# Anyone here ever had a professional-model display?



## Wayne A. Pflughaupt (Apr 13, 2006)

Sadly, our 10-year-old Mitsubishi 31” TV has been showing its age of late. When you turn it on, the picture collapses to a thin white horizontal line across the middle of the screen. When the picture finally kicks in _a couple of hours later_, it has horizontal lines on the screen that are progressively larger and more numerous towards the bottom of the screen. I’m sure it’s just a minor repair – the picture tube is still nice and bright. But until my wife gets a new job, we just don’t have any money to spare for a repair. So, we just got in the habit of leaving it on all the time, rather than having to wait for it to work. 

It’s been a great TV. The picture is fabulous, which is why I never felt the urge to upgrade to a big screen TV. By “big screen” I mean the hulking rear-projection models that proliferated until a few years ago. I’d go to the stores and look at their pictures, but none of them could compare to our little Mits. I just wasn’t interested in a downgrade in picture quality to get an upgrade in size. (Interestingly, the only big screen I ever saw that gave ours a run for the money in the picture quality department was also a Mitsubishi!)

As luck would have it my son, who is a lead installer at a big home theater shop in Dallas, recently moved up to HD when he picked up a discontinued Zenith LCD display for cost, so he offered us his old TV. It’s also a Mitsubishi, but not your run-of-the-mill Best Buy fare. I guess you’d call it a commercial or professional monitor (don’t know for sure which term is correct), with a plethora of BNC connectors and a VGA plug on the back, along with the usual RCA and S-video. It even has a couple of cooling fans - hey, you know you're dealing with a manly display when it has to be fan-cooled! If that doesn't convince you, check out the metal case! This thing is a beast – two men can barely carry it without some serious straining. I measure it at 36” diagonal, but the model number indicates that it’s a 37” (XC-3730C). (Mitsubishi seems to have a thing for non-standard sizes with these TVs; the remote also works for a 29” model, and some Googling shows the existence of a 33” as well.) 

You should see the strange picture adjustments available in the menu. In addition to the usual Bright, Contrast, Color, Tint and Sharpness, there is Purity, H-width, H-phase (“Horizontal?”), Vertical Height, Vertical Position, PCC Gain, PCC Phase, and Address. I’ve yet to figure out what some of these do. There are also Temperature options for 6500 and 9400. The Temperature function even has a “User” option to do separate adjustments to the red, green and blue guns!

I’m happy to find that the picture quality is as good as our old Mits, if not better. It does seem to do black detail better, the only complaint I had about the old one. “Rich” or “lush” is how I’d characterize all the Mitsubishi CRT pictures I’ve ever seen. There’s just no understating the difference correct color temperature makes. It’s not HD, but we’re sure enjoying the bigger picture! With our seating only 9 ft. or so away, it seems plenty big to us, and the picture quality holds up well, even at such a close distance. It’ll hold us until we can afford to upgrade all our gear to HD. And it sure looks impressive having a "professional" monitor in the equipment list! :bigsmile: But, I will miss one of my favorite features the old TV had – closed captions that automatically come on when muting. Maybe we can find an outboard unit of some kind.

Just wondering if anyone else here has ever used a pro monitor?

Regards,
Wayne


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## fmw63 (Jun 20, 2007)

Yes, I've got the same one, and it is nice. And big and heavy. I've been wondering if I actually need all three fans, though. Oh, and it does hd, you just have to use a converter to drive the RGBHV bnc inputs. Right now I'm using a Key Digital KD-CTCA3 fed by the component outs of a DishNetwork 811.


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## lcaillo (May 2, 2006)

Great old sets.


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## tonyvdb (Sep 5, 2007)

I Think Mitsubishi has some of the best CRT displays back in the late 80s early 90s, I also loved their HiFi VHS VCRs even played back S-VHS tapes.

I had a 29" Yamaha monitor for many years before we bought our current Sony 53" RPTV (Yamaha only made Televisions for about 4 years). The Yamaha (cant remember the model number) had MTS DBX stereo and has a plethora of inputs on the back as well. The picture was fantastic and the sound was great. It looked really nice as it had an oak outer shell. Sadly the flyback transformer went in it twice and I had it repaired the second time and sold it to where I work (the students living on campus loved it) but sadly someone tried to move it and knocked it off the stand it was on and smashed the front of the tube.


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## Wayne A. Pflughaupt (Apr 13, 2006)

fmw63 said:


> Oh, and it does hd, you just have to use a converter to drive the RGBHV bnc inputs. Right now I'm using a Key Digital KD-CTCA3 fed by the component outs of a DishNetwork 811.


Wow, thanks for the tip, Frank! We're contemplating upgrading for HD but our stuff is sooo old, we'll be needing all kinds of stuff - a receiver, TIVO, outboard amps, etc. Since the TV is the big-ticket item, it'll probably be the last thing we get; it's nice to know we'll be able to use the Mits in the interim.



tonyvdb said:


> I had a 29" Yamaha monitor for many years before we bought our current Sony 53" RPTV (Yamaha only made Televisions for about 4 years). The Yamaha (cant remember the model number) had MTS DBX stereo and has a plethora of inputs on the back as well. The picture was fantastic and the sound was great.


Tony, I'll bet you a dime to a donut that 29-incher was a rebadged Mitsubishi! I mean, how many companies ever made a 29" TV? Yamaha is well know for that, rebadging other manufacturer's products. For instance, their DVD players used to be "hot-rodded" Panasonics - maybe still are, for all I know...

Regards,
Wayne


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## lcaillo (May 2, 2006)

Most of Yamaha's sets from that era were NEC chassis with RCA CRTs. NEC had some great performing sets back then. The flybacks have aged out and been a rather high failure item. Mits had some of the best tubes, though.


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## tonyvdb (Sep 5, 2007)

a little off subject but My parents still have their Baumark 21" CRT (Sold at The Bay stores here in Canada) that they bought way back in 1980. And it still works however I dont know how anyone can handel watching a CRT that small as the overscan is so bad that you cant often read all of the ticker bar during news programs. 
We have an old Sony trinatron pro display at our church that was used way back in the 1970's early 80s for a reference monitor during our days of brodcasting television. It has a SCART connector on the back and BNC inputs. It is also still working today. I wonder if the reason the older sets last so long is because of the fact that they did not over drive the transformer to get the greater contrast as they do in newer displays.


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## MatrixDweller (Jul 24, 2007)

Wayne A. Pflughaupt said:


> You should see the strange picture adjustments available in the menu. In addition to the usual Bright, Contrast, Color, Tint and Sharpness, there is Purity, H-width, H-phase (“Horizontal?”), Vertical Height, Vertical Position, PCC Gain, PCC Phase, and Address. I’ve yet to figure out what some of these do. There are also Temperature options for 6500 and 9400. The Temperature function even has a “User” option to do separate adjustments to the red, green and blue guns!


I have a Samsung HD CRT. It doesn't have all the fancy connections but I found a trick to get into the service menu rather than the standard user menu. You need to press a few keys on the remote to unlock it and it gives you a pletora of settings that I'm too scared to change. I think in your TV they are automatically unlocked because the user probably knows what they are doing (works in a studio, etc). My consumer driven TV locks them out because if it didn't it would cause a nightmare for tech support (and a manual 200 pages thick).



> a little off subject but My parents still have their Baumark 21" CRT (Sold at The Bay stores here in Canada)


My parents too have an old Sears brand 27" CRT that they bought from back in the early 80's. It's still kicking. The cool thing about it is that it has some spring clips on the back for small surround speakers. I think both Sears and The Bay's electronics were re-branded JVC, Goldstar (now LG) or RCA back then (
Beaumark is the HBC brand name I believe).


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