Got one of these older tv’s to play older fighting games and retro games. It actually has both component and s-video too which is really good. But hooking it up a japan ps2 fat it cuts off parts of the picture around the screen. And looks like it’s about 1/4 of a inch too far to the right. It’s a KV-32FS120 model made in November 2005. Just looking for any advice on how to fix this picture cutting off problem. I didn’t get a remote with it as well.
And yes I googled the model number with not much luck at all. Just figured this would probably be the best place for advice on this.
You can find plenty of remotes on ebay cheap. Overscan is set at the factory unless someone fiddled with it and usually it’s to hide uneven and unsightly geometry problems. Unfortunately, CRTs are prone to geometrical issues and even the direction your TV faces can affect it. You may or may not get good results with messing with the overscan settings, and the Sony service menu codes are very vague one what they do so you have to do a lot of experimentation. If you’re expecting a CRT to have the full image like a HDTV, then you’re out of luck since most of them are set to 5% overscan.
Yeah I’m just really starting to learn about this sort of thing. Very greatfull for all the help here too. And yeah I’ll just order a remote off ebay. Looked at a few and there less than $10. And that’s with shipping. I saw what the service menu stuff is too. It’s the weirdest menu I’ve ever seen in my life for adjusting stuff like the screen. I’ll just have to get used to it.
Another reason why I got this TV too is some older games will NOT work right on HDTV’s. Stuff like trying to play Duck Hunt with a zapper. Or old old 30fps DDR games. The arrows will fall in and out of sync during the scrolling. And old games won’t look any better on a HDTV anyway. I actually tried using a/v cables on my toaster nes hooked up to my Vizio HDTV. Graphics no different than using RF. And the sound was only coming out the bottom of the TV. Switched to RF and it actually fixed the sound problem too.
Video quality will vary on a HDTV based on how good the analog to digital conversion is. You have scaling of the lower resolution plus analog conversion. If you can find a good CRT with component in, that’s usually the best you’ll get when it comes to pure analog and many modern HDTVs don’t have it. You should be able to still find Sony WEGA TV’s on craigslist and those are great for retro gaming.
Yeah definitely get the remote. I have that same TV and the overscan/underscan issues are really annoying. I set it up with the service menu to hide the edges, but I have 12 consoles hooked up to it. It’s impossible to find a setting that fixes the problem for all of them. The PS2, NES, and Master Systems seem to produce more issues with that than other consoles.
And if my TV loses power, all of the settings get lost too. I save the settings, but that apparently does nothing. Also, my picture droops in one corner, and the only way I’ve found to fix it is to use magnets on the back of the screen to manipulate the picture. Just letting you know that you can’t fix something like that in the service menu.
It produces a gorgeous picture, and I got it for $10 with the remote, but it does have its issues. FYI, lightguns work fine with it. I’ve heard people say that they don’t work on flat screen CRTs, but I’m pretty sure that only applies to the HD ones.
All CRT have that issue. You can alleviate some of them with permalloy magnets to a degree, but you’re literally fighting physics. There is usually digital convergence and hardware convergence. Then you have to fix the rest with magnets and hope the direction your TV faces is optimal to the earth’s magnetic fields.
Every tech has problems. Still, I can’t wait until we one day have a true successor to the CRT.
Well I guess that settles the question I’ve been wrestling with about whether or not I should look for another TV.
What would a true successor to the CRT be? I can’t imagine people going back to bulky, 200lb TVs again. Maybe some sort of built in CRT filter, which obviously wouldn’t be the same.
Last generation of TVs, plasma was the closest thing. Unfortunately many of them didn’t refresh the phosphors fast enough that you’d get phosphor lag. I had 3 Panasonics that I took back to the store because they performed horribly. Whenever panning a camera fast in a third person game, I would see green ghosting on the left of vertical objects and red on the right. I have a Samsung plasma now that has lower phosphor response time so it isn’t an issue, but there are still things that aren’t as good as CRT. Motion still isn’t quite the same, and neither are gradients. Color quality and geometry are awesome though. Scaling isn’t as good sadly, but what can you do?
I was hoping OLED would be up next but they have some of the same problems plasma does. Image retention is still a thing, both plasma and OLED have it. Plasma really shouldn’t have, but many manufacturers use thin coatings of phosphors and a few other things that makes it a problem that CRT didn’t have. Both are phosphor based so it goes to show it was something else. OLED has other issues like blue OLEDs degrading faster meaning your color balance is going to shift and go to crap over time. So for now, I’ll stick with my plasma and my older CRT.
There is quantum dot displays, which I guess we’ll see how they end up doing once they start coming out.
Just posting some examples of the screen cutting off here. And I looked up that ps3 component cable and it’s around $20. Is that the best one to get? And how well does it work with ps1/ps2?
It’s a bit hard to see in the last pic. But there’s about a 1/4 of a inch black line on the left side. Not the one from the tv itself too but from the picture being that far off to the right. Looking into it more it cuts off the picture on every side but the left.
And thanks so much for the help guys. Really learning more and more about this stuff.
If you want to see how much is cut or distorted, most (if not all) arcade boards and some older classic games have a cross hatch test pattern that you can use to show how badly the image is cut/shifted, and how distorted the image is; a quick Google search showed a video that mentions some PS1 games have this.
No CRT is going to have perfect geometry, ever. You get the cross hatching right, your circles will be off, you get perfect circles you lose good cross hatching.
Best you can do is find a happy medium between all your adjustments.
I am Salty VGA is being phased out of newer HD TVs
i have the same crt in 27". still use it for fighting games. sony wegas were notorious for severe overscan, and flat crts in general are loaded with geometry problems. i would barf if i had the misfortune of seeing that arcade cross hatch feature on my tv. i would rather stay ignorant. generally, you have to hope that you can adjust the dimensions of the game screen in the options menu, which most older fighting games have. if you do go into the service menu and adjust the picture, let us know how it goes. i’ve never tried tampering with it to that extent.
Not all consoles center the image for overscan the same, either. Plus different resolutions will make the overscan different. For example, a Saturn will look completely different from a PSX when hooked up to the same TV. Alpha 2, for example, on both systems the Saturn version filled out the screen more and had larger sprites. The PSX version was smaller in appearance. SNES games will appear different and NES games will often be shifted to the top right.
Throw up a 4:3 cross hatch via a PS3 using component out, that’s your best way to check how the TV is handling it. PS3 enables you to full screen images and the PS3 can also do 4:3 aspect ratio SD output. It won’t fuck around with the image at all. You should be able to find official Sony component cables for super cheap at this point in time. If not, I recall ebay having Monster branded s-video cables dirt cheap which should also do the trick.
Not just every console overscans differently most consoles, especially in the 240p resolution is really out of spec.
Heck the whole 240p resolution is out of spec, and it relies on the analog nature of CRT screens to make the image even work.
Compare the Sega Genesis to the Super Nintendo, there all sorts of junk in the Sega Genesis overscan area that you never were intended to see.
Junk if you didn’t know better might make you think the game is glitching (it’s not).
Yeah, plus the Genesis has a different resolution from the SNES. The entire SD era wasn’t standardized very well. Throw on top of that earlier CRT had a more rectangle/oval shape to the pixels and throwing those older consoles on something modern with square pixels throws off aspect ratio even more along with seeing all the junk you mentioned that is usually hidden by overscan.
The 8-Bit NES did not use square pixles, it had rectangular pixels.
Also watch out for scaling, unless you use perfect integer scaling you get something called Dot Crawl,
Usually you get dot crawl when you have a poor image quality (like a crap RF or Composite video connection), but having an image upscalled improperly will also cause the visual artifact.
For NES now a days I just use an emulator. I’d love an original top loading NES to hook up to my Sony XBR910, but that isn’t happening anytime soon. Have to do some major work on the 910 and would need a modified NES that uses s-video or component.
