The HD, WIDESCREEN Tube TV! Sony Trinitron KV-30XBR910
That's right, this TV is something special. Not only is it a tube TV, but it's a widescreen, full HD tube TV. And believe it or not, the owner was hours away from sending it off to recycle. First of all, we need to clean this thing.
It's disgusting. It's just sitting on my garage floor for obvious reasons, so ignore that. I started by taking off the back screws. There are 2,215 in total. That is a typo, and it's supposed to say 15 screws.
The back just slides right off and exposes the internals. I wasn't sure what I'd see in here. I mean, I'd see the internals of a TV, duh. But I don't know how many layers of dust and spiderwebs would be in here.
That back piece is just one massive piece of plastic, so I put a little dish soap on it and hit it with the hose. Now that that's drying, let's move on to the electronics. Good news, there's not a ton of spiderwebs, but it's caked in this dust that sticks to all the components. It's gross. Before I touch anything in here, I need to discharge this tube. I'm not going to go into how a CRT works, but inside this tube there are some crazy voltages.
We're talking upward of 30,000 volts. And it will stay in that tube after shutting it off and can stay in there for a very long time. If I touch the wrong piece of metal, I might have the opportunity of finding out what 30 kilovolts feels like, which I'll politely decline.
Modern CRTs should automatically drain excess charge left in the tube, but I don't want to assume Sony did that or that it's working properly. It's also not that difficult to discharge. However, this isn't a tutorial and don't try this at home. I took an alligator clip and clipped one of the ends to a screwdriver. The other end got clipped to a piece of the exposed metal frame.
What you do is take this screwdriver and poke it under the anode cap. That's the red rubber ring on top of the tube. There's a little piece of metal under there and it's going to contact that and discharge the tube. I've never done this before, but it seemed like it wasn't that difficult, so here we go.
I have a thick rubber glove on, isolated from ground, took off my watch, put my hand behind my back, and... there was nothing. I even did it a second time to make sure I was contacting something. So Sony probably put a bleed resistor on here, which is good.
Now it's time to clean. I don't want to directly vacuum everything because it can build up ESD, but I can hit the board with canned air and indirectly vacuum the dust that comes off it. This worked pretty well. I don't have a Datavac, which would have been better since the canned air kept freezing up, but this was fine. I tried to get in there as much as I could and it took me a while. But enough of that, let's look at the components.
Right up top is this speaker, but it's not just any speaker. It's a 15 watt subwoofer. I know that doesn't sound like much, but there are two bass ports with entire bass chambers that really get the most out of those 15 watts. And it's cool, this whole plastic thing is designed around the neck of the CRT.
Here's the flyback transformer, which is huge and it has some Sony branding on it. And the tube itself, which is also huge. You're not going to get the best sense of scale on video, but it's really big and all the coils and stuff look really cool back here. I got some cool pictures. There's a ton of different boards in here that handle all sorts of different things, some for input, some for processing video, and a bunch more things. Okay, the back cover is dry now, so let's put that back on.
The Sony logo is front and center, as it should be. The sticker on the back here has the model number, voltage, and serial. This was manufactured in September of 2003.
Also, it takes up 280 watts. Okay, let's get to the inputs, and there are a lot of them. You have three composite inputs back here, two of which have an S-video jack that you can use instead of composite.
There's another composite jack for monitor out, and then one that's just audio, and it's labeled audio out. But wait, monitor out? It's kind of weird to have a TV that outputs video, but from what I can tell, it's for dubbing VHS tapes, which is nice. I'm gonna try that out later. Okay, so having two S-video jacks is a great start, but just you wait. The next two inputs are both component that go up to 1080i, and now for the seventh input, DVI? I mean, of course, DVI will carry video just fine, but on a TV, it's a little weird.
You actually have to have separate audio inputs, because DVI doesn't even carry audio. It just seems kind of pointless. Why not just use HDMI? My theory for why they didn't use HDMI is that it wasn't really widespread in 2003. Version 1.0 had just been released the year prior, and while it would work, DVI was already there, and a lot of devices were already using it. I didn't know this, but they even made digital converter boxes that had DVI on it, so I bought one just for this video, just to try it out.
But no spoilers, let's continue. There are three coax jacks, one for VHF or UHF, one labeled "To Converter", and one labeled "Aux". I know this labeling is a little confusing, but the manual explains it.
It actually explains tons of different configurations, and tells you which scenario matches each configuration. Under the one labeled cable box and cable only, it says it's best for if you only have cable, and your cable company scrambles some channels, but not all of them. So the TV will decode the channels that it can, the normal unencrypted ones, but the cable box will decode the rest, the scrambled ones. You might be thinking, why? Why not just have all of them pass through the cable box? Well, this TV offers picture in picture, and all these other dual picture modes that let you channel surf while watching one channel. You can see previews of other channels, and that wouldn't work if everything came from your cable box. I know I don't have a working visual of that right now, but I'm going to demo this as best as I can later in the video.
Now it's time to look at the front, but I really need to get this out of my garage. This is the worst part about CRT ownership. I'm not going to measure this myself, but the manual says it weighs 70 kilograms.
That's 155 pounds for those of you outside of the United States. I can lift a 75 inch flat screen by myself, but this 30 inch TV took two people, and it was miserable. It's unbalanced, and just this big awkward box. The reason for this weight is because the tube inside of here holds a vacuum, and there's a lot of pressure on it. The glass has to be pretty thick to not implode. After finally getting it inside, I put it on this standing desk that's supposedly rated for 20 pounds more than what the TV weighs.
That's nine kilograms. While the desk itself feels sturdy, and it doesn't seem like a concern, doesn't feel like it's going to tip, the standing part is out of the question. I initially thought I couldn't lift the TV at all, but it turns out it can. It's just really slow, and I feel like it's struggling a little too much. This motor is tiny and isn't very confidence inspiring, but yes, it does lift it. I'm still not going to do it because that's a really high center of gravity, and I didn't really buy it for the standing capabilities.
Anyway, the TV's ready. You probably noticed by now that there are some huge scratches all over the screen. It's sad that they're there, but you don't notice it too much when you're actually using the TV, at least in person. I could try and buff it out or whatever, but I don't want to mess it up if I don't have to. If you happen to have any suggestions or tips on how to, I don't know, get rid of them, if that's possible, please let me know.
But let's fire this thing up and listen to it degauss. [Degauss sounds] Man, I love this thing. It starts right up and just has a black screen.
It looks like the last input used was Receiver. We need to get some actual inputs in here, so let me introduce you to "The Stack". It's composed, from top to bottom, of an Xbox 360, that digital converter box I mentioned earlier, a blu-ray player that totally doesn't work, the DVD-VCR combo unit that I made a video on before, a Pioneer CD player, and a Pioneer Laserdisc player. I've made videos on most of these, so I'll link them all in the description if you're interested. All this is connected with this massive bundle of cables running back to the TV, and this isn't even taking up all the inputs.
Oh, I also forgot to mention there's a composite/S-video jack on the front too. You can program in the names for all seven inputs via the menu. Receiver was actually left in from the previous owner, so it's good to know that these are saved after you unplug the TV. For the labels themselves, there's the normal ones, including Laserdisc, but there's also 8mm and Beta. Of course, it's a Sony. It's also weird, the component inputs don't have the same labels as composite.
For example, my Xbox is plugged into component, but there's only game labels for composite. I don't know why they wouldn't just keep the same labels no matter what. Why not have a game console that plugs in with component? Oh, and one more odd thing is this memory card slot. I naively assumed it'd be SD card, but of course it's not. It's slightly narrower, and it turns out to be Sony's own format.
It was released at the end of 1998, but actually stuck around in their cameras for a long time. And according to Wikipedia, they didn't start moving away from it until the A7R IV in 2019. I'm surprised it stuck around so long.
I've never heard anyone talk about this, and never heard it mentioned in reviews. Most of the older formats won't show off how good this TV looks, but I'll quickly play a VHS and Laserdisc to show what the upscaling looks like. ♪ ♪ -[Voice on TV] Paramount is pleased to bring you our future presentation. ♪ ♪ - First impression, did you hear how good that sounds? It might be hard to tell over a YouTube video, but you'll have to trust me. The voice was very clear, and there was actual low end. For integrated TV speakers, these are exceptional.
Sometimes I'll just listen to music on these because of how good they sound. ♪ Highway to the... ♪ I hope it comes across well. I'm recording this with three separate microphones to try and get the best quality. It's never gonna sound as good as in real life though.
Of course, this TV has captions. It decodes all four caption channels, all four text channels, and the info channel that shows the program name and rating. Okay, let's step it up to something that fills the screen, a widescreen Laserdisc. Let's load it in the player and change the input. It's still over composite, unfortunately. Also, I'm just using my Harmony remote to control the TV because the normal remote is still pretty gross and it's a pain to clean.
I'll go over that later in the video in case you're interested. The Laserdisc loads up, and there we go. Now, once the movie starts up, we need to zoom in the picture to fill the screen. I just click the zoom mode button to get to the right mode, and well, it's doing just that, filling the screen.
This still looks pretty good, all things considered. Laserdisc alone looks amazing for analog, but man, Trinitrons are impressive. This is the first I've seen one, at least that I can remember. I mentioned upscaling, too. The manual talks about Digital Reality Creation Multifunction V1, which I mean, do I even need to explain what that does? Sony says it's better than a conventional line doubler because it replaces the signal's NTSC waveform with the near-HD equivalent while doubling the number of horizontal and vertical lines. Apparently, this produces four times the density for good quality sources.
I'm not exactly sure what it means by density, or what it means by doubling the vertical lines since analog video doesn't have vertical lines. There's also different modes of deinterlacing. It can display interlaced, deinterlaced, so progressive, or CinemotionTM. What's CinemotionTM, you ask? It's reverse 2:3 pull-down.
It's supposed to look at a video source and determine what it was originally shot in, what frame rate it was shot in, and display that instead of showing the 60 interlaced frames per second. I couldn't tell the difference between any of the modes. Maybe I need to find a source that has really bad judder. Oh, and something I just noticed, it cuts off the captions when you zoom in. That's really weird since I thought the caption circuitry was separate from the video circuitry, but now I think maybe zooming in is the last step that happens to the video, so I don't know.
It's kind of weird, and I feel like that's gonna break a law on caption decoding or something. Don't quote me on that. But speaking of zooming, I want to show you something. Let me switch to DVD real quick. Yeah, that's another cool thing about this Harmony. I've never had enough inputs to take advantage of the activities, but man, it saves a lot of time.
When I hit the activity button, it changes the input of the TV, spins down the Laserdisc, and turns off the player, then kicks on my VCR, sets the input to DVD, and presses play, all with one button, and I don't even have to think about it. Yeah, I get this is the whole point of the remote, but it's really coming in handy, and I don't know, it's pretty cool. So this is Seinfeld on DVD, and watch the beginning of it carefully. Okay, this didn't go as planned. I distinctly remember seeing the anti -piracy notice fill the screen, the full widescreen TV, and then the TV automatically adjusted its zoom setting to fit the 4:3 content. But I can't recreate this.
Was this a thing? Could a DVD player signal if it's playing widescreen content or not? Let me know, I'd be interested. I guess while we're here, I'll measure the 4:3 size. It's a little over 24 inches, which is still pretty reasonable. Okay, let's set this up to an HD source, my Xbox 360 hooked up via Component.
I really hope the sheer resolution of this thing gets across on video. When I first saw an HD source on here, I just stared at it. You have this expectation of CRTs being standard definition, a little blurry, you know. But the amount of detail produced is mind -blowing. It looks like it's photoshopped.
We'll also look at HDTV, but here's Trials on the Xbox. For reference, here's what it looks like on my little 14-inch CRT. It's kind of what you'd expect.
Now here it is on the Sony, night and day. The resolution, the color, everything is just so much better. The sound system adds to the whole experience. Again, I've tried to record this as best I could. It's just really impressive for built-in speakers.
One potential downside to a widescreen CRT is that the edges can be blurry. This is because the distance the electron beam has to travel is different in the middle compared to the very far corner. You can try and mess with the focus, but it probably won't help much. I'm in Minecraft here, and it shows the controls at the bottom left corner. It's not that bad all things considered.
It's definitely a little bit blurry, but when you're at a distance, you can totally read it. And the geometry is consistent across the board too. It's actually perfect.
Back to that little CRT, I don't know if this is just some components going bad or if maybe the TV wasn't designed very well, but the image gets all distorted and warps depending on what it's playing, especially on images that have a lot of contrast. It's actually pretty distracting, but the Sony has none of these issues. And the gaming experience is really good across the board. I don't game a lot, but I know people like these TVs for gaming since there's no input lag and all the other benefits that come with a CRT. I mean, you can see a lot of detail in these far away objects and stuff.
The reason this TV looks so good is not only the raw resolution, but some of the R &D efforts that Sony put into the TV. First off, it's a Trinitron. These are known for being exceptional.
A lot of that comes down to the aperture grill, which yields a brighter, sharper, and more vibrant image. I'm not qualified to try and explain how CRTs work, but here's what I do know. A lot of old TVs have shadow masks, which up close looks like this.
You can see little cells that have red, green, and blue, and they're all staggered and they have a lot of empty space around them, while the aperture grill looks like this. It's just one continuous line of red, then green, then blue, and it just repeats. The beam still travels horizontally and all that, but the amount of space between colors is significantly reduced.
Not only is this a Trinitron, but it's what Sony calls an FD Trinitron. Apparently, these have finer aperture grills, better electron guns that keep the edges of the screen sharper, and a better deflection yoke that keeps all the colors aligned. It's also completely flat on the front, which apparently improves viewing angles and helps reflect less ambient light.
That's a lot of words, which basically means it's good. Okay, now I think it's time to watch some TV on this TV. We'll look at analog later, but right now I want to watch HD TV. The digital converter box I ended up getting was the Samsung SIR-T451.
I won't be going over this in depth, because at the end of the day, it's just a TV tuner, but this one has a huge variety of outputs, which is the main reason I got it. It has antenna out, optical audio out, S-video, composite, component, DVI, and VGA, of all things. That pretty much covers every output I could want. Of course, I'm plugging this in with DVI, and you have to run the audio separately. The DVI signal actually carries HDCP, which is probably the reason why it was able to be used. The manual says that it's compliant with the EIA 861 standard and is not intended for use with personal computers.
By the way, it works fine with personal computers. Here's me playing one of my own videos on it, and it's just plugged in to my laptop, with an HDMI-to-DVI adapter. And here's that size comparison. Okay, I have it all set up, and I already ran a channel scan. It didn't pick up some of the weaker stations, or the ones that change to a worse frequency during the repack, which is a little unfortunate. But for the ones it did pick up, it looks great.
I mean, when you're watching this, after a few minutes, you completely forget that it's a CRT. It's old technology in here that's producing really good images that are still acceptable for modern standards. There's barely any image retention, so motion looks great. The text at the bottom is really sharp too, and even if you get up close, it looks good. And the scratches aren't really ruining the viewing experience.
You can tell they're there, but after a while, you forget. Kind of like a notch on a MacBook. While I have this tuner box set up, I want to try the VGA out. I'm going to plug it into this old Dell monitor, and it works! For some reason, I couldn't have it output letterboxed, so it's either squished or cropped.
It's also only outputting 640x480 to this monitor, and it's a 1600x1200 monitor, but I think it actually looks pretty good. It's also a good time to test the monitor out port. It only works with the composite sources, so it's not doing any fancy scaling or anything. I'm back to playing a VHS tape, and yeah, it does exactly what you'd expect, it outputs the video you're watching. Menus and all that don't get passed through, so I think it's literally just spitting the input signal back out. This would be good, as the manual says, for recording whatever program you're watching, and if you have two VCRs connected, you can use this as a monitor for tape-to-tape editing.
Okay, I thought that was it for the TV, but I totally forgot about analog TV. I made this little analog TV transmitter a while ago, there's a video on that and everything. It's very low power, but it lets me transmit basically any video source over any analog TV channel. I'd recommend watching that video, after this one of course. I actually bulked up the transmitter to now have three analog TV channels to mess with. The antenna, which is definitely not just a coax cable and an alligator clip, is plugged into the VHF/UHF port on the back, and let's run a channel scan.
You actually have to go through every channel and can't back out of the scan early, and after it's done I went to manually adjust the channels it saved. I scrolled through the list, one at a time, and made sure that only my three channels were added. It picked up a few other channels that weren't actually analog TV, since that doesn't exist anymore.
It probably just saw some digital channel or something and thought it was getting a signal. And as you go through the list, it actually shows a preview of the channel that you're on, which is nice. And just like that, we're watching analog TV. But I want to try out the picture in picture mode, or what Sony calls twin view. I just hit the button on the remote, and now you see the channel I was just watching on the left.
And on the right side of the TV is another window that I can switch over to and tune to whatever channel I want. And yes, you can watch the same channel twice. But this does have two separate TV tuners, so you can watch two separate channels at once. You can arrow back and forth between them to change channels, and the sound comes from whichever one you have selected. I was thinking this might be cool to use as a preview and program monitor if I ever needed to. And to exit out of twin view, you just click the OK button on one of those windows and it'll fullscreen to that channel.
Now, what's another implementation of two TV tuners? Well, if I hit the index button on the remote, the current channel shifts to the left, and on the right, there's a scrolling list of all the channels I have saved. It has a frozen picture of the channel, and when it's selected, the TV actually tunes to it and shows a one-second clip of what's on. Imagine you're trying to bounce back and forth between channels when there's advertisements. You can literally keep an eye on what every TV station in your area is displaying. I really wish I could have used this when analog TV was a thing.
You also don't have to scroll it. It does that for you. If you want to stop scrolling, you can click one time, and it'll just stay on whatever channel is selected. Then you can click again if you want to tune to that channel in the main display. The arrow keys also change the scroll direction if you missed one or whatever.
Also, that monitor out port shows whatever is currently tuned to, and when you're in index mode, it doesn't have that menu on the side. It just shows whatever is on the main window. As far as other options, this TV lets you set eight favorite channels.
It also supports analog, unscrambled cable, and you can choose between using cable or antenna. Not sure if it lets you do both. I couldn't tell.
Channel Fix locks the TV tuner to one source. You can choose between channels two through six on VHF, two through six on the auxiliary input, or the first composite input. This is for if you watch TV and you tune exclusively with an external device. Then when you hit the TV button, it just changes to that external device instead of having other channels with just dead air. You can also label channels, but you have to scroll through the entire alphabet.
I tried using the numpad, but that just changes channels, so... oh well. It's five digits, so that's enough to put in an acronym or call sign or whatever. Then it shows that label as you're tuning to different channels. A few quick things that I couldn't fit well into the video. The remote is actually kind of interesting, and it's still really disgusting, so I'm just going to cut to a live shot of me messing with that.
Okay, here's the remote. As promised, absolutely disgusting, but let's go from the top to the bottom. So we have the satellite or cable button, power, muting, and sleep. And then function, so this is for satellite or cable, and this is for TV, which is interesting. Then you have video, the TV or video, so you can tune or go to video source, antenna, picture mode, a nice numpad as usual. And then here's wide mode, index, and twin views.
So wide mode will make a, you know, letter box and pillar box thing fill the screen. Index is that super fancy TV mode. Front and center, that button is literally front and center, so clearly they were proud of that. Twin view, picture in picture. Menu, this is so gross, ew.
It's a joystick. Memory stick button, for however many times you use that. And then the mode and palette button, uh, for DRC, that digital reality creation or whatever. For, uh, deinterlacing and stuff like that.
And then reset favorite guys display, but then look at this, on the side there, it literally says flip open by the way. Now you have, so these buttons persist, and then you have system off, TV VCR, VCR DVD, select, disc mode, oh, I just got this now. This is home theater control, AV1 through 3, and then DVD.
I bet this is for if you have that control, um, port connected. And you have freeze, record, all this. This is all stuff that the TV wouldn't record or play, but this is for that S control port, or control S port or whatever. That's actually really cool. This remote's nice, but it's gross, and I'll clean it at some point, but for now I'm just gonna go wash my hands.
There's also a control port, sorry, an S control port. The in and out ports let the TV send and receive control signals to other S control compatible devices. This reminds me of the control port on the Pioneer CD player I have.
It does the same kind of thing where it can control other devices from the same brand. Last thing for this video, I have to mention the sound system. I know I already talked about how good it is, but seriously, it's good.
It has enough bass and doesn't sound muddy. There's a good amount of high end too, so it sounds really clear. I actually miss it when I listen on other speakers. It also gets so loud. I turned up the volume so it was almost uncomfortable for me, and left my ears tired after listening. And it was 90 decibels.
That's literally the same reading my Apple Watch gave me at a concert. What's insane was that this was only about 30%. I don't know how much louder this can get, or if the rest of this volume indicator is even real.
Maybe it caps out, or maybe it just keeps getting louder. But I don't want to blow these speakers out, so I'm not even going to try. Anyway, I think I've said enough about this TV.
If you enjoyed this, maybe consider supporting me on Patreon. I'm trying to produce high quality videos, and the support from these members really help with that. Thank you for watching! ♪ [Upbeat music] ♪
2025-05-30 19:30
