We have a nice television. It’s a few years old, it’s CRT but it’s wide-screen and has a presence that makes people say ‘wow, nice telly’. Then we turn it on and they really like it. However for a while now something has been wrong; the magnetic coil has been out of alignment and there’s been a bright green patch in the lower left corner. It’s particularly prominent on red or blue backgrounds and being somewhat of a perfectionist when it comes to my television I’ve been unable to take my eyes off it. I couldn’t tell anything that’s happened on any show we’ve had on for a while now, but I can spot that shade of green a mile away.
Thankfully I’ve tracked down a contact through work who has offered to lend us a degaussing wand and I’ve dispatched Rae to the outer fringes of Melbourne to pick it up. The street is so new you need the latest Melway to find it so I hope she’s packed a lunch.
My plan is to get home, get changed, unplug the DVR and place it a long way away, fix the telly and then sit down in front of it and not move for many many hours.
Have you tried turning the TV off at the wall for about half an hour?
Doing this allows the inbuilt de-gaussing circuit to ‘reset’ itself, so when you turn the TV back on it should de-magnetise the shadow mask inside the picture tube.
The shadow mask is a sheet of metal just behind the screen that controls the electron edges of the beams to ensure they are only ‘shining’ onto the coloured dots that each beam is supposed to be hitting. Having a TV near any speakers, or moving a large TV can be enough to upset the alignment of the beams due to the changes in magnetism on the shadow mask.
If you end up using the de-gaussing wand, make sure the wand is slowly removed further and further away from the screen, far enough away from the screen that the picture is no longer being effected by the wand BEFORE it is turned off….. otherwise you may even make the colour purity of the picture even worse!
Good luck,
Pip
I second Pip’s suggestion: turn the TV off. At the end of the day, naturally. Let it sleep overnight. Turn it on again when you need it back. This has worked everytime on our POS.