Howdy! I’m Derf from ConsoleMods.org. I’ve been working on a project which may interest any CRT enthusiasts. This is also a call to action for anyone generous enough to help out.
What is it?
Over the past few months, I’ve scraped a ton of documents from multiple Sony websites from public Archive.org backups. These documents contain Sony memos that were sent out to distributors, operation and service manuals for tons of their products, and most importantly a ton of rare Technical Bulletins for Broadcast Video Monitors (BVMs) and Professional Video Monitors (PVMs)! These bulletins are very specific instructions for Sony technicians to perform that fix model-specific issues. They are even specific enough to tell you exactly what parts to replace, how to test the fix, and what serial numbers of that model unit are affected. While some of these bulletins were floating around in the past, I believe this is the first time most of them have seen the light of day.
For instance, my BVM-14F5U has 24 Technical Bulletins that address issues ranging from white balance issues, image ringing problems, built-in test patterns not working, or power issues. They also include manual corrections, notification of new parts, or exact detailing of what firmware updates fix. One of them even addresses an issue I had been chasing where my unit goes into “Power Overload” state if I don’t let it sit plugged in for 10 minutes first.
At some point in the past, these manuals were available through publicly accessible URLs. This is where Archive.org had crawled all of the links and saved these documents. The set is likely not complete (as I noticed a few models missing) but it’s still a massive amount of manuals and technical bulletins that are no longer available to the public. If you have ever requested a manual from Sony, often times they do not have them as they are years out of support, and they will instead direct you to various third party manual re-sellers which often times don’t have the manual. These documents are now available on ConsoleMods.org under the CRT Wiki — or alternatively — you can visit https://crt.wiki. The full unlabeled repo can be found on this Google Drive link and will also available on this Archive.org page in the near future.
What can I help with?
While I had made a script to search the contents of these files and sort them by model number and generate wiki-friendly tables to paste onto each page of the wiki, the files themselves are all a spattering of random numbers or text strings taken from the document title, and you can’t tell what the document is until you open it. So, we are looking for help in labelling these documents.
If you are interested in helping, these are the steps to follow:
1. Create a ConsoleMods.org account and login so you can edit the wiki (if you haven’t already).
2. See this list of models with unlabeled documents on them, and open your favorite model (or any).
3. Click an unlabeled file to go to the file’s info page, click the file again to see what the document is, then click “edit” on the info page and put a short description. Once a document has been labeled this way, it updates all pages where that document appears!
See this page for an example where all technical bulletins are labeled. Once all of the files on a page are labeled, you can remove the warning message asking for help labelling them.
Conclusion
I hope you find some use in these documents to restore, repair, or learn more about your old professional Sony CRT. We would greatly appreciate any help, especially if you want to add any further information for your set on the CRT Wiki or upload a picture of your CRT as many of the pages don’t have an image. Watch this space for more to come on this project!