Steve from Retro Tech recently posted a great video, showing his experience replacing the capacitors in certain input boards on a Sony BVM D24: One of the rare 16:9 broadcast monitors ever to be released.
WARNING: Working on CRT’s is extremely dangerous if you don’t know what you’re doing! Please be careful and don’t attempt any internal repairs without professional knowledge!
…but the above warning aside, one very lucky thing about BVM’s (and some other RGB monitors) is their input cards can be removed. This is not dangerous and provided you unplug the monitor, any beginner can feel free to remove the cards, should they need to send them out to be recapped by a professional.
In this video, Steve decided to replace every single capacitor on the boards, as they appeared to be the original caps. Then he did a really interesting experiment: He tested all of the removed caps to see if they went bad and actually needed replacing – Any many were still far within the tolerances, even after around 70k hours of use. There seemed to be a pattern of dying capacitors that are on specific boards in high temperature areas…research that echo’s the statements of Pat’s experience over years of working on these monitors.
Steve also recently posted about the “sinister six” capacitors that commonly fail on internal boards inside BVM’s. If you’re experienced enough to work on the internals of the monitor, it’s a good idea to preemptively change these: https://www.patreon.com/posts/sinister-six-in-38445167
Also, Steve made the above post public, to share the information with all BVM owners, but he’s constantly posting other great information, so if you’re an RGB monitor enthusiast, please consider signing up!
