Behold! the monster!
May 26th, 2008 | Filed under Personal, Technology.
That is the reason for this weekend’s mad 600-mile round trip, stopping off at four people’s houses on the way to break up the trip and make it a bit more interesting. It’s a 42 inch Toshiba rear-projection telly.
Getting it into my car was a mission and a half. We spent the journey home with the front seats slid forwards, and the back seats flattened. The telly just fitted in my car but did very horrible things to the fuel economy. Getting it out required help from my neighbour, but me and Amy managed to lift it onto its stand by ourselves. It’s a big bugger, coming almost up to my shoulders.
I got it free for one reason; it has convergence problems and will randomly decide that the red, green and blue images shouldn’t match up.
Rear projection tellies are strange beasts. There’s three CRTs in the bottom part of the TV, they project their image upwards and through a complex system of lenses and mirrors the three images are converged on the back of the screen. The screen is a giant piece of plastic that has been tinted. If something happens to the convergence ICs, or some part of the optics, the image starts to look like one of those anaglyptic 3D images with mis-aligned red and green images.
However, when working, the picture is pretty good 
It’s big and doesn’t have any weird artefacts like LCD displays show. I have tested it out with some TV, a bit of Crackdown and Space Giraffe.
I’m strategically ignoring the convergence problem until it becomes permanent or starts to irritate me. The Internet is full of people saying their rear projection tellies, and the fix seems to be to gut the telly and replace the driver ICs with new ones. Apart from the lethal death voltages the replacement is a simple soldering job.
I shall have to closely watch the telly for a few hours and make sure it works properly 
I don’t think I can go back to a “small” TV any more though. Maybe two player Halo and Mario Kart will be better on such a large screen too
