Second chance at a Grundig CUC 4635

By far my favourite SCART TV chassis to date was the Grundig CUC 4635 that I managed to fry by powering up with the H and V yoke inputs unplugged. I tried to be philosophical about the loss ("why be upset about the loss of something that cost $0?") but, really, I was pretty down after that. How could I have been so stupid?!

Amazingly, a fellow SCART junky from Germany offered to sent me a CUC 4635 chassis in the mail! What started as a passing comment on a forum quickly snowballed into a TV being purchased, torn apart and the chassis being packed into a cardboard box. I haven't heard if the package has made the post yet but, either way, it makes for a great story! Check out the images and read the back story here.

The original article:

Grundig ST 1470/9 text

Then, stripped bare:

Comfy in the car...

Phillips A66EAK22X01 tube

Ooh! Look at that!

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.

Image is correct but what's the advantage over my Blaupunkt?

Well, that explains things...

So, it turns out that the warped image that my universal chassis was showing is due to an incompatibility between the Sharp Image chassis and the Phillips tube that I paired it with. Boo hoo! That means that comparing the Blaupunkt and Sharp Image isn't really a fair contest since the Sharp Image is working with a monitor it doesn't like. Here's what Joey from Jomac had to say:


"Mate honestly that picture looks awful , I know exactly what's causing it but it's not something I can do remotely or without the same tube here , I wouldn't be happy with that either the way it is. , fortunately it's not a issue with most tubes , for some reason it only appears on some of the Euro types with moulded yokes but still not all , I think you would have heard by now if this was a general issue."

I guess that means that the images I posted aren't really indicative of how these chassis usually operate. It also means that I'm out of luck in when it comes to a universal chassis.