You Render Me Speechless, Colorless and Furious!
October 12, 2015 1:56 AM   Subscribe

I got an old rear projection TV for free — it's a 65" Toshiba 65HX83 HD. How can I calibrate this monstrosity?

It still has some life in it, nothing's burnt, but the color rendering is horrendous. Can anyone talk me through a DIY tuneup? Messing around with standard settings ain't cuttin' it. The online guides I found throw around terms like "ISF" "colorimeters" "calibration software" and "test patterns," but I want to do this cheap. And it's an old set... do these walk-throughs even apply?

If it matters, my goals are to: 1) run movies off my laptop, and 2) help my roommates set up gaming systems (probably PS4 & Steam Machine). #1 is achieved, but the damn screen is so dark I can barely make out faces or shadows. Surely there is more awesome to be had!

My current setup is a mid-2012 Macbook Air and a mid-2015 Macbook Pro, DVI/HDCP > HDMI > USB adapters, and an RCA cable.
posted by fritillary to Technology (2 answers total)
 
Best answer: 1. Replace the lamp. You should be able to find someone who sells just the lamp part for around $30 and then disassemble the lamp housing and replace it yourself. I did this for my Sony of the same generation. Color and brightness will be waaay better. Yoi may have to take the lamp assembly apart to get the part number of the actually lamp. try these guys, who I used.


2. Read a little on using colorbars and then using either a full screen colorbar picture set the monitor up.
posted by chasles at 3:30 AM on October 12, 2015


Best answer: The manual for your TV mentions the possibility of burn-in on a picture tube, and an implosion risk if the TV is improperly disposed of. That suggests to me that it doesn't actually have a lamp; it has a CRT instead.

When CRTs get old, the cathodes lose emissivity and the picture gets dim. This is wear; there's not much you can do about it. You can have a technician adjust the sub-brightness control to jack up the cathode current and make it run hotter, but that's a very temporary cure as it will then wear out even faster.

The only real fix is a new picture tube, and I would expect that to be quite expensive.
posted by flabdablet at 4:07 AM on October 12, 2015


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