Sony GDM-FW600 monitor

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Pimpom

I have a chance to buy a used 24-inch Sony GDM-FW600 CRT
monitor for about US$90 after having it inspected by a
friend in another city. I know it's a monster but we have
worked out a way to ship it for a reasonable cost.. I
believe it was a high-end model in its day. Assuming that
it's in good working order, is it still worth buying? To
keep things simple, please disregard things like power
consumption, warranty, future repairs, etc.
 
Pimpom said:
I have a chance to buy a used 24-inch Sony GDM-FW600 CRT
monitor for about US$90 after having it inspected by a
friend in another city. I know it's a monster but we have
worked out a way to ship it for a reasonable cost.. I
believe it was a high-end model in its day. Assuming that
it's in good working order, is it still worth buying? To
keep things simple, please disregard things like power
consumption, warranty, future repairs, etc.
Click to expand...
Sorry, that should be GDM-FW900.
 
Paul said:
Is there a cost to dispose of one of those at your dump ?
:-)

We had both ordinary and large Trinitrons at work, and
while
I can't be sure it's the same model number, the large
Trinitron had slightly uneven light level across the
screen.
(One corner was a bit dark.) Your friend should inspect
for
that, or look for slightly blotchy color across the
screen.

The 19"/20" Trinitrons, on the other hand, were fine. It
might just have been the two large units we got for the
CAD
department that were like that.

Some faults on a CRT, can be cured with a degaussing coil.
So if the color purity is off, and power cycling the
monitor and using the built-in degauss doesn't help,
you can take the Trinitron to a TV store, and get them
to use their degaussing coil. When I got my Trinitron
for home usage, the color was terrible when I first got
it,
and after the degaussing coil was applied, it looked
great.
So somehow, the frame of my Trinitron got magnetized
during
shipping. The best part was, the staff at the TV store
didn't charge me anything. I think they took pity on
me, when I lifted the monitor into the store.
Click to expand...
I repaired TVs - and a wide range of professional,
industrial and medical products - for 15 years up to the
mid-90s and still have a degaussing tool with me.
How do you plan to ship it ? Do you have a freight company
that will take a 90 lb load like that ? When I bought
mine,
I took it out of the box in the parking lot of the retail
store,
then strapped the seatbelt around the monitor, while the
monitor sat in the passenger seat. It just barely fit.
I carried the empty packing crate, on the top of the car.
That way, there would be no expensive calamities in the
middle of the highway. You shouldn't put a load like that
on the roof of your car, without an exceptionally strong
roof rack. Carrying the empty box up there, wasn't nearly
as much of an issue.
Click to expand...
FedEx now has a branch here in India and their ground
service can ship it for about US$50 although it's estimated
to take the better part of a month to cover the 2000+ km
distance. I have a small truck to carry it from their local
outlet (I don't think their local office in this remore
region has the facilities to deliver heavy stuff yet).

What I really wanted to know was whether the monitor is
still an above-average product by today's standards, and
worth the price *and* the hassle. In the few owners'
comments and forum discussions I looked at, mostly some
years old, they all raved about the exceptional display
quality and how it couldn't be touched by contemporary IPS
LCDs.
 
Pimpom said:
Sorry, that should be GDM-FW900.
Click to expand...

Is there a cost to dispose of one of those at your dump ? :-)

We had both ordinary and large Trinitrons at work, and while
I can't be sure it's the same model number, the large
Trinitron had slightly uneven light level across the screen.
(One corner was a bit dark.) Your friend should inspect for
that, or look for slightly blotchy color across the screen.

The 19"/20" Trinitrons, on the other hand, were fine. It
might just have been the two large units we got for the CAD
department that were like that.

Some faults on a CRT, can be cured with a degaussing coil.
So if the color purity is off, and power cycling the
monitor and using the built-in degauss doesn't help,
you can take the Trinitron to a TV store, and get them
to use their degaussing coil. When I got my Trinitron
for home usage, the color was terrible when I first got it,
and after the degaussing coil was applied, it looked great.
So somehow, the frame of my Trinitron got magnetized during
shipping. The best part was, the staff at the TV store
didn't charge me anything. I think they took pity on
me, when I lifted the monitor into the store.

How do you plan to ship it ? Do you have a freight company
that will take a 90 lb load like that ? When I bought mine,
I took it out of the box in the parking lot of the retail store,
then strapped the seatbelt around the monitor, while the
monitor sat in the passenger seat. It just barely fit.
I carried the empty packing crate, on the top of the car.
That way, there would be no expensive calamities in the
middle of the highway. You shouldn't put a load like that
on the roof of your car, without an exceptionally strong
roof rack. Carrying the empty box up there, wasn't nearly
as much of an issue.

Paul
 
Pimpom said:
I repaired TVs - and a wide range of professional,
industrial and medical products - for 15 years up to the
mid-90s and still have a degaussing tool with me.

FedEx now has a branch here in India and their ground
service can ship it for about US$50 although it's estimated
to take the better part of a month to cover the 2000+ km
distance. I have a small truck to carry it from their local
outlet (I don't think their local office in this remore
region has the facilities to deliver heavy stuff yet).

What I really wanted to know was whether the monitor is
still an above-average product by today's standards, and
worth the price *and* the hassle. In the few owners'
comments and forum discussions I looked at, mostly some
years old, they all raved about the exceptional display
quality and how it couldn't be touched by contemporary IPS
LCDs.
Click to expand...

On our two units, the image wasn't that good, because
of uneven light level coming from the tube. By comparison,
our smaller Trinitrons (20" or whatever they were called
at the time) were better. The ones we received, were purchased
soon after the first ones became available. Our CAD staff
wanted them, for the increased screen area. It turned out,
the CAD tools had a fixed 4:3 aspect ratio to the tools
layout (active area of the window in the tool was 4:3.
And in fact the added screen area didn't help that
much. But the staff who received the monitors, still
continued to use them. So whatever the issues were at
the time, they still liked them enough to keep them.
They had the option of going back to the 20" screens
that everyone else had.

If you're used to CRTs and still use them regularly,
an LCD comes as a shock. It took me quite a while to
get used to the LCD "light shining in my face". I
didn't like it at first, but now it doesn't bother me.

I suppose it depends, on how much the loss of $90
bothers you, as to whether it's worth purchasing.
It's probably as good as another Trinitron, if
you're used to using those. All I can say is,
with the ones we had, I wasn't that impressed with them.
I don't know if we ever called in service people to
have a look at them or not, to see if they could be
adjusted. Ours didn't look to me to be a "degaussing"
related problem. I was thinking it was something to do
with the design of the CRT tube itself. I'm just surprised
the other reviews I'm reading, find them to be so good.

Our CRTs were driven by Sun Sparc computers, likely with
a pretty high end video card in the box.

*******

Now, the text here looks interesting. This might have
been of value to us, when we got the monitors.

http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=952788&page=240

"Discolored Corners?

If you have a yellowish (or other color) "tinge" in one
or more corners of your display (but the rest of the display
is fine), adjust the "landing" setting for the affected
corner in the monitor's setup menu."

Wish I'd known about that years ago.

Paul
 
Paul said:
On our two units, the image wasn't that good, because
of uneven light level coming from the tube. By comparison,
our smaller Trinitrons (20" or whatever they were called
at the time) were better. The ones we received, were purchased
soon after the first ones became available. Our CAD staff
wanted them, for the increased screen area. It turned out,
the CAD tools had a fixed 4:3 aspect ratio to the tools
layout (active area of the window in the tool was 4:3.
And in fact the added screen area didn't help that
much. But the staff who received the monitors, still
continued to use them. So whatever the issues were at
the time, they still liked them enough to keep them.
They had the option of going back to the 20" screens
that everyone else had.

If you're used to CRTs and still use them regularly,
an LCD comes as a shock. It took me quite a while to
get used to the LCD "light shining in my face". I
didn't like it at first, but now it doesn't bother me.

I suppose it depends, on how much the loss of $90
bothers you, as to whether it's worth purchasing.
It's probably as good as another Trinitron, if
you're used to using those. All I can say is,
with the ones we had, I wasn't that impressed with them.
I don't know if we ever called in service people to
have a look at them or not, to see if they could be
adjusted. Ours didn't look to me to be a "degaussing"
related problem. I was thinking it was something to do
with the design of the CRT tube itself. I'm just surprised
the other reviews I'm reading, find them to be so good.

Our CRTs were driven by Sun Sparc computers, likely with
a pretty high end video card in the box.

*******

Now, the text here looks interesting. This might have
been of value to us, when we got the monitors.

http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=952788&page=240

"Discolored Corners?

If you have a yellowish (or other color) "tinge" in one
or more corners of your display (but the rest of the
display
is fine), adjust the "landing" setting for the affected
corner in the monitor's setup menu."

Wish I'd known about that years ago.

Paul
Click to expand...

UPDATE:
The monitor arrived a couple of days ago and I'm putting it
through its paces. It had the "discolored corner" on the lower
right-hand side but it's not too bad and I'd forgotten what you
said about the "landing" control. Still didn't recall it even
after I saw it in the menu. I didn't know what it meant and
mentally filed it away as something to find out later. I thought
I'd have to deal with the discolored patch by opening up the
monitor and adjusting the convergence magnets. Luckily I learned
what the landing controls do today while browsing the pdf manual
I downloaded earlier. And it works. The discolored patch is
gone!!

As with all CRTs, compared to the 1:1 pixel rendering of an LCD,
the image looked a tad soft at first. It's by no means what I'd
call blurry though - 6pt Courier in Windows Notepad is easily
readable. Where it shines is in color reproduction. I can see
subtle shades that I didn't notice on my LCD which admittedly is
not a high-end model.

I expected to see some signs of aging and sure enough, there's a
couple. One is that the screen is very bright and I have to set
the brightness to a low value. This is a known issue with old
units of this model and reportedly can be easily rectified by
turning the grid2 voltage down. The second is that the green
channel is much brighter than the red and blue ones and has to be
turned way down relative to the other two. Once that's done, RGB
balance is nicely maintained throughout the greyscale range
without a lot of fiddling with gamma controls.

All in all, I'm well satified with the deal considering that I
spent only about 5% of the cost of a new one including shipping.
I'm hoping that it won't show major signs of further aging for
the next 2 or 3 years.
 
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