Recently picked up a free Sony Trinitron from a nice dude on kijiji.- the only issue was it needed service. I opened it up, but having never repaired a TV, let alone a CRT with a massive amount of human killing voltage surging inside, I decided to hire a pro. Thankfully, AlliedTV is still around (albeit not operating from their King St E location, opting to run his business out of garage due to Covid) and was willing to take a look. Even though there wasn’t a single CRT in his garage shop (it was all flatscreens, including a nice old Panasonic Plasma) he was confident that unless it was something catastrophic or impossible to repair (like the flyback transformer), the repair should be no problem.

I told him to take his time and within a month, he called letting me know it was good to go and in perfect working condition once again. The reason for the malfunction was the pincushion transistor, which, let’s be frank, was something I had never heard of until today and was something way out of my repair league. I’m pretty happy and the price of repair was reasonable and cheaper than I expected.

It’s a really nice early 2000s set with every port you’d want for that era (Svid, composite and component), so it should pair nicely with all of this retro bullshit I own (most of which is currently hooked up to a couple of 14” PVMs). While this set looks nowhere near as nice as my Sony PVMs, its still a must of have a decent 27” CRT if you care at all about enjoying old video games as they were meant to be experienced on a decently sized screen.

Note the Wondermega in one of these shots. That also recently came back from repair after it has its own massive failure. Expect another post soon.