Before I sent the Sharp Image back to
Jomac, I couldn't resist testing the chassis with a couple other tubes. I tried out another "black standard" Phillips and experienced the same geometry problems as before:
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| Phillips A66EAK071X11 |
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| Great focus, colours and contrast... but, err... one problem! |
This was a shame because the newer "black standard" Phillips tubes have such dark blacks and more vivid colours. The older EAK tubes look greyer when they're turned off and have less contrast between highlights and black backgrounds when operating. The whole point of buying a universal chassis was have an analogue chassis driving one of these excellent newer tubes.
As a final test, I hooked the screen up to an older Phillips A66EAK71X11 tube. Bingo! The geometry came good! Still, compared to my analogue Blaupunkt, the geometry still wasn't quite as good and since there was none of the advantage I was hoping to get from using a "black standard" type Phillips, I still figured the best thing to was to send the chassis back. The Blaupunkt still looked better so there just wasn't any point keeping the Sharp Image.
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| Image is correct but what's the advantage over my Blaupunkt? |
Interesting stuff, when you refer to "Black Standard" are you talking about A68ESF or just a subset of A66EAK tubes? on the label you posted above, I can see the mention of "BSi" and "BLSTD" which could be a match for "Black Standard". I checked my A66EAK and the older ones all have the "BLSTD" marking while the newer ones have "FX" instead. My ESF tubes have "FX" in place as well. I'm wondering how you're telling apart the "Black Standard" and non "Black Standard" tubes?
ReplyDeleteHeh... when I was doing all this (9 years ago now!!!) nobody else was into it so I was just making assumptions based on how the tubes looked. Also, it's worth noting that I couldn't even give away these Loewe TVs back then... how times have changed!
ReplyDeleteSo, in answer to the questions, I was eyeballing the image and could the different in the black levels between the tube types. Still have no idea how the coding works... because none of those tubes are available to me now.