I never saw such garbage in my life. Never again. The series I rent from Netflix these days are classic shows from the 1960s and 1970s, when I was growing up. TV was a lot better, IMHO, in those days and earlier than it is now. Back then there was a little thing called the National Association of Broadcasters Television Code. Most U.S. television stations subscribed to it, making for much better programming than the garbage seen today. Prime time programming 30-40 years ago was, for the most part, entirely suitable for family viewing; the few shows that tested the limit were broadcast at hours during which most young children would be asleep. The stations went off the air around 2 a.m. as well, so we had no such things as infomercials and such to worry about. That's another thing that gets me. Why on earth do TV stations bother to run those infomercials anyway? I'm sure not many people watch them between two and five a. m., and I am sure no one tapes them on a VCR to watch the next day. Most infomercials are about as interesting to most people as a test pattern. The nation's TV stations are, IMO, wasting money and energy (AC and RF) running these darned things, not to mention having to pay a transmitter engineer time and a half or more (!) to work those overnight hours. They would be better off, again IMHO, going back to the way it used to be: signing off after the last network program left the air.

I honestly don't know if stations make money on infomercials or not; if not, as I said above, running these things in the small hours of the morning, when most folks are asleep anyhow, makes no sense to me. Many people, myself included, reach for the remote and mute the sound on the commercials anyhow, but the television industry is trying to stem this trend by various techniques. (There is a technique being studied, and perhaps close to being implemented, which would make it difficult or impossible to skip commercials on TV shows recorded on a TiVo unit.)

I think the next step might be subliminal advertising, so even if one mutes the sound, the commercial's message will nonetheless get through. The only way subliminal ads wouldn't work would be if the person wasn't watching the picture, but, knowing that commercials keep the stations and programs on the air, the networks and local stations may eventually come up with a system to make it virtually impossible to ignore commercials even if the viewer was away from the set; sort of like the Emergency Alert System, which force-tunes your TV to the key EAS channel in your area if there is an alert or even a test (at least that's how it works if, as I do, you use a digital cable box ahead of your set). Even if you try to change channels, the same emergency message shows up everywhere, making it impossible to ignore the thing unless you turn the TV off.

Sigh! . . . you just can't win.

BTW: As to secret TV service menus, my RCA CTC185, and possibly my 1995-vintage Zenith Sentry 2, have them, but I've only seen the ones on the RCA once, when a technician from the local TV shop was here to repair the set four or five years ago. I don't remember for the life of me how the tech invoked them on the RCA, and I never knew how to call them up on the Zenith, but maybe it's just as well. As one of you said, it is possible to cause severe damage to a TV set if you fiddle with those controls without knowing what you are doing. Most give no clue as to what they do anyhow (a service manual is required to find that out, as the menus appear simply as numbers on the TV screen), so fiddling with them can only get you into trouble if you don't have that info in front of you. That was probably one of the best things TV manufacturers ever did, as it took the service controls off the back of the set and put them somewhere where most average TV viewers would never think of looking; this alone probably reduced the number of nuisance service calls drastically. The procedure used to invoke the service menus is sufficiently complicated, moreover (and never mentioned, of course, in the TV's customer instructions), to make it nearly impossible for unqualified persons to access the menus even if they know they are there.

Sorry for quoting everything but I agree with you. I also remember that some station here in Pittsburgh would air movies or old re-runs in the wee hours of the morning, pretty much for people who worked the swing shift and graveyard shifts in the steel mills and factories. I think KDKA TV even had "Swing Shift Theatre" in the 1950's for that purpose. The only stations that went off at night were PBS and Channel 4. I'm talking well into the 1980's here. I know on weekends, some of the UHF stations still air old shows like Andy Griffith and so on.