I can't show anything on it yet because I'm waiting for the right cable. But in the mean time, here's a video about the projector where I mostly name all the parts correctly.
32:59 these will be the RGB drivers for the tube cathodes to modulate the beam intensity- nothing to do the deflection coils. They are located at the tube base as they produce high-frequency output at moderately high voltage, so capacitance needs to be kept to a minimum to avoid degrading the signal bandwidth.
don't remove the lenses there is fluid behind the lens that when electrically Excited Floress each one have a different colored Fluid Be careful. also these tubes are far more complex than normal CRT's. I have one so I know.
If you have a CRT projector with liquid-coupled lenses, I find your explanations not correct or hitting the target... The lens assembly is indeed more complex than on "normal" CRT projectors, but these lenses can easily be unmounted to inspect the wear of the phosphorus etc.. You need to PAY ATTENTION and only loosen the 4 fasteners with heads on the surface of the lens flange itself, NOT the other 4 ones down lowered in the lens flange holding the flange of the glycol chamber together. If you don't know what you are doing and unscrewed all 8, yes you are in trouble.... By the way, CRT projectors use high heartstopping amps/voltages in many places inside, so if you do not know what you are doing, please stay safe and let someone who knows what they are doing work on them. It is not the coolant/fluid but the differently composed phosphorus hit by the electron beam sending out photons that have the properties for the three primary RGB colours. The glycol liquid is for cooling the phosphorus and is placed in the chamber in front and closed as a sealed "part" of the CRT tube assembly. On LC-coupled projectors, the glycol and the inward-curved front glass on the tube become the first optical element of the lens system. (mainly to reduce halo effects caused by light bouncing between parallel surfaces reducing picture contrast and can be seen as rings of light around bright objects on a dark background in the projected picture ) If the glycol coolant itself is to be coloured according to the primary colour (like you suggest), the difference in thickness due to the space between the curved glass and the flat phosphorus glass surface would make a very uneven colour filter with lots of light loss toward the corners.) LC CRT projectors therefore sometimes use coloured C-element, placed inside the glycol cambers on red and green to get a more narrow frequency range on these primary to achieve better colour reproduction than the phosphorus manage on its own. (redder red, greener green, for a better colour gamut ). On non-LC lens CRT projectors where the front glass is flat and the glycol thickness is even, it was sometimes popular to put colouring into the glycol to achieve better colour reproduction. Others used lenses that had colour filter elements built in, the HD144 lenses were popular on 8" CRT projectors. The Barco 909 in the video is one of the highest-end CRT projectors ever produced, and can when correctly set up throw really beautiful 1080p pictures. If someone is interested in knowing more about CRT projectors, the Curt Palme site is one nice place to start.
You need the LIMO PRO internal scaler to use the s-video or composite video on these sets, they don't connect to anything without that board. I have one for my Cine 9 since they usually came with it installed, but i don't use it any more and removed it years ago. You may see a slot on the far left of the rear that is not populated, and that is where the LIMO PRO scaler goes. You are also missing the IRIS3 auto convergence camera, no real loss there, although without your limited knowledge it may indeed be significantly quicker and more accurate to set up using IRIS3 if you did have it. The thing you thought was a speaker is where the little camera goes. There are no internal speakers, there is no audio input anywhere on the set. The remote was near identical to the built in version and it is NOT wired, you can use it wired, but it is infra-red. The RS-232 ports are also used to update software and save or load setup data. In the bottom tray you have four boards, convergence, astigmatism, focus, and main controller. The first three do nothing else apart from their dedicated roles. The main controller board is the digital brain, with a Motorola 68000 CPU managing it all. This board feeds digital positional info into the other three boards for alignment and geometry settings. In the rear of the set there are analog positional adjustments on a couple boards, v-size and v-position can be adjusted using analog pots. Be sure you are adjusting the correct pots. The SMPS has an adjusment procedure for the 17v output rail, which is critical for best stability of the set. I adjust this with a full white screen and aim for 17.3v at the test point, i then watch the voltage as i turn from white screen to full black or very close to full black, if it fluctuates too much you need to replace a heap of capacitors in the SMPS, not just the two 560uF caps on the standby section. The modification you see on that SMPS is done by Barco, not a big deal. Leave it alone. You will notice the fan speeds change when you go from a full dark screen to a full white screen, and this is due to voltage sag, hence you want to have that SMPS in very good health so it will hold as close to 17.3v on that 17v rail as possible if you want the set to be reliable and alignment/geometry to be stable. That 17v rail affects everything in the set one way or another, including dynamic beam focus and convergence, astig, etc. Everything starts there. In the middle of the set are the 3 neckboards, all three are identical, no adjustments there. You will see 3 width coils on the main backplane board, those will give a small range of adjustment for the width of each image so you can get all three the same width on screen, using less digital correction makes for a more stable set. DO NOT USE A METAL SCREWDRIVER TO ADJUST THESE, EVER. You MUST use a plastic adjuster, or you'll either get a major boot or your burn yourself as the metal screwdriver starts to get incredibly hot. Adjustment of the yokes is also somewhat important for minimal digital correction, again use care and do not touch the windings. Move the focus yoke back and foward to achieve best midpoint focus at or about 57. Setting one of these up correctly is no simple task, it takes many hours of checks and adjuments and tweaks to get all the mechanical aspects of the set correct before you begin going too far into digital adjustments. If you skip anything and find you can't get something perfect, you're starting again from whatever you skipped or didn't set correctly. These sets can easily display clear razor sharp 1920x1080p that will rival all but the best 1080p digitals, but need to be accurately set up to achieve that. You can indeed display 2560x1440 and 2560x1600 and also achieve a very sharp clear image, but this will require some skill to have it looking better than 1920x1080p. You may have paid $15 for it, but that was a $50,000+ set when it was new, and it is well worth maintaining it as such!!
Actually there's no need to destroy an Eidophor as they will self-destruct when left without power for more than a day or so. The maintenance of those was insane, you had to swap the filament of the electron gun every 100 hours... while it's on a vacuum... via some sort of air lock.
I guess there are 2 reasons why those rear-projection consumer TVs weren't particularly good. One is that they were essentially based on standard TVs, but with higher beam currents and slightly modified deflection circuits to have some way to control convergence. The other problem was that living rooms typically are much brighter than a typical room you would use CRT projectors, combine that with cheaper, less bright, projection tubes, and you simply get a rather faded out picture.
there is liquid in those lens assemblies i saw someone on RUclips the other day taking one of those lens assemblies apart from a CRT projector so just letting you know before you take one apart
These tubes are glued into the LC chambers with silicone, and the c-element of the lens is held in place by a few stainless screws through a retainer ring into the chambers. Taking the lens assemblies off won't let the glycol out.
I left a comment on the other video, you can get a VGA (HD15) to 5xBNC cable and drive the projector from VGA that way with just a cable. I used to drive a 21" trinitron monitor back in about 2000, and I had a CRT projector at the time to (an old Sony one I took down from the university after they replaced it with an LCD projector in a large lecture hall) and I was able to use the same thing to run the projector as well
The PFC has to produce a voltage that's higher than the peak of the incoming voltage (120VACrms is about 170V peak) - it's essentially a DC-DC boost converter, where the incoming DC actually varies with time (because it's actually 60Hz AC - but it's very slow compared to the switching frequency the boost converter is running at, so I like to think of it as very slowly changing DC input). The 300VDC will be quite smooth, as there are large capacitors on the output of the PFC circuit. Basically the main switch mode power supply runs from the 300VDC bus the PFC circuit provides, instead of from the usual 170VDC bus that there would be with a regular bridge rectifier input.
Can you share more info on the CRT projection stacking? Im curious how that would work from the point of view of converging the image to ensure the image was still sharp.
too much effort, the idea is you point both sets with the green dead aimed at the screen center, and using the point on green adjustment you align both green images after all mechanical adjustments have been made. This will be only an advantage to brightness on a large screen. I have no problem lighting up a 130" 16:9 screen with just one Barco Cine 9 in my fully light controlled room with contrast set on 72. Blending is a better option, two sets (or more) will then cover their own section of screen, such as the left and the right of a 2.35:1 screen, and a soft edge blend zone can be adjusted so the blended area is even brightness with the rest of the screen. this will also allow for significantly higher resolution.
I recently purchased an hdmi to vga adapter to run my old Gateway VX900 monitor. It let's me take the resolution up to 1080p surprisingly. It's 4:3 so the sides get cut off though
Interesting question! Yes and no. You would not typically show a film with a projector like this, because the resolution of the projector will be noticeably worse than film. However, a lot of movie theaters did have one. There were two reasons: first, in the '90s it was becoming common for theaters to show pre-show advertising off a computer using a CRT projector. It was cheaper than making up slides for a slide projector, and you could show video ads (and charge more for them!). Second, theaters were starting to get into theater rentals and live events, both of which might involve showing a television image. For example, Century theaters advertised for a while that you could rent a theater for a party and play video games on the theater screen (you can probably still do this if you ask but I haven't seen an ad for it for a while). Back in the day, they would have used a CRT projector for this kind of setup. Now that digital cinema has taken over, the digital cinema projector usually has a big input processor, sort of like the card you see in this projector, that allows it to display video from all kinds of inputs. A lot of theaters can operate with only a single digital projector as a result, when you used to have different projectors for different purposes. As a kid, I used to go to an OMNIMAX theater that used a CRT projector to run pre-show slides. The image was sort of comically small and dim on the enormous OMNIMAX screen, but they weren't exactly going to make up 70mm film to show a slide about an upcoming exhibit.
@@computersarebad no, not a Reality 909. Not anywhere near bright enough or big enough for that, even the Reality 912 with it's monsterous 12" tubes would have struggled to do that job. Resolution is not the issue, it is light output.
Stena used to have CRT projectors on their ferries showing movies in the early 90s.
32:59 these will be the RGB drivers for the tube cathodes to modulate the beam intensity- nothing to do the deflection coils.
They are located at the tube base as they produce high-frequency output at moderately high voltage, so capacitance needs to be kept to a minimum to avoid degrading the signal bandwidth.
There was also LCD panels for OHPs in the early 90s too.
We had one of those. It was "supertwist"... so you had your image in brown and blue with very little contrast and reaction times in the seconds.
don't remove the lenses there is fluid behind the lens that when electrically Excited Floress each one have a different colored Fluid Be careful. also these tubes are far more complex than normal CRT's. I have one so I know.
If you have a CRT projector with liquid-coupled lenses, I find your explanations not correct or hitting the target...
The lens assembly is indeed more complex than on "normal" CRT projectors, but these lenses can easily be unmounted to inspect the wear of the phosphorus etc.. You need to PAY ATTENTION and only loosen the 4 fasteners with heads on the surface of the lens flange itself, NOT the other 4 ones down lowered in the lens flange holding the flange of the glycol chamber together. If you don't know what you are doing and unscrewed all 8, yes you are in trouble....
By the way, CRT projectors use high heartstopping amps/voltages in many places inside, so if you do not know what you are doing, please stay safe and let someone who knows what they are doing work on them.
It is not the coolant/fluid but the differently composed phosphorus hit by the electron beam sending out photons that have the properties for the three primary RGB colours. The glycol liquid is for cooling the phosphorus and is placed in the chamber in front and closed as a sealed "part" of the CRT tube assembly. On LC-coupled projectors, the glycol and the inward-curved front glass on the tube become the first optical element of the lens system. (mainly to reduce halo effects caused by light bouncing between parallel surfaces reducing picture contrast and can be seen as rings of light around bright objects on a dark background in the projected picture )
If the glycol coolant itself is to be coloured according to the primary colour (like you suggest), the difference in thickness due to the space between the curved glass and the flat phosphorus glass surface would make a very uneven colour filter with lots of light loss toward the corners.)
LC CRT projectors therefore sometimes use coloured C-element, placed inside the glycol cambers on red and green to get a more narrow frequency range on these primary to achieve better colour reproduction than the phosphorus manage on its own. (redder red, greener green, for a better colour gamut ).
On non-LC lens CRT projectors where the front glass is flat and the glycol thickness is even, it was sometimes popular to put colouring into the glycol to achieve better colour reproduction. Others used lenses that had colour filter elements built in, the HD144 lenses were popular on 8" CRT projectors.
The Barco 909 in the video is one of the highest-end CRT projectors ever produced, and can when correctly set up throw really beautiful 1080p pictures.
If someone is interested in knowing more about CRT projectors, the Curt Palme site is one nice place to start.
You need the LIMO PRO internal scaler to use the s-video or composite video on these sets, they don't connect to anything without that board. I have one for my Cine 9 since they usually came with it installed, but i don't use it any more and removed it years ago. You may see a slot on the far left of the rear that is not populated, and that is where the LIMO PRO scaler goes.
You are also missing the IRIS3 auto convergence camera, no real loss there, although without your limited knowledge it may indeed be significantly quicker and more accurate to set up using IRIS3 if you did have it. The thing you thought was a speaker is where the little camera goes. There are no internal speakers, there is no audio input anywhere on the set.
The remote was near identical to the built in version and it is NOT wired, you can use it wired, but it is infra-red.
The RS-232 ports are also used to update software and save or load setup data.
In the bottom tray you have four boards, convergence, astigmatism, focus, and main controller. The first three do nothing else apart from their dedicated roles.
The main controller board is the digital brain, with a Motorola 68000 CPU managing it all. This board feeds digital positional info into the other three boards for alignment and geometry settings.
In the rear of the set there are analog positional adjustments on a couple boards, v-size and v-position can be adjusted using analog pots. Be sure you are adjusting the correct pots.
The SMPS has an adjusment procedure for the 17v output rail, which is critical for best stability of the set. I adjust this with a full white screen and aim for 17.3v at the test point, i then watch the voltage as i turn from white screen to full black or very close to full black, if it fluctuates too much you need to replace a heap of capacitors in the SMPS, not just the two 560uF caps on the standby section. The modification you see on that SMPS is done by Barco, not a big deal. Leave it alone.
You will notice the fan speeds change when you go from a full dark screen to a full white screen, and this is due to voltage sag, hence you want to have that SMPS in very good health so it will hold as close to 17.3v on that 17v rail as possible if you want the set to be reliable and alignment/geometry to be stable.
That 17v rail affects everything in the set one way or another, including dynamic beam focus and convergence, astig, etc. Everything starts there.
In the middle of the set are the 3 neckboards, all three are identical, no adjustments there. You will see 3 width coils on the main backplane board, those will give a small range of adjustment for the width of each image so you can get all three the same width on screen, using less digital correction makes for a more stable set. DO NOT USE A METAL SCREWDRIVER TO ADJUST THESE, EVER. You MUST use a plastic adjuster, or you'll either get a major boot or your burn yourself as the metal screwdriver starts to get incredibly hot.
Adjustment of the yokes is also somewhat important for minimal digital correction, again use care and do not touch the windings. Move the focus yoke back and foward to achieve best midpoint focus at or about 57.
Setting one of these up correctly is no simple task, it takes many hours of checks and adjuments and tweaks to get all the mechanical aspects of the set correct before you begin going too far into digital adjustments. If you skip anything and find you can't get something perfect, you're starting again from whatever you skipped or didn't set correctly.
These sets can easily display clear razor sharp 1920x1080p that will rival all but the best 1080p digitals, but need to be accurately set up to achieve that. You can indeed display 2560x1440 and 2560x1600 and also achieve a very sharp clear image, but this will require some skill to have it looking better than 1920x1080p.
You may have paid $15 for it, but that was a $50,000+ set when it was new, and it is well worth maintaining it as such!!
Actually there's no need to destroy an Eidophor as they will self-destruct when left without power for more than a day or so. The maintenance of those was insane, you had to swap the filament of the electron gun every 100 hours... while it's on a vacuum... via some sort of air lock.
I guess there are 2 reasons why those rear-projection consumer TVs weren't particularly good. One is that they were essentially based on standard TVs, but with higher beam currents and slightly modified deflection circuits to have some way to control convergence. The other problem was that living rooms typically are much brighter than a typical room you would use CRT projectors, combine that with cheaper, less bright, projection tubes, and you simply get a rather faded out picture.
there is liquid in those lens assemblies i saw someone on RUclips the other day taking one of those lens assemblies apart from a CRT projector so just letting you know before you take one apart
These tubes are glued into the LC chambers with silicone, and the c-element of the lens is held in place by a few stainless screws through a retainer ring into the chambers.
Taking the lens assemblies off won't let the glycol out.
Baudrillard would be a huge fan of the fact that a tool for displaying images uses the word reality in its brand name.
did you get this working?
I left a comment on the other video, you can get a VGA (HD15) to 5xBNC cable and drive the projector from VGA that way with just a cable. I used to drive a 21" trinitron monitor back in about 2000, and I had a CRT projector at the time to (an old Sony one I took down from the university after they replaced it with an LCD projector in a large lecture hall) and I was able to use the same thing to run the projector as well
The PFC has to produce a voltage that's higher than the peak of the incoming voltage (120VACrms is about 170V peak) - it's essentially a DC-DC boost converter, where the incoming DC actually varies with time (because it's actually 60Hz AC - but it's very slow compared to the switching frequency the boost converter is running at, so I like to think of it as very slowly changing DC input). The 300VDC will be quite smooth, as there are large capacitors on the output of the PFC circuit. Basically the main switch mode power supply runs from the 300VDC bus the PFC circuit provides, instead of from the usual 170VDC bus that there would be with a regular bridge rectifier input.
Can you share more info on the CRT projection stacking? Im curious how that would work from the point of view of converging the image to ensure the image was still sharp.
too much effort, the idea is you point both sets with the green dead aimed at the screen center, and using the point on green adjustment you align both green images after all mechanical adjustments have been made. This will be only an advantage to brightness on a large screen. I have no problem lighting up a 130" 16:9 screen with just one Barco Cine 9 in my fully light controlled room with contrast set on 72.
Blending is a better option, two sets (or more) will then cover their own section of screen, such as the left and the right of a 2.35:1 screen, and a soft edge blend zone can be adjusted so the blended area is even brightness with the rest of the screen. this will also allow for significantly higher resolution.
I recently purchased an hdmi to vga adapter to run my old Gateway VX900 monitor. It let's me take the resolution up to 1080p surprisingly. It's 4:3 so the sides get cut off though
Did they use these in film theatres?
Interesting question! Yes and no. You would not typically show a film with a projector like this, because the resolution of the projector will be noticeably worse than film. However, a lot of movie theaters did have one. There were two reasons: first, in the '90s it was becoming common for theaters to show pre-show advertising off a computer using a CRT projector. It was cheaper than making up slides for a slide projector, and you could show video ads (and charge more for them!). Second, theaters were starting to get into theater rentals and live events, both of which might involve showing a television image. For example, Century theaters advertised for a while that you could rent a theater for a party and play video games on the theater screen (you can probably still do this if you ask but I haven't seen an ad for it for a while). Back in the day, they would have used a CRT projector for this kind of setup.
Now that digital cinema has taken over, the digital cinema projector usually has a big input processor, sort of like the card you see in this projector, that allows it to display video from all kinds of inputs. A lot of theaters can operate with only a single digital projector as a result, when you used to have different projectors for different purposes.
As a kid, I used to go to an OMNIMAX theater that used a CRT projector to run pre-show slides. The image was sort of comically small and dim on the enormous OMNIMAX screen, but they weren't exactly going to make up 70mm film to show a slide about an upcoming exhibit.
@@computersarebad no, not a Reality 909. Not anywhere near bright enough or big enough for that, even the Reality 912 with it's monsterous 12" tubes would have struggled to do that job. Resolution is not the issue, it is light output.
Didnt sony make large back projected TVs for years before the 2000s too?
Yes, loads of companies did. Later Sony sets used Panasonic tubes, pretty much all brands did in the end.
Moist