SCART Hunter: Arcade

Showing posts with label Arcade_OSD. Show all posts

Sunday, 22 April 2012

The Loewe C9003 does 256 lines

Over the past weekend I found the time to revive a Loewe C9003 chassis that I had stored in a cardboard box. It needed a new power switch and I managed to salvage an identical replacement from a non-working Grundig CUC 2030 chassis that I found on Good Friday. The new power switch did the trick and chassis came to life!

This is the oldest Loewe chassis I've tried. The main menu system looks very different although the Service Menu is very similar to the E3000. The picture quality is very good. Quite a "classic" image. Less modern looking than the E3000 and none of the silly image artefacts that appeared on the later chassis types.

The best news is that the C9003 will happily display 256 lines (hello R-Type and Mortal Kombat!) The E3000 fails in this regard. So, the C9003 is now the Loewe chassis to look out for...

Loewe C9003 showing 256 vertical lines

Sunday, 4 March 2012

Sharp Image in a better light

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:

Phillips A66EAK071X11

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.