Yesterday I picked up a Sony KV-32HS420 that I found on Craigslist. It was looking really good with a variety of sources. PS3 over component worked in 480i, 480p, 720p, and 1080i. Dreamcast also worked in 480p using VGA through a VGA to component transcoder.
No problems until I tried to get lower resolutions. I tried Street Fighter Alpha 3 on the Dreamcast (384 x 224 progressive). On my KV-27FS120 this looks great, it displays in native resolution and you can see some healthy-sized scan lines. On the 32, there were no scan lines and everything was too sharp. I could tell that the TV was upscaling to 480p, which is not going to be the best look for any of my retro games. I tried using composite right out of the Dreamcast to make sure the VGA Box wasn’t doing the upscaling, but got the same result. Apparently the TV has something called “Digital Reality Creation” which upscales low resolutions to 480. You set it to upscale to 480i, 480p, or “Cinemotion,” whatever that is, but you can’t turn the upscaling OFF. I later realized that it might have to upscale, because the 1080i-capable tube might not accept 15kHz resolutions… but read on.
Frustrated with this, I found the service manual online, got into the service menu and started looking for a way to turn off the upscaling. After successfully adjusting the geometry and a couple of other things on my 27, I was confident I could find my way around the service menu on this one. BIG MISTAKE. None of the adjustments are labeled properly in the service manual as to what they do, just 4 letter designations like AFCM and VDJP. Anyhow after guessing around and being unsuccessful at disabling the upscaling, I thought I should reset everything to the default, in case I changed something I shouldn’t have. As the manual says, I pressed “7 > jump > enter” and “7 > 9 > enter” to reset the “MID NVM Data” and the “SYSTEM NVM Data.” Apparently I should not have done this. Now the TV won’t display anything but a 480i signal or lower. 480p doesn’t work, 720p doesn’t work, 1080i doesn’t work.
Does anyone know how to fix this? I’m guessing I have to fix something in the service menu, but there’s hundreds of adjustments and they’re not well labelled. Please let me know if anyone can help. I can send you a PDF of the service manual. If you’re looking for it, it’s Sony Chassis DA-4, once again the TV is a KV-32HS420. Thanks.
As a rule of thumb it’s always a good idea to right down all the values incase something goes wrong. Too late for that though. You’re probably just going to have to go through each adjustment until you find the right one. Take this time to label them yourself in a notepad file. Sucks but there’s really not much else you can do if the manual doesn’t tell you what each variable means.
First, are you sure you’re reading the right manual? I’m having this problem with a KV-32HS420, which certainly can do progressive and higher resolutions. Before I had messed with the service menu I had tested 480p, 720p, and 1080i. These can all be selected and tested on a PS3. On non-capable sets, the screen will just show a bunch of lines and static if you try to use these resolutions, but this TV was displaying them perfectly. In 480p you could see the difference from interlaced, since there was no longer motion blur. In 720p, you could see that the resolution was finer and of course it was letterboxed to fit on the 4:3 tube. Similar in 1080i, but interlaced again. Unfortunately, after messing with service menu, the screen is just black when trying these resolutions, not even any lines or static.
I was wondering if anyone had ever seen this before, of if anyone know what adjustments in a service menu had to do with the enabling of these resolutions, or what some of the 4 letter designations mean.
One site says that the HS series of Sony CRTs doesn’t have the ability to disable DRC, although I don’t know how much merit that holds. But the “everything being too sharp” can also stem from SVM, be sure to disable that if you’re lucky enough to find it. You’ll notice it right away.