What could cause ghosting on a CRT?

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kaldaim

Weaksauce
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Jan 16, 2006
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I know it's not a PC monitor, but my 27" panasonic CRT TV (about 6 years old) has been having weird ghosting problems lately. It happens both when watching cable TV from Comcast and when watching DVDs.

My DVD player is a Panasonic DVD-Burn player (not at home now so i dont know the model) and I'm using a ~4' decent-bandwidth video cable to connect my dvd player to my TV.

My Cable box is made by Motorola, and that cable is also ~4ft.

Any thoughts? Is my TV going bad? Anything I can do?

The ghosting is really bad. Almost looks like a special effect, but it's like that for everything.
 
What exactly does the ghosting look like? If its color-fringed overlapping images, even on a static display, then your yok magnet is weakening. If it looks like snow, it can be a simple interference problem. If its a (non-color tinted) offset image, then its shadowing, not ghosting, and probably due to an impedance mismatch and/or a poor-quality cable.

There's a few other things that can cause it...it would help if you can describe the actual effect better.
 
Bad cables, RF/cross talk, Switch boxes and or adaptors, long cables...


this is just a few....
 
Zardoz said:
Bad cables, RF/cross talk, Switch boxes and or adaptors, long cables...


this is just a few....
Click to expand...

agreed, start with the bare minimum i.e. direct cable to the monitor. Get good quality cables, belkin gold series is what Iam using now to extend my VGA cable and there is no degradation whats so ever.
 
If it's "really bad," as you say, then I don't think it's normal ghosting (which could be caused by an old phosphor/whatever coating of the screen giving out) but sounds like something much worse.

Try going into MSPaint (I know, bear with me) and draw all of the basic colors with a slight overlap, and no border. Tell us if the colors get a "fringe" of either another color, or a brighter color when they touch one. For example, draw base red overlapping onto base blue. Where the red touches the blue area, look for a bright-red/orange "border".
 
if its something worse then get another screen, its will probablycost you more to fix.
 
6 years isnt that old for a TV, my Panasonic living room TV is nearly 5 years old and it gets on average 16+ hours use per day since day one. The picture is more or less as the day we bought it.
 
kleox64 said:
6 years isnt that old for a TV, my Panasonic living room TV is nearly 5 years old and it gets on average 16+ hours use per day since day one. The picture is more or less as the day we bought it.
Click to expand...
You forget: televisions made in the late '80s and early '90s were designed with years of continuous life in them. I've still got a Sony 'psuedo-flatscreen' Trinitron from '91, and it's still going strong.

On the other hand, though, we bought a Sony Wega about ~5 years ago, and it's almost hit the bucket with less use daily than the Trinitron. Newer televisions are made much more cheaply than older ones in our disposable society.

Add to the fact that Panasonic was notorious for buying other companies products and rebranding them (like Dell does with their CRT monitors) and you have a recipe for failure. If it's just a 27" screen, I would look into buying a new one. A severe "ghosting" problem like you say you have leads me to believe that it's something major that's wrong. If you want, take it into a repair shop, but be prepared to pay upwards of $75/hour* for it to be looked at; and televisions almost always have a 3-hour-minimum in repair shops.



(*father worked at Steiner Electronics as an AV repairman for 25 years; prices were almost always that high there :p . Note: he has since left because Steiners reeled back their repair department and focused on selling. There's barely enough repair work to fill the two days a week he works as a friend there)
 
take it into a repair shop, but be prepared to pay upwards of $75/hour* for it to be looked at; and televisions almost always have a 3-hour-minimum...
Click to expand...
father worked at Steiner Electronics as an AV repairman...[ Now] there's barely enough repair work to fill the two days a week he works...
Click to expand...
I think your first statement does a lot to explain the second one. :p
 
masher said:
I think your first statement does a lot to explain the second one. :p
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Heh. Well, it's not just his place. Every electronics repair place here charges that, or upwards (!). Steiners is one of the two cheapest.
 
hignaki said:
Heh. Well, it's not just his place. Every electronics repair place here charges that, or upwards (!).
Click to expand...
Exactly so...so in a time when the average tube TV costs $500 or less, who wants to spend $250 or more fixing a used one? The pricey LCD/DLP TVs haven't been out long enough to be failing out-of-warranty regularly....and in a few years, when they do, they'll already be outmoded, inferior technology.
 
It might be from previously killed video game foes?




Thank you, I'll be here all week. :D
 
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